Post-Election Party Favors 

The election's over.   A month has passed.   The smoke has cleared and the trick mirrors we used to try and find our way out of the house of horrors created by our individual and collective greed and corruption have been transformed into the three-way mirrors of a brightly lit dressing room where we are now being forced to try on bikinis and speedos that reveal all the ugly consequences of our former gluttony.       

We’ve finished congratulating ourselves on being able to show ourselves and the rest of the world that the majority of us have at least conquered racism.  Or have we?  Have we conquered racism, or have we as a society merely finally recognized that we have all become slaves and that to continue to make distinctions based on the skin tones of our fellow slaves is just silly? 

The election of a mixed-race president is indeed a cause for celebration, and a reason for hope in and of itself.  It provides much-needed evidence that mankind is still capable of evolving socially and politically.  This may very well mean that we can avoid the grand murder/suicide of humanity by the sadistic abusers who would rather see us all dead than see us to escape their control, than for us to leave them and be happy with someone else.  Yes, if racism, one of the divide and conquer tools long used by these sadists, has been revealed for what it is and is now reviled, that’s definitely cause for dancing in the streets.  

However, we fall short of jubilation.  Jubilation would require a jubilee in the original sense.  The following are definitions of jubilee from the Oxford English Dictionary:   

1.  A year of emancipation and restoration, which according to the institution in Lev. xxv was to be kept every fifty years, and to be proclaimed by the blast of trumpets throughout the land; during it the fields were to be left uncultivated, Hebrew slaves were to be set free, and lands and houses in the open country or unwalled towns that had been sold were to revert to their former owners or their heirs.

 name="m1.b"b. fig. or transf. A time of restitution, remission, or release.

2. R.C. Ch. A year instituted by Boniface VIII in 1300 as a year of remission from the penal consequences of sin, during which plenary indulgence might be obtained by a pilgrimage to Rome, the visiting of certain churches there, the giving of alms, fasting three days, and the performance of other pious works.
   It was at first appointed to take place every hundred years, but the period was afterwards shortened to fifty, thirty-three, and twenty-five years, and now ‘an extraordinary jubilee is granted at any time either to the whole Church or to particular countries or cities, and not necessarily or even usually for a whole year’ (Cath. Dict. 1885).

   name="m3.a"3. a. The fiftieth anniversary of an event; the celebration of the completion of fifty years of reign, of activity, or continuance in any business, occupation, rank or condition. name="2"silver jubilee (after silver wedding), a name for the celebration for the twenty-fifth anniversary; so name="3"diamond jubilee, applied to the celebration of the sixtieth year of the reign of Queen Victoria.

 name="m5.b"b. Shouting; joyful shouting; sound of jubilation.

 name="m5.c"c. A Negro folk-song of an optimistic and joyful kind, often having a religious basis; freq. attrib., esp. name="4"jubilee singer, name="5"song.

 While by some definitions, jubilation has been achieved, by others we are still far from it.  Yes, there has been a lot of joyful shouting.  Admittedly, I’ve been doing some myself.  It’s been wonderful to be released from the shackles of shame and humiliation created by the world believing that I, and the majority of Americans, accept someone as blatantly corrupt and idiotic as George Bush as our “leader”.  Then there was the added shame of knowing that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes, that the whole system was corrupt to its core, but being powerless to do anything about it.  When you’re led to believe you live in a democracy, that degree of actual powerlessness is doubly painful. 

 Personally, I find great comfort in the knowledge that at least Barack Obama is smarter than me.  That’s worth a dancing a little jig for all by itself.  The fact that he writes his own speeches for the most part is enough to make me break into a full-fledged polka.  But jubilation?  No.  That would require more than a mere changing of the guard.  It would require a change in who is paying the guards’ salaries.

 There are few phrases more powerful in any language than “all is forgiven”. 

It was interesting for me to note that the origin of the word "jubilee" is religious, and to realize that the power formerly held by religion has now been seized by banking institutions. 

For those of us not wishing to participate in the practice of usury, discrimination abounds.  Try renting a car, an apartment, or even increasingly, getting a job, without a good credit rating.  It has become almost impossible to do anything without participating in the banking system whether we like it or not.  Following the “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” principle, we begin to understand how government can steal our tax dollars from us, give it to banks, and allow banks to lend our own money back to us and make us pay interest on it. 

