The Lotus Eaters

All the information in the world at my fingertips. I just have to search for it. So where to start? It's a tricky question. Each time I hit search it opens up a rabbit hole with slippery slopes of related links and endless forums of speculation, and a wikipedia-go-round that often throws me off in a completely different realm than what I was searching for.

Like many, I have abandoned the mainstream outlets of news and information due to their complete lack of journalistic integrity. I think it's called "Infotainment" now. And like many, I rely on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report for critical analysis of the spin of the mainstream headlines. While I value the work of the satirists, it is a necessarily narrow and limited reaction to the mainstream noise machine, not a journalistic enterprise.

Exciting developments in the human endeavor are happening constantly and increasingly. For years I have believed that every problem that faces humanity has a solution, here, now. But the problems seem to sell more Dorito's than their solutions, and so what happens between the Dorito's commercials too often passes as the whole story, and defines reality for the DoritoEaters. I then have to negotiate the DoritoEater reality due to the overwhelming numbers of people that carry it.

I feel that something has gone awry in the human condition. We have gained the powers of reason, but lost the context within which to reason, that context being the human condition. Often the limits of our reason are too narrow to render it relevant in the context of the larger human condition. Too often our reason stops at our personal interests. What the Fundamentalist movement seems to be doing is perfectly reasonable within the context of their reality, and to them their reality is Reality. What the Arizona shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, did was perfectly reasonable within the context of his personal reality, which to him was Reality.

The challenge seems to be, not agreeing upon what Reality means for us, the Humans at large, but agreeing to make this agreement a priority.



The premise of the United States Political System, or any political system for that matter, must be a conspiracy, by nature, at least by the original root of the word, conspiration; "to breathe together". Our representatives in Washington and elsewhere come together and conspire for our sake, conspire to bring about results in concurrence with us, the represented. This is our conspiracy. We conspire to select our representatives. Now, about that we and us thing....

A few years ago I was riding in the car with my parents. I hadn't seen them in years and I was doing my best to keep things civil. We were driving from Oklahoma to Kansas City, to take me to the train station. The AM radio was on the whole way. I had endured two hours of Rush Limbaugh, and was now suffering through the Hannity Show. The show bumpers between commercials bombastically trumpeted "UNITED WE STAND - THE SEAN HANNITY SHOW". I endured this for an hour or so before I was completely overcome with the irony. I put on my best diplomatic voice and turned to my dad, "that phrase, 'united we stand...'
"'United we stand, divided we fall'. If you don't know who said it, I'm not going to tell you." my dad said, all dad like.
"Well, that's not really my point. I noticed that in between all these 'united we stand's' that the radio host spends the majority of his time bashing half the country, so I was wondering who is supposed to be 'we'?" Both my parents balked and blurted in unity, "Us!".

It hurt my brain. To spare your brains from hurting, I will not relay the rest of our conversation, but it was at this moment that I realized that my folks, and the others of their political persuasion had an absolute zero capacity for irony. Their heroic zeal for unity was a large part of what was fostering the division in our country. We would not spend the rest of the drive conspiring to solve the Nations problems.

At that point I gave up on the notion of a country united. Until the citizens conspired to elect representatives that represented 'us' humans first, over the identity of Christian, or conservative, or liberal, or whatever, we will be divided by the "we" that stand to unite against us.

There are uniting factors however. Disaster being one of the most expedient. An earthquake that shakes the divided from their individual shelters is an excellent example. A TeaBagger will not hesitate to help douse the flames on the house of his neighbor, even it that neighbor voted for a tax increase. But do we have to just sit and wait for everything to fall down around us before we agree that it might be in every ones self interest to consider each other?



Brisbane, Brazil, and Sri Lanka are drowning. The magnetic North Pole raced towards Russia forty miles last year and is expected to go farther and faster this year. Antarctica is experiencing t-shirt weather this week. Fish are floating to the surface and birds are dropping to the ground in unprecedented numbers. Quiet Volcano's are waking up. The permafrost in Canada and Russia isn't so perma anymore. Brad and Angelina are having relationship problems.

Do we really have to just wait until the New Madrid Fault zone rips the country in half before we stop doing it ourselves? Chicken Little fever is sweeping the country, and even the Chicken Little's are pecking at each other over who's disaster is most alarming. Were entering into a stage of meta-rhetoric where the rhetoric over our rhetoric is being rhetoricized.

The Dark Days are coming for us all. The apocalyptic crowd, the 2012ers, the environmentalists, the nationalists, the publishing industry, Lindsey Lohan, Organic gardeners, etc. I believe a desire for some kind of unity underlies this disaster talk fetish. But we don't know how to imagine this unity without giving up our particular identities and agendas. We resist the need to be humans first, and put all that otherness second. In the midst of all the disaster-tragedy cacophony we still enjoy that luxury.