Saucer-Shaped Moon

A saucer-shaped moon waits below
A tenuously connected
Mars and Venus
Asking to be
Filled with the heavenly nectar
As the three float horizon-ward
Disappearing while the night is
Still beginning

YOU Are the Republic

We are finally at the end of President Trump’s first week in office. It has been a hectic week to say the least. In his inaugural address, the new president said the time for talk is over and it is now “time for action.” He has been true to his word. It is difficult, not just for the average citizen, but even for the news media to keep up.

Mr. Trump’s first executive order marked the official U.S. withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. I wrote about that briefly here.

Among the highlights of the other EO’s are reinstating the “Mexico City” abortion rule, implementing much of what he’s promised to do on border security and immigration, providing “relief” from Obamacare regulations, issuing a freeze on all regulations created by agencies of the federal government, implementing a federal hiring freeze, restarting construction of the XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, expediting environmental reviews of infrastructure projects, creating a new rule requiring any pipelines built in the U.S. to be built with U.S. made steel and other metal products, and ordering a streamlining of the federal manufacturing regulations for U.S. manufacturers.

This adds up to Mr. Trump wanting to get moving quickly on infrastructure projects to get American workers back to work rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure. It won’t solve all of our earning problems, but every little bit helps.

I don’t have time to go through each one of these executive orders, nor do I have any delusions you would sit and read all of it, so I will focus on a couple and give you an overall assessment of where we are and where we are headed.

Pipelines

President Obama wanted these pipelines to be built. He did not cancel them, he delayed them so he didn’t have to deal with the political fallout. Hillary Clinton’s position was “whatever I have to tell you to get elected.” Bernie Sanders stood alone in the presidential candidate field in opposition to these pipelines. They both became a working reality the moment the polls closed on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. If you were against these pipelines, understand, no matter who won in November, you lost this battle the moment Bernie Sanders was mathematically eliminated in the Democratic Primaries. Blame the DNC and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

I’ll say this and move on. ALL pipelines leak. The Native American tribes believe their water supply will be at least tainted if we build the Dakota Access Pipeline. They deserve to be negotiated with as a sovereign nation or, at least, a state in the union. This has not happened. As usual with the U.S., the First Peoples are treated as less than second class citizens. This is how the U.S. government treats all those with less power than itself – and this behavior does not change whether Democrats, Republicans, or Whigs, or Federalists are heading up the government.

Border Security and Immigration

Easily the most impactful thing President Trump has done in his first week is the combination of two executive orders: one to build the wall along the southern border and another on far reaching immigration policies. Among bullet points in the second order are

• ·         Hiring 5,000 additional border patrol agents
• ·         10,000 new immigration officers
• ·         Creation of new detention facilities
• ·         Ending the “Catch and Release” policy and replacing it with “Catch, detain, and deport.”
• ·         Denying federal funds to sanctuary cities and “jurisdictions” (a new word we haven’t seen much of, at first blush, it appears to be a stab at denying entire states federal funds unless they cooperate with the President’s agenda)
• ·         The action also orders the Department of Homeland Security to create and maintain a list of “sanctuary jurisdictions.”
• ·         The office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to create an Office of Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens. (An ominous name, no?) This office will be compiling lists of crimes committed by immigrants. One can only assume these lists will be studied to help officials decide specific countries from which to block, reduce, or only allow super select immigrants. It also says in the order these lists are for the purpose of “better informing the public regarding safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions.” (A thinly veiled threat. This list will very soon be turned into a propaganda tool to disrupt tourism and commercial investment in these “sanctuary jurisdictions.” Why would you visit or expand your business in a place that is so unsafe? The goal is obviously to force compliance by using internal “economic sanctions” against these places.  

I have to point out at this point, had the administrations of the past ten presidents or so simply enforced the immigration laws on the books, we would not be in the position of having to decipher whether this authoritarian president believes his actions are for the good of the nation or if he has more nefarious motives. In short, we did this to ourselves.

Hope

In President Obama’s first ten days he signed nine executive orders. President Trump has signed twelve. This number may actually be thirteen, but it is difficult to get clear information at this point. He was scheduled to sign an EO ordering an investigation into his fictitious voter fraud claims yesterday afternoon, but the signing was postponed.

