Hi all:

I have no idea how many of you will read this after it's been so long since I stopped posting. I've been reading the comments you've made after I left and I feel I didn't properly explain my decision to leave.

First of all, thank you all so much for your interest in what I have said here. It means a lot that there are still people out there who have some interest in our society's fate. I was also moved that I actually had some impact during the short time I regularly posted.

But that was not the only reason I left. Though I didn't see any response and so didn't much see the point in posting (something I now realize was a misconception), I had other reasons.

In my life I have went through several metamorphoses, most of which have improved me as a person and deepened my mind and spirit. However, while I was posting I found myself being filled with a hateful being that posessed my entire thought processes. In analysis of my own mental state, I discovered the source of my hatred.

When one lowers oneself to the level of a critic, and a critic alone, then the mind conforms to fit its purpose. The mind can now find only misfortune and corruption in the world, and knows only complaint. For some, they can escape this effect with some ease. As I have always been a black-or-white person, I could not find the same way out.

If you are familiar with the narrative of the fool and the knave you will understand. I grew constantly more concerned that I was merely fitting into their little formula and serving my purpose by balancing the system. Their little doublethink routing that carries so many off in haste.

I realized that I was transforming from a social commentator to a fool, one who criticizes and criticizes but never seeks to change. What was I saying that no one else could say? What could I contribute that no one else could contribute? Passion, yes, but only the kind that destroys through its own self-destruction. So much more is achieved through civil action and introspection, or legitimite journalism.

I could not, in good conscience, do that to either myself or anyone who read my posts. One commentator noted that we need to act on our beliefs. Too true. Complacency has obstructed our purpose for too long. But most do not realize that at some point one begins to lose one's originality and, though one may speak words of protest, you are merely feeding the Establishment's purpose. If you've read 1984, then you'll understand what I'm saying.

It has come on to go back to my roots of pure social commentary, not negative spouting off of anger; that benefits no one. I now have more time to work on my novels and articles, through which I would like to believe I have more chance of changing the world.

If you would like to email me for any reason, then please contact me at paganpoetica@gmail.com. I never turn down a chance for a discussion of the issues. Thanks for the time you've devoted to listening to me. I hope that the universe brings us together again.

Namaste.

I am afraid that, due to a lack of time on my part and a lack of interest from readers, I will not be posting any more blogs (at least for quite a while).

I would like to thank any of those who did read this blog. Without you, I would not have lasted as long as I did.

Look out for me in the future, and don't forget to liberate your minds from all this shit the world tries to shove down your throat.

I bid you adieu.

What I have to say is simple and quite self-evident, but it seems as if all common sense has been lost now, so I'll say it anyway. I'll keep it short and sweet.

Friday marked Earth Day, the most prominent (secular) holiday that celebrates the environment in which we live. I was shocked and disgusted to hear that George W. Bush was "celebrating" Earth Day by visiting the Smokey Mountains, once again proving my belief that truth and politics are not related by even the farthest stretches of the imagination.

I wish that, for once, all these assholes would admit that they hate the environment, hate women, hate love and kindness, hate gays, hate non-Christians, and basically hate anything unlike themselves. And you know what? I think I'll take my own advice and just admit right now that I hate the assholes.

So there. I said it. At least now everyone knows where I stand. Now maybe all these evangelical hate-mongers get some balls and give a non-political answer FOR ONCE.

But what's worse is that there politics are corrupting the liberals as well. Now Democrats are afraid to say anything original because it seems that Washington is opposite-ville, and everyone just manipulates the hell out of what they're going to say in order to better manipulate the voters.

Christ, when will they learn?

Okay, so maybe this topic isn't integral to the success of humanity, but I just need to get a few things off of my chest.

This week I was watching the finale to the SpikeTV series The Ultimate Fighter, and I heard (once again) a winner attribute his success to "his Lord Jesus Christ." Now, every now and then I can deal with this, but in a society that is supposedly drifting toward humanist idealism, why are these rantings so prolific?

It's everywhere: the Grammys, the Oscars, sports tournaments, game shows, etc. Now, not being a Christian, maybe I'm biased, but this seems a little fishy to me.

