FOR ALL DUers! A balm for the Warrior's soul...

I don't know about anybody else here, but this has been the longest almost-four years of my life. I feel like a sprinter who has been called upon to run a marathon without the training and carbo-loading.

I know others here feel the pain too -- I see the posts about depression and burnout, and the ones who thought about suicide after the invasion. (As a San Franciscan, I have had to deal with Bush being sElected, Arnie slipping in the Governor's mansion, and now face a local race with a slick-as-owl-shit, JFK-wannabe, downtown suit who wants to be my Mayor...god, will it never end?!?)

So here we are, in the 20th mile -- our legs feel they won't carry us a step further, our lungs are ready to burst, our brains are saying "can't", our hearts are saying "must", and the last few miles are all uphill, against the wind.

And there is a nasty, unthinkable possibility that, even if we stagger across the finish line, we may be called upon to run again.

The following Mark Morford column is a balm for the Warrior's soul and posted here in it's entirety with the kind permission of it's author (admins: if you need I can forward his email):


Please Become More Selfish

Sick of war and violence and BushCo reaming the planet every day? Only one thing you can really do

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, October 24, 2003

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Everyone wants to know what they can do to counteract.

Everyone wants to know how they can join the revolt and punch a hole in the toxic BushCo bubble and deflect the bloated dumbed-down Wal-Mart-ization of the culture, and resist being soaked all the way through to the bone with the sad notion that this country really is jammed to the blindly patriotic gills with misguided terrified fools and simpletons and gun nuts, drunk on rabid GOP spin and Adam Sandler movies and generic Paxil.

This is what I get asked, all the time: What can I do? How can I fight this poisonous miasma of hate and violence and hollow BushCo smirks? Is this country really this blind? What has happened to us? Should I move to Canada? What the hell is wrong with Celine Dion?

After all (they say to me), I write my senator and I sign petitions and send thoughtful angry e-mails, I educate myself and pay attention and am loaded to the goddamn brim with all the proofs I can stomach of BushCo's appalling lies and environmental atrocities and disgusting abuses of this gorgeous nation.

And I participate in marches and I breathe deeply and hang my head in shame when I watch the news, what with its astounding pornographic cavalcade of deeply embarrassing macabre schlock infotainment bickering bloodletting violence violence violence with a cute story about puppies at the very end to make it all better.

And, indeed, it can seem relentless, the onslaught, the toxic stew, reducing you to bitterness and hopelessness, making you ask impossible questions of Fate and the universe, such as, Why George Plimpton and Edward Said and John Ritter and not, say, Karl Rove or John Ashcroft or that guy I read about who beats his dogs? Is that too much to ask?

As, meanwhile, countless ultraconservative shock pundits spew hate and rage and misinfo on the Right and the whiny disconcerted politicos from the Left can only mewl and whimper, stunned by the success of the GOP's steamroller of homophobia and intolerance, essentially clueless as to what to do about it.

It is enough to make you weep. It is enough to drive you to savage depression and shirt-rending angst and Leonard Cohen on infinite repeat without knowing why. And so you ask, what the hell can I do?

I humbly submit, here is the first part of the answer: You sift. You filter. You refine your awareness and stay very attuned and educated, yet choose what you want to let in and what you want to reject and flush away as dangerous and scarring to your heart, and you work within your range of heat and breath and love. This is the only way. Take it all on and you will crumble and short circuit and implode.

What else? You pray your ass off. But not on your knees. You do not whimper and give yourself over to some angry bitter paternalistic God and get all meek and guilty and powerless. Not this time, baby.

I have a friend writing a whole gorgeous book on women's spirituality, and her primary point is invaluable and I shall steal it now: Have a dialogue with the divine. One on one. Meet the divine as an equal and rise up to it and match it and get it on, hardcore, every day, via ritual and mindfulness and intimate connection, from the most prosaic winks to the most profound dream visions, and everything in between.

You do not think yourself rife with pathos and sin and irreparable flaws. You do not merely "have faith" that some higher power has a master plan, and therefore you get to take no responsibility for your life or your decisions because you're just a feeble apelike pawn grateful for even the tiniest scrap of a hint of a wisp of mercy.

You think the divine wants you submissive and passive and mushy and pathetic? Bull. You wanna know God? Look in the mirror.

Maybe this is still too vague. Maybe this is not as good as wishing you were suddenly granted a super-cool "Bewitched"-like superpower to inflict, with a wink and a nod, screaming night sweats and instant burning death and/or sudden divine benign pagan awareness upon the war fanatics and the GOP monkeys and the ultra-Christian gay bashers and Lynne Cheney. Is it? Too bad.

Because when all is said and done, there is only one thing you can really do to counter it all. There is only one approach that works almost every single time, in every case.

