Ruminations on the Eve of 2023 - Alcyonenews

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Posted December 30, 2022

Ruminations on the Eve of 2023

Holidays are good to have. Especially so for those in the labour force and those in school of all sorts. But why do we love holidays? The answer is simple at least for people in the mental grove I am in: Holiday time is an escape from work, it is like parole to all, a chance to connect with friends who serve terms in other institutions.

Early God-makers quickly recognized that they could not market a God so cruel as one who having built man from mud just for fun would burden him with the yoke of work. This sent the God-makers to rework God around that and they came up with a diabolic plan. They shifted the cause and placed the blame for the human burden on humans, namely Adam and Eve. They had the pair irk God beyond the limits of his unbound magnanimity, thereby compelling the Omnipotent to sentence both Adam, Eve and all their heirs and successors to a life-on-labour without parole so as to teach us all a lesson. This left God immaculate and eminently marketable.

The Bullies capitalized on that and interpreted God’s sentence to mean: “work, sleep and have no fun” and took it upon themselves to ensure it happens. They voraciously grabbed all bits of leisure they could discern and deployed it to build cathedrals, palaces, castles and village chapels. Then they forced people to spend considerable time on their knees chanting praise to the vain God and praying for more of the same. Residue leisure was used to stage bloody raids and pillage, like the “crusades”. All done to ensure that people have no time left to think. This because “idle hands are the Devil’s tools”, and thinking minds too.

Speaking in relative terms, the Dark Ages were the apotheosis of human enslavement. Even now, seven centuries after Dante Aligheri started unravelling the Dark Ages, some of that does not leave us. Much has changed in name and form but in substance much remains as brutal. Galloping technology has produced tumultuous amounts of leisure, much to the pleasure of a plethora of “oligarchs” who use it to build huge yachts and buy private jets. Yet this does not consume it all and the creative Bullies shove the residual labour into parasitic jobs. Such as PR (deception), Advertising, (pushing waste), Lobbying (corrupting politicians) and overfeeding the Eisenhower Military – Industrial complex.

The people who are denied access to the windfall of wealth-in-excess-of-justifiable-needs are those who are most entitled to it by virtue of having unsatisfied needs. These are our brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, “down there in the streets”.

No, it ain’t their fault. But even if it was, this would not release us from our obligation to pull them out from that “inhuman” situation. Much more so when we muster the courage to recognize that we had a hand in creating the predicament they are in. This, at least by having allowed it to happen.

It is “normal”, a natural law if you will, that in a given society, under a given set of circumstances, a certain number of people “will fall through the cracks.” Running soup kitchens and Christmas turkey-dinners, praiseworthy as it may be, is mere relief, not a cure. To help people have a 3-meal-day, avert addiction and have the help to manage addictions when such happen, society need to change that “set of circumstances” – change to Democracy.

There is no Democracy when people sleep in the street. Nor there are people sleeping in the streets in a Democracy. There is no majority support, nor even a minority support, such cannot conceivably be, for what is happening in our streets. Sadly, there is no democracy available to us to spare ourselves being governed by politicians who “lead” us to endure this, who “protect” us with rusty submarines, or “earn fees” delivered in $1000 bills in a brownbag.

If we had Democracy I would ask all the MPs of Canada for a super-urgent ad-hoc Ideas Bank to solicit ideas on how best to help and dignify our brethren now left “in the streets”. This would ascertain the emergence and force the implementation of the best solution possible now. And while time surely will improve on that, no one would likely take away from us the wonderful feeling from knowing we all are well cared for.

The politicians would have to respond in the public view which means that they would have to do it. I call this process “white-mail”, but it is widely known as “Democracy”.