What these people need to get through their head is that Jesus doesn't give a shit whether they win a stupid sports tournament or music award. Maybe they should invent a religion in which followers worship their ego as the supreme God of the universe. Because I'm sure that as Jesus was being crucified on the cross his main objective was to help rappers and athletes get money to drench themselves in greed and living beyond their means.

And yes, I'm sure that Jesus is up there in heaven right now saying, "Now I have the power to end wars and famine and prejudice, but instead I think I'll help this egoistic fool win the Super Bowl."

By ignoring our own part in our successes in life, and attributing them to a being which, quite frankly, is a superstitious photocopy of our most pathetic traits, we are also sacrificing responsibility for the things that go wrong in our lives. I know I hate it when people say, "God has a plan and we don't always understand it," or "Jesus will come down and save us before things get that bad."

Number one: Everything does happen for a reason, but that reason isn't engineered by some God-being and the reasons aren't always pretty.

Number two: There is nothing preventing us from understanding the way our universe works and functions.

Number three: Jesus isn't waiting in the clouds to save us. If he is, he sure as hell could have come a lot earlier. Anyway, we can't risk our very existence on a false hope that a two-thousand-year-old man will return to escort the righteous to heaven.

So I guess I was wrong: humanist thought is essential to the continuation of our existence. It does nurture our spirit to know that we have a hand in our glorious destiny. After all, we as humans have the potential to be gods. And humanism allows us to say, "Hey, we screwed up; so lets use our unlimited potential to clean up this mess we've made."

It seems that ever since the pope has died, people have been ranting on and on about how noble he was in life. I don't mean to be cruel, but I really don't see what all the hype is about.

People have been droning on about John Paul II's morality. I have even heard some go so far as to call him the most moral person in the twentieth century. But in all actuality, this is an insult to all the others who have changed history this century alone. Have they forgotten about Gandhi? JFK? Martin Luther King Jr.? The Dalai Lama? Jimmy Carter?

I know I have not.

Another claim is that John Paul II extended an olive branch to Jews and Muslims and help bridge the gap between Catholics and these religions. But he could not stifle the mutual hatred between the followers of these faiths, which pervades every facet of their relationship.

Besides, these are all faiths of the Abrahamic tradition and have many similarities; what did he do to reconcile differences between Catholics and various pagan religions who have been oppressed by the Roman Catholic Church for centuries.

Let's not forget about the pope's position on such issues as abortion rights, homosexuality, and women priests. How could such an "enlightened" person be so anti-civil rights? And what's more, how is it that even liberals are praising him for this trait? Quite frankly, it disgusts me.

By no means am I celebrating the death of this man, but it's time we live up to some standards and stop bestowing titles of moral leaders on people just because they follow a certain religion. As I've said many times before, religion and morality do not necessarily go together.

A few weeks ago I received a public email from Senator John Kerry that called for an urgent move to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge from a covert Republican vote about to hit the Senate floor. The message's subject..."In 24-48 Hours."

Needless to say, the bill passed and the Senate voted 51 to 49 in favor of it. However, what shocked me the most was how fast this seemed to hit us. I am a follower of the news and I am a subscriber to www.johnkerry.com. I read the paper every day and watch the local news as often as possible. And yet, somehow, I heard nothing about this until "24-48 hours" prior to the vote. Even John Kerry didn't seem to have known until it was too late.

Is this what it has come to? Are we so blind to the workings of the Establishment that we know longer know when they are about to trash one of our nation's most precious resources to satiate our lust for black gold?

In short, yes.

Government secrecy has become an increasingly relevent issue over the past years, especially among the time of one of the most secretive administrations in history (and not to protect the public, just to cover their own trail of lies and corruption). And to think that in my local paper, on March 13, I read an article (Government secrecy, Chuck McCutcheon, Newhouse News Service) praising Senate Republicans for their less lenient policy on government secrecies as of late. The article discussed their attempts to update the 39-year-old Freedom of Information Act in order to increase public acsess to government information.

But not even a week later, seven of the little devils sneek past a bill to drill in ANWR, and it's passed less than a day after the public is made aware of it (If you could even say that!). Granted, this has nothing to do with FOIA, but it certainly tarnishes the Republicans' newfound record of "keeping the public up to speed." I guess that the public only needs kept up to speed when it's some "liberal scum" that we're trying to pass, right?

