big angry orange

In Hershey, PA, last night, the president-elect disappointed. Instead of embarking on the path of someone who has risen above partisan rhetoric, someone trying to make America truly great again, he dragged out the old racist slogans and hateful language, at one point mocking a disabled reporter. Perhaps he was just speaking to the crowd, rich Caucasians who booed loudly any time he mentioned Obama. Perhaps, though, his semi-sane suggestions of the last few weeks have been nothing but more smoke and mirrors from the Big Angry Orange. My companion and I left early, and so maybe we missed the part of Trump’s speech where he promised to disentangle America from its ongoing and illegal involvement in armed conflicts from Syria to Yemen. Most of what we saw appeared to be the president-elect rehashing his electoral victories and basically being publically jerked off by his legions of adoring white fans. Short on policy proposals but long on windbag self-aggrandizement, this author suggests that the ‘I Thank You Tour’ should be renamed the ‘You Thank Me Tour,’ and that Old Stumpy take things down a peg.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

rapid and furious

In the prayer room of a local hospital, a man was caught stealing and otherwise abusing copies of the Quran, Islam’s holy book. Accepting of most viewpoints and bursting with forgiveness, the chaplain in charge of the prayer room finally figured out who had been violating the sanctity of the sacred spaces in his care. Instead of having the offender arrested for the hate crimes he’d been committing, however, the chaplain merely alerted hospital security, who in turn approached the offender and gave him a stern warning, whereupon he pledged to cease his hateful, criminal assault. The man claimed he had been desecrating the translations of the Quran out of concern for the spiritual safety of his Christian neighbors. In his mind, it appears, the Muslim teachings promote only death and hatred - leaving no room for celebration, compassion, or love.

Imagine for a moment that this scenario had played out the other way around, that a non-Christian had been entering local chapels to steal, ruin, and similarly abuse the Christian holy books stored therein. Imagine he claimed he was doing it to protect the minds of children from the influence of Yahweh, the Christian god, who orders his followers to kill homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13); to murder people who work on Saturday, the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14); and to end the lives of those who don’t believe in him (2 Chronicles 15:12-13). Oh, how swift would be his likely judgement, how brutal the townspeople's reaction. Such an offender would probably rot in jail for months until he faced a hostile judge and jury; then, he’d go back to jail for the maximum period of time allowed by law.

Why did hospital security not take steps to prosecute the Christian who was abusing Qurans? Why did they not do everything in their power to protect the persons working in or visiting the hospital from the openly violent ways of a religious extremist? To this author’s eye, it seems that the original offender was given a pass because he was a Christian who chose to abuse the Muslim holy book. If this scenario had played out any differently, the outcome would have been one of rapid and furious action in the pursuit of justice. The area in which these hate crimes occurred is predominantly Christian; it is therefore not surprising that a person who would act in the manner of a Christian terrorist should receive not his due punishment but a mere slap on the wrist. When justice is kept blind, mankind has the chance to achieve greatness; when those who deserve her wrath are instead allowed to roam free, their minds poisoned by prejudice and hatred, the human race is doomed to wallow in fear-soaked failure.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

on childhood dreams

During a severe bout of fever when I was nine or ten years old, I experienced strong hallucinations. Such were my visions that, whilst shivering in my bed one night, my sense of perspective skewed wildly, vast distances shrinking down to tiny points of light, small particles exploding in size. Aware of volume on a cosmic scale, I now understand I was at that young age phasing through stages of awareness (or perhaps levels of enlightenment) that many Westerners struggle to access. At some point during my childhood tribulations, everything I thought I knew, everything I had theretofore been aware of, vanished into a shrinking black dot. In its place was a white space of infinite proportion, at once massive and miniscule, into which entered an external force, an ancient and terrifying awareness I recognized as something outside of me. This figure - a small man wearing a strange hat who was at once as large and small as the crushingly vast white space around him - communicated with me using not words but knowing, not speech but the kind of awareness that is often called a gut feeling. He first appeared at the top of my whited-out mental framework, slowly drifting downward as our time together went on. I can’t remember how long this visitor rode me or to what extent I became his physical embodiment, his loa. But within me to this day still live his grapple-points, those spaces to which he attached during his visit, those avenues burst open by sickness down which he waltzed into my consciousness. I was terrified of him at the time, mostly because he was so foreign to my young brain, his power so great, his outline so hard to pin down. There was something in his hand, a staff or scepter, that shimmered and danced as he held it. Perhaps this figure was just a figment of my imagination conjured up by a mind in the throes of apparent death. Perhaps a wee god did stop by for a visit, drawn to the fertile fields of a young mind blasted open by fever. Either way, it was a lot to handle at such a young age, and it changed me significantly.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