To avoid karmic meltdown and utter disgusted nausea and suicidal tendencies and the bashing of one's skull into the brick wall of cultural ignorance six hours a day: You work on you. This is the only thing you can really do. What, too boring? Hardly.

You think it's easy to do everything in your power on a day-to-day basis to crank your divinity and suck the big toe of your own personal Jesus and discover that the god you seek is actually you, is your true Self, and beam that healthy sexy wet individual robustness out to your immediate world every day, minimize the refined sugar and the garbage food and the stomping of the planet and maximize the orgasmic sighs and the organic highs and the holistic everything? Verily, 'tis not.

You kiss with everything you've got. You love deep, make love with full intent, feel the divine's hot breath on your skin at every possible moment, buy the best wine you can afford, read your ass off, cherish your body, get lots of sleep, hunker down, scream your joy. There.

This is always an unsatisfactory answer. It always feels like some sort of cop-out, incomplete and ineffectual, like there must be something else, surely something beyond just the same ol' self-development crap you always hear and you're all, like, OK whatever fine, so I breathe deeply and I take yoga and I eat well and don't cut people off in traffic, have more intense orgasms and laugh more easily and listen to good music and turn off the TV and get outside and work in the garden and whatever. Great.

But goddammit, look. Look around. I do all that, and nothing changes. Still the world is imploding. Still murders and animal abuse and BushCo reaming the planet and it doesn't seem to get any better, and in fact only seems to be getting worse, no matter what I do. Right?

Wrong. The world changes with every intent. The world is affected by every single thing you do. They can't truly crush you, because working on yourself means your divine bullshit detector is cranked to 11 at all times and you laugh in the face of their debauchery and you do not eat at their trough of sameness and white noise and dread.

And this is the most powerful awareness of all.


©2003 SF Gate

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/10/24/notes102403.DTL

advice as posted on commondreams the other day, will help keep us sane as we fight to preserve our lives.

The Most Radical Act: Do It Today

by Ira Chernus

 
OK, everyone. Time out. You've been reading commondreams.org, and everything else you can get your hands on, to keep up with all the latest terrible news. You want to know every detail about how George W. and all the other nefarious characters are screwing up our world. You are outraged every day, because you are paying attention.

Well, time out. I hereby give you permission -- in fact I order you -- to take off a few hours, or even the whole day if you can swing it. Go out and enjoy the glorious autumn before it disappears. Take a long, long walk to see the trees. If there aren't any trees where you live, just enjoy the clouds floating across the autumn sky. I hope it is at least half as beautiful where you live as it is where I live. And I hope you can take your walk with a friend.

It's the most radical thing you can do today. Taking a long walk on a beautiful autumn day reminds us why we do all this political work and make all these efforts for social change. It reminds us of what we are aiming for and working for, why we feel responsible for keeping well-informed about all the world's ills
. . . . . . . . . . . .

Marcuse said that the economic and political injustice of our world is only a symptom. The deeper underlying disease is repression. What makes us truly human -- our ability to imagine, to feel beauty, to take pleasure, to love -- is systematically repressed by the global capitalist system. The system keeps us pacified by feeding us digitized substitutes like TV sit-coms, web porn, and internet dating. The true revolution would be to throw off those substitutes and fill our lives with the real thing.

Marcuse's theories were based on a simple radical truth, which we can re-discover on a long autumn walk. Imagination, beauty, sense pleasure, and love are all related to each other. Each one can trigger, enhance, and reinforce the others. In the world we radicals want to create, carefree joy would be the norm because life would be all about imagining, loving, feeling beauty, and taking pleasure. Every social institution would aim to promote and enhance those most basic human experiences.

Today that new world already exists. Occasionally, we are lucky enough to be somewhere that it is being put into practice. Mostly, though, it exists only in our imagination. That is why we must go out and see the beauty, take the pleasure, and do it (when we can) with someone we love: to feed our imagination, to bring our imaginings of a better society back into our homes, our offices, our factories, our schools, even our banks and shopping malls. Every improvement in the world began when someone first imagined it. As the French radicals of Marcuse's day wrote on the walls and sidewalks: "All power to the imagination."

So time out. Take a long walk on a beautiful autumn day. It is more than just a brief vacation from the harsh reality of our world. If you understand the full meaning of what you are doing, it is the most radical act you can do today. It is an act of faith in a truly better, truly alive, truly human world. Every step you take is a step into that world, a step that turns imagination into reality. Every step reminds you that imagination can be the most real reality of all.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1017-01.htm

Damn, I like that!

This Marcuse guy sounds like someone I need to look into some more...

Thanks for that!

Hell

and one even feels a bit guilty for finding pleasure and joy-- good friends, a good glass of wine, great chocolate.

but, these things are necessary and so terribly important, and we can't forget that.