It is getting harder and harder to breathe. The world grows smaller as storms gather. All night the storm raged furiously, the lightning, thunder, rain, and wind locking us in and away from the world. No one expected it to be this bad. The dogs howled like wolves.
At most they said it would hinder us, and we, wanting to believe the experts who daily warn of something to fear – overripe bananas, marginal risks of severe weather, squirrel flu, spiders in tight pants, the wrong mascara, fear of falling in loose pants – accepted. Now we are huddled against the onslaught, gasping at the fury that imprisons us.
No one can sleep with the roar and rapping all around. Dawn comes slowly and dark. We huddle around our dinguses to link us to a world we cannot see or hear. They don’t ding. We have lost power. Someone wonders if the satellites are still up, but the sky is too dark for auguries. We listen to the clatter of an eerie silence. Our silence. We are all unknowingly holding our breaths. Another says, I think our phones are wasted, it feels like digital death. The dogs nod.
It is getting harder and harder to hear. Beethoven was so young to become deaf to the world. Someone says this for some unknown reason. She is old. She then says he said, “I will take fate by the throat, it shall not overcome me . . . I feel that I am not made for a quiet life.” The kids laugh. The windows and roof shake, the dogs howl, I think how true. For me, at least.
Yesterday the Israelis killed 104 Palestinians in Gaza. Par for the course, a daily occurrence. Many children among them. Did those kids hear the bombs and bullets coming? Were they gasping for breath? They are no longer breathing.
Did they call out to God? Do hundreds call out? Thousands call? Millions? Which God? The slaughterers made them dead on prayers to their genocidal God who lives in Tel Aviv.
God help us. How? The phones are wasted. Where is the Good God hiding? How can we call him?
The immigrant grandmother, hiding here from Trump’s masked thugs, says through her tears, do any of you remember how in Colombia 25,000 people, 8,000 children, all innocent, died, none of whom are calling out now, as the survivors did when they asked the great good God, why these savage deaths, after the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted and stuffed their mouths with mud, courtesy of Vulcan, the God of fire, courtesy of God Almighty.
No one answers her. Her prayers are singed with a cynicism that she hates. We can’t answer. Most don’t remember. Who will tell her why the good God, the good Earth, their mother rose up to bury so many in mud? Who can tell the survivors’ families why Our Lady of Guadalupe rose and drowned their loved ones recently?
Who is this person called Fate who knocks at our doors? Mother Nature? Father Grinning Jackal in suit and tie with blood oozing through his fake teeth, talking casually about nuclear war and slaughtering the innocent?
An old man says, let’s listen, we must defy fate. He puts a record on the battery operated record player. The wind is howling hideously so he turns the sound up to full volume. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C minor rocks the room, the walls shake like dice in a cup, tossing us on such swells of feeling that time is arrested in its turning. One hears the call to revolution.
Suddenly it is October 1962, a man is time-travelling. The Cuban Missile Crisis – real fear everywhere. Fate knocking on the door, obedient men propped at flashing boards, in Moscow and Washington, D.C., awaiting orders. They are still waiting.
There was a call then. A few men heard it. It was soul deep. In those days there were humans who could recite poetry, grasp the meaning of madness. We survived and have moved on. They call it progress. Technological progress. The machines have the answers to all our questions, except the important ones.
Who will answer the wailing voices seeking answers? Who can tell them why the good God, the good earth their mother rose up to bury them in mud and water? Who dare answer the 1,000,000 Pakistani dead, drowned on November 13, 1970 beneath a cyclone driven tidal wave? Or maybe it was two or three million. Who knows? Who cares to ask: Was it an act of Mother Nature, of God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth? Tell me, who the hell is responsible?
It is getting harder and harder to breathe. The world grows smaller as storms gather. We have been wasted by the phones, dinguses that will not save us from the nuclear weapons that the jackals with polished faces have prepared. Dead men sit at flashing boards awaiting orders. It is depressing but true, and while naturally we cannot stop nature from devouring her children, we can stop the human killers from their appointed task to close down the world and engender all a silent void.