Bottom line, President Trump is not that far ahead of where President Obama was at this point in his presidency.

Also, one of the first EO’s President Obama signed was the order to close Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba. Eight years later it is still open. The President is not a king. Just because he orders something to happen does not mean it is feasible or doable. The wall may indeed get built. If it does, it will have little effect on illegal immigration. The more stringent steps in the accompanying order will have far more effect. Building the wall will create a few decent paying jobs for a few American workers for a few years. If we decide we don’t like it, we can always take it down once the Trump Presidency is over. Creating a few more temporary jobs?

We’ve had megalomaniac authoritarian presidents before. In the sixties and early seventies we had one who was a Democrat (Johnson) and one who was a Republican (Nixon) consecutively.

And we are still here as a sovereign and a free nation.

The Republic is bigger than one man. It is definitely bigger than this one man, no matter how many times he tries to conflate himself with the nation.

Keep in mind: YOU are the Republic.

Happier Things

I said on Tuesday I’d write about happier things today, so here you go.

We have had wonderfully moderate temperatures here in Houston for the last ten days or so. We have not used the heat or the air conditioning in our home for at least that many days now. The ten day forecast calls for sunny or partly cloudy and mild temperatures through next Saturday, as well. Reminds me of living in California. A little. California has better beaches, a better ocean, and MOUNTAINS.

I’ll be on the back patio by the fire pit nearly every evening for the next ten days. Lady Dog will be with me.

I am the most content and enjoying my life more than at any other time I can remember. My life is really good, right now. I am enjoying my work. I find true fulfillment in giving people the lifelong gift of being able to make music for themselves. My kids are all in good places in their lives.

I am taking the time to revel in that goodness.

Thank you for being a part of it.

I will have a much longer piece either later today or tomorrow with my take on the President's first hectic week. Hint: He said in his inaugural address it was "time for action" and he wasn't kidding. 

See you tomorrow.   

President Trump's Combative Inaugural Weekend

I didn’t get a post out yesterday because I couldn’t decide what to focus on. This morning I realized that is exactly what I need to write about.

The reason I had so much trouble deciding what to write about yesterday is because, for three days, we were inundated with lies, half-truths, conflations, misrepresentations, and outright propaganda.

Before I go any further, I want to say:

                ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE

It is a part of governing.

                ALL POLITICIANS LIE

They cannot get elected or even inspire confidence otherwise.

The Bush and Obama administrations both employed the strategy of hiding their lies. I’ll let you decide who did the better job.

President Trump seems to be employing the strategy of the Clinton, Nixon, and Johnson administrations. This strategy is to overwhelm the public with so many lies of varying types it wears the public out. The overwhelm strategy erodes the resistance of everyday people who are working to take care of their families. This erosion happens quickly, like a mudslide in a California rain storm. Soon, the only resistors left are the most radical. Because these folks are so far outside the mainstream of the “Average American” they are easily dismissed and marginalized by the government propaganda machine and their sometimes willing, sometimes unwitting accomplices.  

I will be delighted to be proven wrong on this, but, if the first weekend is any indicator, we are in for an exhausting four to eight years.

**************************

Important Happenings

Besides the U.S. continuing its 220 year streak of peaceful transitions of power, some other significant events happened this weekend.

President Trump’s first executive order was to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. This is exceptionally good news for the American worker. This agreement, while possibly shoring up U.S. influence in Asia, would have our workers degraded by even more competition with fifty cent per hour laborers and three hundred dollar per month knowledge based workers with no protections from our government. U.S. wages have been depressed for far too long by these types of agreements. The only people enriched by these types of agreements are large, multinational corporations.

A record number of people marched in protest on Saturday against President Trump and in favor of women’s rights. This number is nearly equal to the number of popular votes he lost by in the general election. I find that an interesting coincidence.

Finally, the U.S. military carried out drone bombings in Yemen on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as President Trump wasted no time getting to work trying to fulfill his promise to “eradicate extremist Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.” 

I searched again this morning and could find no U.S. Congressional authorization for the U.S. military to be conducting war in Yemen. Our president, neither Obama nor Trump, have any authorization to be conducting war on Yemeni soil. Still, I see almost no news coverage of this. No outcries from the leaders of either party. No grass roots uprisings. The American people seem content to allow our presidents to illegally use our military to eliminate those they don’t like in other sovereign nations while killing more civilians than combatants - as long as they are “keeping us safe” here at home.