Tuesday morning’s dream

I was again in a house, but this one had lots of windows as well as blond beams of wood exposed to a bright blue sky above. Its roof was gone in places although I was confident in the structure’s overall integrity. I’d gotten to the house after climbing a steep hill, meaning that I had been climbing a steep hill and then found myself inside the house. Unlike in previous dreams, the house was not too scary, dark, or replete with series of ever-smaller doors I felt compelled to crawl through until I was squeezed in so tightly I could not move. I experienced the sensation that the house was moving or rolling as if floating on high seas. For some reason, I climbed up onto the roof, discovering it was a hybrid between hill and house. A Buddhist temple and other shrines stood on the roof’s peak, and as I was walking along it I wondered where the hill had gotten to. To my left were other buildings, a quaint town constructed in a medieval European style. To my right was the hill, an impossibly steep mountain shrouded in mist. I was running past the temple toward the shrines at the roof’s far end when I awoke back into full consciousness.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

on American imperialism

This author rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. Having read repeatedly the nation’s founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration, he finds in neither of the two texts cause or justification for imperial ambitions. America was not founded as an empire, and yet it is an empire, today. America exhibits sicknesses and discrepancies similar to those found in previous empires: we spend the lion’s share of our budget on keeping and expanding foreign corporate holdings - most often through aggressive war-making - whilst neglecting our domestic economy and infrastructure, allowing them to crumble; we curtail free speech and civil rights at home whilst paying them lip-service abroad; we imagine ourselves mighty because we had the unthinkable gall to use nuclear weapons in anger yet fail to understand that such brazen and inhuman acts compel other nations to arm themselves similarly; we call for the prosecution of foreign leaders who willingly committed crimes against humanity yet hold our own leaders (e.g. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld) exempt from such prosecution even though our own crimes dwarf those of others; we topple legally elected foreign leaders in favor of violent thugs trained by us to subjugate and torture their own people in order to maintain and protect American corporate profits.

Not one of the deplorable conditions mentioned above is called for in the Constitution, this nation’s supposedly highest code of laws, wherefore these conditions are unconstitutional, unjust, and forbidden. There is no justification for America’s imperial ambitions; our acts of war in the interest of short-term corporate profit making violate the Constitutional directives, wherefore they must stop. The America of which we collectively dream - that place where all persons are created equal, where the government acts to protect the Life, Liberty, and Property of all persons instead of merely the financial gains of artificial, immortal entities - that America does not now exist, nor has it ever. We pathetic citizens who demand a return to traditional constitutional values are being ignored, laughed at, and brutally silenced. Woe be unto this nation. Forgive us, world, for we knew what terrible things we were doing, and did them anyway.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑

on blocking DAPL

Warriors allied with the Standing Rock Sioux successfully engaged in peaceful protest thwarted efforts to dig up and otherwise violate some of the lands they hold dear. The pipelines will go in, the oil will flow, but at least the greedy bastards who stand to gain immensely at the expense of this planet’s long-term livability will have to wait a little longer for their already vast fortunes to grow further. The rest of America goes about its business in uncaring ignorance, burning up old sunlight in its cars and getting fat on nutrient-poor food-like products - prepared snacks, fast food, and candy. Some argue that every life is precious, that we must fight to protect even the weakest among us. What about the greedy and the gluttonous, though, those people who just eat and eat and take and take until there is nothing left to eat or take? Those lives are worthwhile too, mostly because they serve as a challenge to those of us who reject the modern economic notion that the fortune of each man is carried solely by the bones in his back and the sweat on his brow. We who reject this notion, who think that humans work best when living in mutually supportive and multi-generational groups that pursue their happiness through artistic expression and ritual celebration, we stand against the isolation and loneliness that manifests when people work all day to afford a home they don’t have time to enjoy, their regular debt-payments enriching the top executives of distant banks. Let us take as an example the various tribes of the Sioux, who were subjugated, tortured, and disenfranchised before being moved into concentration camps in what was then unwanted land. Slowly, the Sioux rebuilt their communities and strengthened their connective bonds with the land and each other to the point that they can now protect their waters from a heavily-armed and militarized police force whose job it is to protect not lives and liberty but the profits of multinational corporations. Let us Americans of European Descent wake up, come together, and join the battle to ensure that all persons the world over can be free, happy, and safe. Mahalo.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

a meditative method

The Buddhist meditative practice known as tonglen involves inhaling the fears and suffering of other people and then exhaling calm, happiness, lightness, and love. It can be done to family members or friends who are in the same room as well as to strangers living on the other side of the globe. There is no conclusive proof that tonglen actually does anything, just as there is no conclusive proof that other types of prayer or meditation have any kind of real-world effect. Tonglen however is in this author’s opinion more useful than worrying; with tonglen, at least, the negative condition or deplorable state which someone finds concerning is recognized and tasted of before it is bathed in the healing energies of unbridled affection; with tonglen, the bad is taken in and the good is given out, whereas worrying only focuses on the negative without concern for the beneficial. Worrying is a one-way street that deals primarily with sadness and discontentment; tonglen is a circular path that honors the existence of suffering whilst actively working to heal it using the power of loving concern. To worry is to expend mental and emotional energy on analyzing and dissecting the things one thinks should change without any attempt made to rectify those things or make them better. Few good things come from worrying, but many good things come from tonglen. For more information, please look online or visit:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqlurCvXuM
Mahalo.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