Long later, hours, years – who knows when? – the unexpected storm abated, the roads out were cleared. It was still hazardous to try. The old man who played Beethoven said as we were leaving that we must take fate by the throat and hear the silent cries of all the people desperate for peace on earth.
“Oh, it is so beautiful to live – to live a thousand times. I feel that I am not made for a quiet life.”
Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His new book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press)
One suggested solution to the so-called Fermi Paradox is that once societies reach a sufficient level of technological development, they manage to self-destruct. Of course, there are other possibilities also, but that one seems to fit the trajectory of events here on planet Earth. Bottoming out in the Kali Yuga is another descriptor of our predicament, which is more in line with acknowledging the dimensions of spirit and soul as a larger context for the current global drama. Living a thousand times, indeed. Perhaps both ideas will combine here in one grand display before it all resets. Certainly, some rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem. We can feel its breath.
The Germans had a word, SCHREIBTISCHMORDER, to describe those who murder while sitting at their desks. Eichmann would be a good example. Netanyahu, the petty gasbag Trump, non compos mentis Biden, they all fit the bill as well. In fact, though, there are hundreds of thousands of others, not just the ones at the top. One of the salient characteristics of the evolution of warfare technology is the increasing distance it allows between killer and killed. These kids who spend hours a day ‘playing’ first-person-shooter computer games are in training; it’s a smooth glissade into the air-conditioned basement, operating killer drones while munching Doritos.
Painful poetry Volt.
The members of this great site of Edward Curtin, should create a Patriotic Front of Salvation, a United Patriotic Front with the main goal of a second independence from the capitalist class, from the capitalist system and from Israel and other foreign capitalist invaders, with the main goal of the complete overthrow of the capitalist system and the capitalist government. And to replace it with an emergency revolutionary dictatorship of the working class, poor citizens and poor peasants exercising a repressive dictatorship against the overthrown 20% capitalist class
We have to overthrow the capitalism that we have in this country, which makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. The American capitalist system of the Democratic Party (DP) and The Republican Party (RP), with its laws and constitutions, are the ones that oppress American population and force that there be 20 percent of the middle classes and rich lazy people, who do not work at all, who literally and physical never work, not create wealth, who do nothing, lazy parasites who produce nothing, but consume without limit; and on the other side of the country a population dying of misery, poverty, low buying power, and who are taxed to death, billed to death and over-worked to death. The 80 percent of americans who are poor, workers and employees, unemployed and hungry, who have suffered all their lives.
Good morning Knoxville Christian-Anarchist….Since I am a bit slow to understand anything that occurs between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans…May I ask you to further explain you statement, ” should create a Patriotic Front of Salvation, a United Patriotic Front”. That’s quite a task, whatever it is! ! I have found it is very difficult to have a conversation about small, self-sufficient communities with 5 other people! So the message might be, why think when it is more convenient to have someone dictate what your life will be, tell you what to do, what to think and so forth. We have a GIGANTIC mess !
Thanks for your comment. I got that idea from an ultra-leftist anti-maduro chavista friend of mine, they are trying to build a Patriotic Front of Salvation, which is related to what the globalresearch.ca writer and candidate of the Green Party (Emmanuel Pastreich) has been also trying to do.
He said that the USA needs a provisional-emergency government, and for that we need to build in this country a non-sectarian (composed of leftists and right-wingers who might have different ideologies but who I think have common objective goals (which is a second independence for the USA (A second independence but instead of an independence from UK, this time it is an independence revolution from the capitalist class, (which is really represented by about 20% of the population of the country) and from the state of Israel.
This United Anti-Oligarchy, Anti-Israel Front would need to be composed of low-wage people, because from a marxist theoretical point of view the upper classes and the upper layer of the middle classes are oppressor anti-change class. (which i think are about 20% of the population or even less)
While the middle-middle classes, the lower-middle classes and the lower classes (the majority) must be at around 80% or more of the population. The average people who shop at Walmart, Savealot and not at Publix. Who never eat at fanzy expensive restaurants like Olive Garden etc.