I’ll be back to writing about happier things on Thursday. 

Negative and Positive Liberties

I am currently reading “Escape from Freedom” by Erich Fromm. He published this book in 1941. Which means he wrote it in the years leading up to and the first horrific years of World War II. As you may have already guessed, Dr. Fromm was desperately trying to figure out how the most “civilized” place the planet had ever known (Europe) had lost its collective sanity and decided absolute destruction and the murder of tens of millions was the solution to all their problems. What made the situation even more maddening for him was the necessity of the “II” designation. This was the second time in fewer than fifty years his neighbors had chosen this “solution.”

His conclusions and arguments are compelling. I will be unpacking them more next week because they have a laser focused relevance to our circumstances today.

Fromm believed we modern humans have a habit of celebrating our negative freedoms as individuals and stopping short of their true purpose of existing: the freedom to become. 

An example of this might be free speech. The Constitution of the United States outlines our right to freedom of expression and hampers the ability of the government or other authorities to infringe upon it. We celebrate and defend our right to think, read, write, and speak what we will. Fromm argued the vast majority of the population of free societies stop there. He wanted to encourage us to go past negative liberty of freedom from regulation and embrace the positive freedom of learning how to think rigorously and independently.

He believed our lack of initiative in this area makes us easy prey for advertisers and propagandists alike.

Henry Ford is quoted as saying:

                Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

I find it interesting a man who so prided himself on his ability to think was bamboozled so easily by the anti-Semite propaganda of his day, but, on this quote, I think Erich Fromm would have agreed with him.

Fromm was concerned, as many are today, our inability to think well combined with our vast scientific knowledge brings many to despair. This despair is induced by cynicism and lack of belief in any personal significance, or meaning. This again creates a susceptibility to advertisers and propagandists.

So what was his solution?

Surprisingly, Fromm offered the same treatment as Jung:

                Acknowledge and face your fears of insignificance, separation from the whole of humanity and society, and lack of purpose and feelings of powerlessness. Once you have dealt with these insecurities you will be empowered to embrace your freedom to become.

Of course, being a psychoanalyst, Fromm, as well as Jung, wanted you to go through this process with an analyst to assist you. But, this is expensive and takes years, at best. Psychoanalysis is not an option for the average person in the United States of America. If Dr. Fromm’s solution is the correct one, and I have a hunch it is, the majority of us will have to go it alone. Which brings us right back to the heart of the problem, doesn’t it?

What do you think?

Do you agree with Erich Fromm? Does our lack of critical thinking skills make us susceptible to advertisers and propagandists to use as they will? Do you see signs of this in your community, church, government?

Do you see authoritarianism around the world or in your own country treating the masses as “prey” or a means to their own personal ends?

Tell me in the comments below.    

If you like this blog, please recommend, share, and subscribe.

Also, invite your friends.

Thanks

Sacredness of Mountain Solitude

The title poem from my upcoming collection:

There is something sacred about
    mountain solitude.
A life wholly other than
    the one we live below.

Is it the proximity to the heavens
    or the heavenly nearness of
    nature,
    or quiet,
    or a more peaceful rhythm to live by?

 The answers to these questions are beyond me.
 As beyond me as the mountains themselves.

A Carless Life?

In June of 2016 I began simplifying my life. Some would say my life was already simple and I’d agree. When compared to the typical American life of hustle and rush, scrape and scramble, my life was already simple. At the same time, I had far too much “stuff.” Junk drawers filled with scraps of this and that, “just in case” I or the kids needed it someday. An attic and a garage full of things I hadn't used in years and had no plans on using anytime soon. Cleaning, arranging, organizing, and searching through all this stuff wastes enormous amounts of time and energy. The older I get the less I have of either. I sold, gave, and threw away books, clothes, dishes, weights, tools, and much more.

I still have way too much stuff.

I am planning another purge soon. That one will be far more emotionally draining. I’ve already gotten rid of most of what I didn’t care about. What is left is different.

I’ll write about that when I go through it.

This past week I was ready to take my vehicle in for an oil change. A couple of days before I took it in the Check Engine light came on.

Uh, oh.