That's one of my biggest problems not only with Republicans, but with Americans in general: hypocrisy. People march outside of abortion clinics and Terri Schiavo's deathbed in support of life but they will fight to kill our prisoners and our wildlife. Republicans are trying to pass a bill that will prevent fillibusters on judicial nominations, but we know quite well that if it was Bill Clinton who was nominating a Supreme Court judge the Republicans would be up there fillibustering for days. I mean, at least Democrats stand up for what they believe. Republicans just wade through the murky waters of politics.

That's the thing about politics: it's all bogged down in logistics and bureaucracies so that we can't see anything but what we're told to see. Once you put politics into the equation there is no longer a "good" or "bad" but a game where people try to dart through loopholes without being caught, before their opponent. In this system, Satan could get elected President and we, the public, could care less.

But not everything has turned out badly. The day after the vote, I received another email from Kerry entitled, "51, 49 and 260,000." The letter opened:

"Dear Friend,

Yesterday, we saw a relentless Republican attack on one of our most treasured natural wonders sneak through the Senate on a 51 to 49 vote. But, we also saw more than 260,000 Americans act in less than 24 hours to add their names to our Citizens' Roll Call in favor of protecting the Arctic Refuge.

It was the first time ever that I or anyone else could stand on the Senate floor and announce that, in a day's time, a quarter of a million Americans had gone online to express their passionate support for a given course of action.

That awesome display of grassroots power rattled our opponents. They even railed against my e-mail message on the Senate floor and entered its text into the Senate record. So, think of it this way. The Republican leaders of the Senate have 51 reasons to celebrate today, but you and I have 260,000 reasons to do the same."

It went on for several more paragraphs, then closed. In the post-script, Kerry added:

"I told you that more than a quarter of a million people signed our Citizens' Roll Call in the first 24 hours after we launched it. Actually the news is even more impressive. As of this moment, there are over 400,000 signers to our Roll Call, including tens of thousands who signed after the vote to express their determination to keep fighting. Let's keep working."

CITIZENS' ROLL CALL

Important: In paragraph 13 of the Wednesday, March 23 issue of Liberator Blog, the sentence that reads "After they turn 18, the ability for parents to remain a part of their childrens' lives is a right, not a privilege," it should be noted that I meant to say "After they turn 18, the ability for parents to remain a part of their childrens' lives is a privilege, not a right." I apologize for this mistake.

Well, the neo-conservative reactionaries have struck again, and this time they are after the right to ease the suffering of people in vegetative states. Needless to say, I'm talking about Terri Schiavo and the effort to take away what her husband says she would have wanted.

President Bush said on the subject, "I believe that in a case such as this, the legislative branch, the executive branch, ought to err on the side of life, which we have. And now we'll watch the courts make their decisions."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told reporters ("speaking more as a physician than as a U.S. senator"), "There seems to be insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegatative state."

But on what information did Frist use to come to this conclusion? Answer: a court-ordered videotape of Schiavo and a conversation with one of the neurologists who examined her. And to him, this gives him justification to purport to be a medical expert on this case? Please. If we want an opinion, we will ask an unbiased neurologist, not hearsay from a heart and lung transplant specialist turned pro-life senator.

And how lucky we are, because some real experts actually have given their opinion on the subject. Ronald Cranford, the leading neurologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, responded to claims by Schiavo's parents that she (Terri) could respond to them.

"To the families and loved ones and to inexperienced health-care professionals, such patients can look fairly normal," Cranford said. "But open eyes, moving around, spontaneous movement of arms and legs, groans and other sounds, are all automatic reflexes."

In fact, the American Academy of Neurologists said in a statement that no one had ever recovered from such a vegetative state.

But I guess they just "overlooked" that statement. After all, Frist is a professional physician, and certainly wouldn't let his political philosophy interfere with his medical expertise. How ridiculous...

"Somebody is being condemned to death, somebody who is alive," Frist said.

Quite impartial and unbiased, I must say.