And who are not owners of big houses and expensive SUVs and luxury items. Because from marxist point of view when people have big houses, expensive SUV and vehicles and have high income they are sort of compromised to support capitalism. In other words they do benefit economically from capitalism, Israel and zionism. So it is impossible for them to divorce from their luxury high income comfortable lifestyle and to support a radical movement.
This patriotic front should be composed mainly of low-wage workers, poor immigrants, poor middle class whites and poor and middle class blacks.
You see the economy plays an important role in the ideology of people, if people feel too good and live a great life with vacation cruises, easy life, they usually support Democrats and Republicans and it is impossible for an upper middle class person to be into alternative anti-war, anti-israel political activism. Unless they were like The Kennedy Family who were rich and revolutionary at the same time. And it is very hard to see people like that.
But like you said mingling together such diverse people of this big country into one united front it is a very hard task, because the country is divided into too many different ideologies and different ways of thinking
Some of the lyrics from a song I wrote about eighteen years ago.
It’s called ‘Who Cares’.
Verse 1.
Who cares if more children are buried under their schools or homes
Who cares there doesn’t seem to be many
Cause Truth is the great unknown
Who cares if more soldiers lay dead
Leaving widows and orphans behind
Who cares as they fill up our heads with lies
And play word games with our minds.
CHORUS
Sorry but I don’t have the time
I’m far too busy you see
What, with work and family commitments
And my new wide screen TV.
you are right we need to care, and the people of USA should see the 330 million people of USA as a sort of family. A country, a nation should be like a family and its government (the parents) but the individualist philosophy of life (which is anti-christian and anti-communism) has destroyed the collective, mutualist, united mentality that US citizens should have, in order to care and not only about the 330 million people of USA. but i think people should care about the 8 billion people of this planet along with all living beings that exist on planet earth which is our home
But don’t worry JFK, Eugene Debs, Abraham Lincoln, Joe Hill, Rosa Parks, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Chief Sitting Bull, Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King and the other radical renegades of the USA are alive and will come back to save us !!
Apathy being the ‘enemy’.
Anarchy (Rules WITHOUT Rulers) being the soulution (sic).
Hi, take a look at this full whole 270 pages book about the need of a radical change in USA https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/craig-rosebraugh-this-country-must-change
Many thanks KCA.
Hello again, Knoxville Christian-Anarchist….as I was eating my squash, which is very tasty, I recalled a book by E.F.Schumacher, ‘Small is Beautiful’. I don’t know anything about this book. However, I think he was referring to small communities and perhaps self-governing as opposed to this insanity we have had for 248 years. I just discovered there were 24 presidential candidates in November. How many of us heard anything about these candidates, more than once? How many of these candidates were seeking personal gain only? How many of these candidates wore decent neckties? Well, anyway, I think we need to get beyond government as we have had a hint of for far too long. I’m sure there are other books about self-sufficient, small communities. What might that mean? What would we do? How well would we know our neighbors? Few people would be receptive!
I have no way of expressing my disgust for the sadistic murder and bombing, the lying, the fraud with their neckties….going on for many generations….the everyday expressed madness and dehumanization here, there, everywhere and in so many forms ! The Palestinians know….we have yet to know anything!
Emotionally stirring. One thing to add is that a Lakota friend speaks of “peace with Earth” because the word “on” is a form of domination, on top of, and domination is a big root of the troubles because some want to dominate Earth rather than work with Her. And from a Michael Franti song, “Time to Go Home”,
“Don’t take our girls away, no
Don’t take our boys away, no
(It’s time, it’s time!)
How many people were they runnin’ from and
How many people never saw it comin’
How many people never heard the warnin’
How many people never stayed at home and
How many people never heard the callin’
How many people never saw it all and
How many people did they spend it on and
How many people got to sing the song and
How many people never heard the cry and
How many people gotten pushed aside
How many people never saw the dust fly
How many people never said goodbye and
How many people never saw the fall and
How many people did we end it all and
How many people never saw the wrong and
How many people did we drop the bomb on
Don’t take our boys away, no
Don’t take our girls away, no”