The local shop did the oil change and ran diagnostics. They came back with an estimate of $2300. The vehicle is a 2007 Saturn VUE. 4 cylinders. Over 230,000 miles. The Kelly Blue Book website says it will trade in for under $1000.

$2300 is far better than a new car payment for the next four to five years, but I took this as an opportunity to explore my options for an even more simplified life. Can I live a carless existence?

I am currently looking into a combination of Amazon Prime Pantry and a grocery delivery service my local grocery store is using. If I miscalculate and run out of something important before it is time for my next delivery, there is the mountain bike option. According to Google Maps the grocery store is only 1.3 miles away.

I believe, with a bit of careful planning, I can avoid needing to use the bicycle option in all but the most extreme circumstances such as, bad storms.

I currently have to drive one day per week for work. This drive is about two miles each way. I could use a soft guitar case with backpack straps to carry my guitar and papers I need as I ride the bike back and forth. I would have to come up with a different option June through September. Folks don’t want me showing up at their house to teach them music when I am all sweaty and stinky. Also, this option needs to be available to me on days like today when Houston’s skies open up and pour for hours on end. Will Uber or a taxi work?

The next hurtle is bank deposits. The majority of my students still pay tuition with checks. I can make another and regular pushes to convert folks over to PayPal or other electronic options, but, for the foreseeable future, there are going to be folks who can’t or won’t use online payment methods. I have to accommodate them. To do this I’ll be making at least two trips to the bank each month.

Finally, I need a plan for when I want to go camping and hiking and for the few times per year I need to get into Houston proper. For these times I can rent a vehicle for a reasonable rate.

There are other factors to consider, but these are the major concerns and I believe I can manage them.

The great thing about this is I can test it – even long term, if I like – with my vehicle parked in my driveway. I don’t have to commit to anything until I am absolutely sure.

By simplifying my life I am giving myself more time to consider the life I want.

The more time I give myself to think about my life, the more I become aware of my questions changing. For instance, this question changed from, “How can I maintain my highly convenient and expensive car lifestyle?” to “Which lifestyle serves me?”

As the months go by the small changes are bestowing upon me a vastly more fulfilling life.

I’ll take it. 

I want to hear from you. 

Are you currently simplifying or making other changes? If so, what prompted you to begin making those changes? Do you see anything I missed I need to consider? 

If you are enjoying this blog, please follow, comment, recommend and share it with your friends. 

See you Thursday. 

How I Could Have Saved Time and Pain

To fully understand this post, first read Learning to Do Life Well. My post from 1/9/2017. 

It turns out some accomplished philosophers and psychologists have written about what I was going through in my twenties and early thirties. First, I had to do the work of living the ancient Greek maxim:

Know Thyself

The ancient Greeks claimed they got it from the even more ancient Egyptians. Had you asked me during the nearly two decades I was trying to figure all this stuff out, I would have said it was probably Shakespeare.

As I was learning about myself, I was also engaging in what Nietzsche called “The Will to Power” and what Jung called “Individuation.” Had I been exposed to these things before or during these particular struggles, I might have been far less concerned about why I didn’t seem to fit anywhere and never being satisfied as a joiner or a follower.

The process of learning who we are is often uncomfortable. Jung encourages us to confront and acknowledge our darker sides and to neither be ashamed or afraid of them. Nietzsche admonishes us to revel in the pain of the struggle. To see it as an opportunity to show the strength of our internal metal.

All through my mid- and late-twenties I had this recurring vision in my mind. I’d be working a job I hated for three to six months, falling farther and farther behind financially the entire time. I’d be working so hard to conform to what “god,” my church leaders, and society expected of me. And I’d be growing more and more miserable.

I could see this “other” me inside myself. He was nearly naked. Long hair, dirty. Aggressive. I had him in a cell of stone and ancient iron bars. There was a single, bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling that was always swinging side to side so no one could ever get a good look at his face.

I knew I had him caged, but any moment he was going to trick me into letting him out again so he could destroy the nice, sanitized, middle class life I was struggling to create. Complete with the two car garage and the white picket fence. Even though I didn’t want any of it.  

I was terrified of this other me and I knew I had no real power over him.