 Clearly, our government is now owned by the banking system every bit as much as any other third world country we read about in which government operation is dictated by usurers.  These countries have long been controlled by institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  Operating under the guise of helping to alleviate poverty and create stability, these institutions finance governments.  They literally put governments into power, governments that agree to borrow money to maintain that power, and to pay the interest on these loans by collecting taxes from those they maintain power over.  The interesting thing is that in these so-called “fledgling democracies”  that are “helped” by banking institutions, the people who have to pay the money back have no ability to vote on either whether to borrow or how much, nor how high their tax rate to pay it back will me.  Nor do they get to vote on the social services the money will provide.  Does this sound familiar?   

 If this isn’t slavery, or at the very least, taxation without representation, I don’t know what is.  We keep hearing about our trillion dollar deficit.  To whom exactly do “we” owe this money?  In our so-called democracy, when were we given a vote as to whether to borrow it?  When were we consulted regarding the terms and conditions of the loan? 

 Yes, Barack Obama is intelligent and articulate.  He is a vast improvement, if only intellectually and cosmetically, over the bumbling ineptitude of George Bush.  But judging by his willingness to give our tax dollars to banks and allow them to charge  interest for loaning it back to us, I would hardly grant him the title of great emancipator, regardless of his skin tone.  The actions of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell should be enough to prove that merely because someone’s ancestors have experienced slavery and discrimination, they are all for ending it.  For some, it’s enough just to trade places.  Let’s hope that’s not the case with our new president. 

 Even if it is the case, we aren’t powerless unless we believe we are.  We can all do our part to break the bank, namely, stop putting our money there for them to use to finance wars and dictatorships.  We can stop borrowing and start living within our means.   We can give up the illusion of personal independence that borrowing from banks instead of friends and family gives us.  To quote our new president, yes, we can. 

 For America, globalization means that we are no longer immune to the kinds of enslavement and exploitation that we’ve watched from afar, indeed benefited from, for decades now.  Our present and future actions must be based on the goal of creating a healthy interdependence, not the continued illusion of independence based on the exploitation of others or the delusion of guaranteed security.  Banks.  The world has become their sweatshop, and America has irrevocably become part of the world.  The price of our past position of privilege must now be paid.  Let’s just suck it up and pay it,  but let’s not allow them to charge us interest on it.  Let’s force them to say “All is forgiven”.  Then we can have some real jubilation. 

That is all.   

Blog entries should, I suppose, have a beginning, middle and end.  A topic, a theme, a story to tell, at least.   Despite the afterglow of just having been snowed in for two blissful weeks with my new wife, complete with yule logs in the fireplace and not a single cross word between us, and a New Year's celebration full of hope, I find myself becoming depressed.  

I blame myself.  I blame my unreasonable expectation that by the year 2009, mankind might have evolved to the extent that greed, corruption, and war might become extinct despite all the evidence that greed, corruption and war will cause mankind to become extinct instead.  I admit it.  I am selfishly disappointed that the rest of the world is refusing to share in my happiness, my desire for goodwill toward men.

News footage of tanks, unmanned drones dropping 2000 pound bombs, graphic photos of helpless toddlers, faces scarred beyond recognition, being cradled by weeping mothers.  Really, it's almost too much for even hope to bear.  Will mankind ever give up sibling rivalry, groups trying to prove that God loves them best and wants them to have the biggest piece of the pie by virtue of granting them access to the deadliest weapons, the biggest appetites?  The belief that one group is superior to another by virtue of its ability to enslave another group, morally justified merely by the absence of divine intervention?  

"Dad, he's hitting me! "

No response.

"See?  Dad thinks you deserve it".  

Maybe Dad is the one to blame, and we need to recognize abuse and neglect when we see it, grow up and leave home, get some therapy and take responsibility for ourselves.  Learn to define and execute fairness and justice for ourselves.  

Instead, billions of investor's dollars are being stolen--and the perpetrator's (Madoff) punishment?  Being confined to his penthouse and forced to purchase extra security to prevent being assassinated.  

"Dad, he stole my allowance.  Now I can't buy what I was saving for".

No response

"See?  Dad doesn't care about you?  I can do whatever I want to you."

Happy New Year. Same as the old year.  

A friend of mine is excited to have the opportunity to attend President Obama's inauguration.  I'm hoping that she'll soak up some hope while she's there, and come back and infuse me with some of it.  Evolution is such a slow process.  Sure, it's progress that we finally have a mixed-race president in a formerly openly racist country, trying to justify its past history of slavery. That's something worth celebrating.  We just have so much further to go.  I wonder if we'll have the opportunity to evolve further before the sibling rivals with the nuclear weapons blow all of us up with them in the process of trying to prove their prophecies right to justify their theft and murder and inability to learn to share.  

I weep for us, that's all.