The only one in this whole situation with the right to decide anything about Schiavo's life is her husband, Michael Schiavo. As her husband, he knows her more than anyone else in her life (including her parents) and is the only one who should have any say in this matter. Every one of those protesters, every senator, the President and his brother down in Florida need to shut up for two seconds and think about someone besides themselves. Just because they have a religious belief doesn't mean that the world should stop in its tracked when they are upset because that belief has been crossed.

Number one: As her husband, Michael Schiavo is legally considered the same person as Terri. That's the reason why he could not be forced to testify against her in court. Therefore, he should have legal jurisdiction over her life, and not the federal government.

Number two: Parents are only entitled to a role in their childrens' lives when they are children. After they turn 18, the ability for parents to remain a part of their childrens' lives is a right, not a privilege. After that child becomes emotionally committed to a person (romantically), the parents lose their position as number one in their childrens' lives. The child chooses its mate, but not its parents. Therefore, what right to the Schindlers (Schiavo's parents) have over their daughter's life when the husband has sworn repeatedly that it would not have been Terri's wish to be kept alive.

Number three: In addition to Michael Schiavo being Terri's husband, he has also been appointed her legal guardian. This only adds to his rights to decide for her.

Of course it is a tragedy that Terri must die, but who are these pro-lifers to say whether or not a person that they don't even know can live or die? And ironically, it is often these pro-lifers who are also pro-death penalty. I smell hypocrisy.

And there were three natural rights granted to mankind according to John Locke: life, liberty, and property. The conservatives tend to focus on life and property, but they conveniently forget the liberty part on a regular basis. Oh well, who cares about liberty when you're in the ruling class anyway, right?

And aside from the liberty side of this issue, I also feel that the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube is an exercise of her right to life...her right to decide when she can live and when she can die. After all, who would want someone else to live a life of constant suffering?

Answer: the Republicans in Congress.

Because I have not prepared a political lecture today, I thought it might be refreshing to discuss a startling personal revelation that recently came to me at an odd place--a concert.

On March 4th I attended a concert in Charlotte, NC starring the up-and-coming band Shinedown. I had no idea that it would be such a spiritual experience. The lead singer was one of the most motivational speakers that I have ever seen, and promised at the beginning of the concert that when we left we would be completely different people.

Not only was he an amazing speaker, his voice was astounding. Throughout the night he utilized some sort of personal power to manipulate the energy of the room, and by the end of the night I saw everything in its true beauty. The next morning, when I woke up, I felt as if I had been drained of the poison that had contaminated my spirit for years.

But the most enlightening experience of the night was when they performed the song "45," the lyrics of which can be found here. After he sang the song, he launched into an intense speech: "For everything in your mind that no one can ever take away from you: (singing) Let go of the 45! For everything in your heart that no one can ever take away from you: (singing) Let go of the 45! For everything in your soul that no one can ever take away from you: (singing) Let go of the 45! I don't care what anyone fucking tells you; your life...is a gift."

And so I came home and let it all sit and crystallize for a while. When I was inspired, I wrote this on a sheet of paper as I lay awake in the middle of the night:

In truth, the 45 is a versatile metaphor. We all have our own 45 that we pick up and shoot ourselves with every day; we are all dying inside--bit by bit being squelched out of existence. Every day when we wake up and pick up the newspaper to see "30 dead in Iraq"...every time we get in the car to drive to a job we hate to pay for a house we also hate...every time we have relationships with people who would hate us if they knew who we really are, so we put on an act to please them.

And we die every time we experience these things because we never ask "why?" Why are people allowed to die for a lie? Why do we suffer every day for the sake of our own misery? Why do we hide our true selves from meaningless pricks who don't matter and never will? The universe, in its pure essence, is beauty, and all things are manifested through its purity--even misery.

So when we see the pointlessness of our wars, our dead-end jobs and our volatile relationships and relenquish themselves of obligation to these tings, misery is forced to stand in its naked form, where it cannot reside in our hearts as misery--it must inevitably return to its true origin: the beauty of all existence.

It's like a good friend of mine told me today: "Everything is beautiful. Even in the most gruesome death there is beauty. You can watch to animals rip each other apart, but in truth it is beautiful. It is all in our own perceptions."

So, for the love of the Universal Spirit: "Let go of the 45!"