Had I been exposed to Nietzsche, Jung, and others, I might have learned this is normal. Instead of keeping this other me caged, I needed to learn to compromise with him and figure out how the two of us could live together in this one body and enjoy it.

It was perfectly fine that I wasn’t cut out to live the Monday through Friday life of modern Americans. Jung calls it the “average ideal.” I wasn’t designed to help fulfill the corporation’s vision, or the pastor’s vision, or anybody else’s vision. I was supposed to be finding and creating my own unique path. And I wasn’t supposed to be fighting my path, avoiding my path, or being ashamed of it.

On his debut EP, singer songwriter Joe Pug has a line I love:

I’d rather be nobody’s man than somebody’s child

This is how young Joe expressed his struggle of finding his unique path in life. I think he summed it well.

In trying desperately through my twenties and early thirties to conform to the jobholder lifestyle of the masses, I was literally harming myself and my family. It wasn’t who I was or who was designed to become. When I finally gave myself permission to accept myself as an artist I began the process of self actuation and my life began to get better. It was a painfully slow process, but it has made an enormous difference in every area of my life: mental, physical, emotional, financial, social, and career.

Life as an individual is good. 

Learning to Do Life Well

When I was thirty I met a cousin on my father’s side of the family. He’s about a decade older than me. We discovered quickly the differences between us were vast and probably too difficult to overcome for there to be any kind of friendship between us. He grew up in the family business. I took it up out of desperation. He was an artist. I was a guy who was there to get paid.

What was the family business? Drywall.

Hanging, taping, floating, and finishing.

He was great.

My skills were passable – mostly.

We were both doing work for the same company. He was an hourly employee and a highly valued one at that. I was a subcontractor. The lowest one on the totem pole. Right where I belonged.

He’d show up at 7 am and work until at least 3:30 pm Monday through Friday. I’d get there shortly after nine and work until six or so. This habit quickly got in his craw. He took me to lunch so he could explain life to me.

“You know, there’s a reason school hours are from 7:30 am to 3 in the afternoon,” he informed me.

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“It’s so that you learn to be disciplined and show up to work on time every day.”

Sounded more like programming to me. I didn’t want to do what everybody else was doing. I could see the value in it, but the trade-off didn’t seem worth it. And I definitely didn’t want to continue working in construction the rest of my life.

I knew he was trying to help me, but I couldn’t stop myself. “So, my showing up every day at 9 and staying longer than most isn’t disciplined?”

We had a short conversation about conforming to norms and expectations, but it didn’t take. Just like the hundred or so other conversations, consultations, and commands of this type that came before it from bosses, managers, sergeants, captains, and teachers. It wasn’t so much that I was rebellious, which I was until I was about twenty-one, but I was just never able to fit into the work-a-day lifestyle I was being encouraged to adopt.

My entire adult life I hated sitting in traffic with everyone else every morning and evening, traveling to and from jobs I either hated or could barely stand, just so I could get paychecks at or below subsistence levels. I simply wasn’t cut out for it. I got called things like, “lazy,” “flakey,” “flighty,” “weird,” and numerous other derogatories I feel no need to mention.

In my work-a-day life, whether in the military, on a construction site, or in the offices of a Fortune 100 company, I always felt out of place. I knew nothing was going to feel like being on stage. There’s just nothing else like it in the world. I also knew most of the rest of life was supposed to be enjoyable, as well. The problem was all other work felt as though it was making withdrawals from my life’s accounts and the meager paychecks at the end of the pay period never balanced the books.

When I got a chance to teach music to supplement my income and then make a fulltime livelihood, it was like coming home to a warm, welcoming house in the middle of a windy Nebraska winter. Don’t misunderstand. I still have to make sacrifices and compromises with my work, but they easily balance out with the rest of my life. I don’t wake up every day excited about work, but I do most days.

Finding what I’m good at and how to make a life with it took a long time. Mainly because I was distracted by what others were telling me I was supposed to do with my life and what advertisers and MTV had trained me to want as a musician. It took years of doing things that took from the quality of my life before I became brave enough to be creative and do something that enhanced and added to the value of my life and to the lives of others.

These days I try not to waste time wishing I’d gotten up the courage to do it earlier. I try to be thankful every day I get to build my life around teaching people in my community to have fun and make music.  

I don't know if I am doing life well, yet, but I do know I am getting better.