Summer Solstice 2015

Earlier this week, one of the group homes I help maintenance for the autistic had their yearly re-licensing inspection. The county inspector dropped a fire extinguisher she had removed from a closet at the top of the main stairs, it broke, releasing that fine particulate fire retardant, filling the upstairs hallway into the bedrooms, into the kitchen and downstairs into the basement. When I got there two hours later (no one thought to call me, I only found out because I called the other maintenance man about another “save big money at …....” fraud of an assemble-yourself picnic table purchase, trash out of the box,) the other maintenance man was blowing that hideous noxious fire retardant dust throughout the house and out the front door with a shop-vac, without wearing a mask.

“Like a perfect metaphor for government at this point,” I said, to everybody there. “Making a mess and not there to clean it up,” someone else added. I feel bad now that I didn't add that banks and corporations do the same thing, to be fair, but it seemed out of context at the time. It was a government official who did this, who might otherwise have quarantined the house and called in the MN Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and the Health Department et al, if one of the $12/hr house staff had done it (we are a private contractor at the mercy of the taxpayer's government.) There were no government officials to be found in the clean-up of that debacle.

I've been ranting on Facebook again, about gov, banks and corporations. People must think I am crazy, talking about traitors and the most fascist collusion between corp and gov there ever was, OKA (otherwise known as) TPP/TISA/TTIP trade pacts. This, after the Minnesota legislature and Governor Dayton just passed a MN State budget that allows nurseries to sell plants containing pesticides that are fatally toxic to pollinators, as “bee friendly,” among other hideously eco-fascist new laws (if fascist is the collusion of gov and corp in violence against economy and ecology,) like allowing county boards to spray wild hemp on private property and then charge the landowner for it; Eliminating the citizen review board at the MPCA; greenlining the Polymet, 20 years of mining for 500 years of sulphuric acid in Minnesota waters, copper/nickel mine in northern Minnesota.

Which Polymet mine, if Minnesota outlawed it, if TPP passes, Polymet would be able to sue Minnesota for “lost profits.” They are going to get their mine and give us the pollution, one way or another.

While gov/corp/bank continue their manifest destiny, to do unto Africa what has been done to America, what has been done to so much of the rest of the world, this mono-cultural totalitarian treatment of people and the earth.

And I'm the crazy guy?

Few care about any of this, in the context of a bowl-cut white guy shooting up an historic black church/symbol of God and freedom for black people, killing nine. Or Gov/Corp/Bank, OKA Military Industrial Complex, antagonizing Russia and China to take up common cause against us? Or that fraudulent con, OKA aristocratic pageant OKA Presidential Election 2016? Or the myriad entertainments? Or the pay-check to pay-check existence most people live? God damn, the only thing keeping most Americans believing their standard of living is better than it ever has been anywhere ever, are their smart phones and tv programming. War against Russia and China would put an end to most of that, I suppose.

What am I trying to do? Do you think I am trying to start a movement, some revolution, with all this online ranting? Yeah, what sort of revolution do you imagine in this disparate, dissolving mega-state empire, with all it's ghastly tools of mass destruction, it's divide and conquer methodology, it's history of hidden and not so hidden atrocities in the name of freedom, democracy and the holy market?

The harder they try to hold onto control, the more it dissolves. What am I trying to do? Survive, like everybody else. To live well. I love my life. I have a greenhouse, an oasis of a garden, a great job, the greatest girlfriend ever. All this ranting about traitors and TPP trade pact treason?

I like coffee. Coffee plants thrive in Hawaii, but nowhere in the 48 contiguous states. I am growing one, as a novelty. I could probably grow more with the proper infrastructure, at great expense, and not very much of it. America isn't going to feed it's coffee habit on what Hawaii and greenhouses can produce. Trade is good.

I am not in favor of trade in people, or any system of trade monopolized by supra-state, multinational, private corporations, or any monopolized trade that comes at the expense of the health of people or ecosystems. I don't care about 99.9% of the consumer trash available, nor “fresh” fruit in January that tastes like cardboard because the few sugars have turned to starch. Trade is fine, if it is mutually beneficial and ecologically responsible. TPP is good for corporations and their investors, no one and nothing else, it is the death of nation-state sovereignty and the sovereignty of people, and the rise of a new aristocracy attached to quasi-states unto themselves, multinational corporations and banks, a kind of untouchable supra-state in collusion, controlling the globe.

Crazy. What am I trying to do? What have I been doing, all these years, ranting about this and that online, face to face to anyone who could hear it? I'm trying to articulate what I see in a way that makes sense, so that others will have the courage to question the narratives we live by, the narratives we are controlled by. To give people the courage to construct a new narrative, a new story about what this life and this earth and this economy are about. To fall in love with the earth again, how about that for a revolution? If the Pope can do it, you can too. LOL. Let that not be construed as support for monocultural anything. We've already had that revolution. 

Happy Solstice.