aching

It has been another week of work, and I am in the process of trying to regain my mental faculties for a couple of days, my humanness, my bliss. I generally enjoy my grocery work, although this week was a bit stressful, for two apparent reasons. First, most everyone in the country has gone back to work after the holidays, and this has a certain grumpiness attached to it. Second, the work tasks have shifted around this week for the new year, and the new tasks on my morning shift are less enjoyable to me. There is less of a full body workout and more stress on the hands and arms. As a fiddler, I am not sure such achy wrists and cramping in my arms will be tolerable for very long, so I may have to change some things if it doesn't improve. Today it was all could do to just get through the day, get home and fall asleep, which seems to have helped relieve some of the ache.

There is also a bit of an ache in my spirit. Along with personal losses the last couple weeks, including yet another friend yesterday, there is the ongoing collapse of the economic system, and concurrent diminishment in life plans, as a backdrop to living in America the last few months. And there is the complete corruption of U.S. political integrity the last few years, the murder of a million Iraqis, torture of innumerable others being only the most egregious of the violence.

In concert with this, there seems to be, since 9-11 a growing attack on free speech here. I find the domestic spying less troubling than the structural barriers to effective protest. There are crackdowns Americans face now at most every public protest, there is ongoing infiltration and undermining of all public organizing, and the media is completely bought and sold, so that such outcry is never impactful to the common public dialog. There are the blogs, thank goodness. But it took a journalist throwing a shoe--after over five years of nearly genocidal occupation--for those of us protesting this insane war to feel we were at last, for a moment, heard in the mainstream.

This is intolerable on some level, and I continue considering strategies for emigration. Yet the old countries of my ancestors are not far removed from the same banking elite which is apparently running this world into the ground. I'm not going too far into my conspiratorial view of the world here, except to say I was born the year JFK was murdered, and this was in retrospect the end of hope for benevolent government, functional economics, and the rule of law. Although we have somehow have apparently made strives in overcoming racial discrimination since then, eh?

Perhaps Pres. Obama will offer some healing yet. If we can together mitigate both the violence and the fascism likely to be stimulated by the current systemic breakdown of society, then we as a generation will have done at least something. And this talk of Obama understanding the power of empathy shines a little hope for me into my otherwise jaded view of these times. In witnessing many of the movements toward justice in Latin America, the arrest of Pinochet a few years back for example, I also take hope for unexpected social transformation toward accountability for violent dictators. While this hope may be dwarfed by the massive and genocidal crimes of the nearly singular Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush administration, it is definitely something.

I think there is also hope in the breakdown of the system itself. While those of us on the lower end of the economic system will likely suffer the greatest increases in deaths and persecution, the systemic exploitation of the world and the Earth simply cannot stand. The treason of recent atrocities aside, there has never been justice or reconciliation of the wholesale global slaughter and enslavement of so many native peoples. I may be outraged about 9-11 for the rest of my life, but then I think what it must have been like to have lost one's entire tribe to the same miserable forces of violence. And there is no salve for that, nor salvation for the system by which it came about. Despite the hopes of my many middle-class liberal friends, we are clearly decades past the point of comfortable reform. We are in what I consider spiritual territory. We need some miracles.

Fortunately, I feel the miraculous energy of Divinity to also be close at hand these days, and this is my greatest hope of all. When we turn our hearts to Love, benevolent evolution progresses at an immediately accelerated pace. And hallelujah to that!