The waters of the River Bon are surging and the rain is now in it’s 4th day, with 2 days said to follow, but for now is unrelenting. I am too ignorant of much to contribute outside of demonstrating a ready willingness to be present. I have my own fish to fry - received my ballot and if i can follow the footsteps of others of my gringo cohort who have cast faxed ballots, may still make my voice heard in a timely fashion, though i’m more an adherent of Leonard Cohen’s “the fight is fixed,” i’m game for representing an alternative to the corporate mayhem that is being served up as “soup du jour” by the withered dead branch of the billionaire class. However, from simple empirical and current data about the fair distribution of important facts, i have grave doubts about our hierarchal orientation about power. My experience has been that within any group, regardless of size or culture - there are personalities whose training leaves them believing themselves superior to all others · i know this from my own “taste” of the poison fruit.
My pathology is from the other end of the ruling class spectrum with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) at the head of the table. When my own parents decided, or had decided by them from the divorce frenzy of the late 1960s, to dissolve their 2o year matrimonial bonds - it was decided that the two elder siblings in a family of four evenly distributed within 2 year-increments would learn of this mutually important event a full 2 months prior to that of myself and my younger brother - ostensibly to protect we the more vulnerable members of the clan from the inevitable damage that everyone eventually enjoyed, but led to a conceit that the two elder siblings somehow possessed greater maturity to face · would that that presumption have become a reality, but no.
Rather, it has led to a circumstance wherein the same siblings are somehow protecting me, a 66 year-old adult male with many more miles under my belt than they two put together, must now “divine” how our mother fairs in a “nazi blackout of 'mutual importance' while simultaneously gagging down my own bile of fury from a passive aggressive cruelty coming from individuals who, in my limited understanding of who they are as humans because of the “shunned identified patient” conceit they would rather attribute to a hatred they have and have possessed for decades using that same justification of “superior insight” and a reluctance to hear any idea but what confirms the “ultra-progressive” righteousness of their socialization that was foisted on them by a confused however loving parent - the now dying "identified patient". What is more difficult to express in this passage is how much i have been infected by this shared pathology, but which i resist only for its toxic effects on whatever growth i can manage in the time left to me for love.
The individuals i’ve described in this chronicle are decent and caring human beings and any confusion about their worthiness in today’s world is a defect in my ability to convey such finely parsed realities between my own evolving need to remain open and honest about what i feel and an historical family dynamic i have found was bent on keeping my voice quashed, not just silent - but invalid. Never again, for anyone, loved or hated will i mute my objection to injustice or cease in any exploration of finding fairness in an unfair world. I will love to my dying day, not just because i am growing closer to my death with each wheezing breath, but because my effort to discover my own very real contributions to my misery, may be useful to unborn children to preserve a peaceful loving DNA strand viciously coopted by unrestrained greed and unexamined existences that could have been otherwise attenuated with small measures of kindness and large measures of good humor - good luck to us all · it may be all there is left to us between here and the charnel floor of our unique and ever loving species.
so much for the discipline of relentless 5 paragraph essays - read later editions, you might have better luck ·
jts 08/10/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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