Completely Wrong-headed Obstructionist, Socially Irresponsible GOP is Killing America

Thanks to Barbara Baty.

Completely Wrong-headed Obstructionist, Socially Irresponsible GOP is
Killing America
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For those who are still interested in reading, learning, and maybe even
changing:

Obama needs to realize the truth about [most] Republicans: "Their loyalty is to a fundamentalist Christian ideology, on the one hand, and American exceptionalism of perpetual warfare and hatred and fear of the 'other' on the other hand. Between the neoconservatives and evangelical Religious Right Republicans you have no friends."
--Frank Schaeffer (see below)
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Blinded by Greed, Oblivious to Need:
How Socially Irresponsible Republicans are Killing America
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By Dennis Rahkonen
Feb 12 2009
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20266
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Most of us aren't old enough to remember the Great Depression.

But "The Grapes of Wrath," stark photographs of pathetically poor folk with life's spark absent from their eyes, and Dust Bowl accounts somberly related by Grandpa have given us grim insight into how hard times were for so many back then.

The elders of my family talked about it often while I was growing up.

What I recall most vividly from those retellings is the contemptuous sneering over Republican President Herbert Hoover's response to the staggering calamity unleashed after Wall Street's 1929 crash.

The impoverished masses were expected to sell apples on street corners to survive!

Under left-wing leadership, the American people angrily rejected such absurdity, mustering sufficient militancy to force FDR's enactment of the broadly beneficial New Deal. They also organized the great industrial unions that gave ordinary citizens the means to attain prosperity and protection on a nationwide scale.

Ever since, conservative Republicans have reached deeply into their rotting bag of depravity to constantly come up with increasingly more selfish schemes to try to undo whatever gains workers have won through necessary, arduous struggle.

One particularly vile effort was "Reaganomics," so destructively thrust upon us during the awful '80s.

Prior to that period, the only poverty I'd ever experienced was in the early '60s, when Eastern mining companies abruptly quit Upper Michigan's once-booming Gogebic Iron Range. Everyone was suddenly jobless, Dad included.

We received welfare assistance for several months, manifested most notably by cans of Kennedy-era USDA mystery meat on Mom's pantry shelves. Our local economy eventually rebounded, but not soon enough to erase my lingering memory of that meat's "unique" taste.

The Reagan recession, though, was much harsher. It affected many millions more.

What's worse, it was deliberately contrived, to break the back of union power and thereby transfer American societal wealth to corporate/financial coffers to a degree that made storied sea piracy seem ethical and paltry in comparison.

Members of my extended family and I were unemployed for an excruciatingly long while. The same could be said for most everyone we knew. Packages of generic macaroni and cheese were supermarket shoppers' first pick, and easily half the passengers on our city buses were down-and-out souls either going to or coming from selling their blood plasma, out of desperate need.

Meanwhile, this country's upper crust -- the primary Republican constituency -- flourished like a fattening pig.

Huge tax breaks for the wealthy, coupled with deregulation of all institutions having direct bearing on the quality of our lives, and our very safety, became the American norm.

Most of us finally went back to work, but at jobs that generally paid much less than those we'd held earlier. Former auto makers became hamburger flippers at fast-food joints.

Rapacious class warfare conducted against America's wage-earning majority -- an open plunder thinly disguised by "trickle down" balderdash -- became thoroughly institutionalized.

Along with all this came the rapid growth of deep, ultimately insoluble contradictions that, in the final quarter of 2008, would make a very compelling case for Karl Marx's famous quote that "capitalists are their own gravediggers."

The entire system collapsed, most spectacularly in its finance sector, but chiefly because American labor had been exploited for so long that workers could no longer afford to buy back what they themselves produced. "Consumer confidence" understandably eroded, and store shelves gathered dust in the uneasy months before their final going-out-of business sales.

Giving Marx credit again where it's definitely due, here is the long-predicted "overproduction crisis" for which private-profit capitalism simply has no solution.

Into this impending catastrophe came Barack Obama, a decent man with ultimate loyalties lying with the common people, by whose status he knows that America's societal health must be measured. Not by how flush and plush things might be with a tiny, superrich minority.

So Obama and the Democrats sought to advance a "stimulus package" to "jump-start" the failing economy.

Never mind that it was too little, too late, or that probably nothing can be done, now, to slow our greased-skid slide to disaster.

Republicans resisted this good-faith effort with all the typical, pro-plutocracy nonsense they could shamefully muster. They wanted even more tax advantages and subsidies for business interests, coupled with demands for less regulation, forgetting that the Bernie Madoff rip-off and the current peanut-butter salmonella scare are two salient examples of deregulation's abject bankruptcy.

Cancer-stricken Ted Kennedy had to return to Washington, since his vote was needed by the Democrats to prevent a Republican senatorial filibuster.

All this completely wrong-headed obstructionism occurred as the unemployment rate soared to record levels and mass hardship was becoming epidemic. Elkhart, Indiana will soon be Everytown, USA.

It happened shortly after one of our community's television stations ran a sobering piece on area homelessness, featuring a man who lived in a scrap-built shelter in the woods, when the wind chill routinely exceeded 30 below!

Where is the "Christianity" of those who greedily devote all their efforts to preserving their privileged, luxurious status, derived by a parasitic sucking of working-class lifeblood?

What manner of "human" can see profit and suffering before him, know that relentless pursuit of the former inevitably causes the latter, and still blithely seek more profit, at the painful expense of public welfare and the common good?

Before our sofas and televisions become evicted furniture out on the sidewalks, we need to rise from our torpor and fight back, like our forebears did in the Rebel '30s, using exactly the same tactics.

Get mad as hell. Unite, organize.

This is our country, and we can't allow traitors loyal only to The Almighty Dollar to destroy America.
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About author

Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the Sixties.

Uniting with the Interior Lovespirit

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Having wrestled with a fairly serious bout of depression as part of my psychospiritual training (several years ago), I now spend most of the time in "pervasive meditation." This is different from the various forms of "structured" meditation, for you carry your mantra wherever you go, and you "run" it at any time during the day when you have a spare five seconds, two minutes, ten minutes, or whatever. This tends, with practice, to quiet the conscious mind, which, as you know, can be quite boisterous, noisy, all-consuming, and negative. This practice creates an "empty space" in your heartmind, into which the Holy Spirit of Love is invited. And if invited, It will invariably, dependably come into the heart; then God (Love) will begin to think, act, and speak through your human form on earth. There is no greater pleasure or delight.

In the ancient gnostic Christian classic called the Gospel of Phillip, it says that those who were converted to early Christianity became not only "Christians," but "Christs." And while it might, and perhaps should, sound bizarre to our ears to hear about "Kevin Christ" or "Jessica Christ," this is the highest goal to which any person can ever aspire, both here and in the afterlife Homeworld.
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Occupational Therapy

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Depression is the most common challenge in our very unspiritual society.
"Occupational therapy" can be most effective. It really helps, in this life, if you have a passion that is greater than yourself!:) Depression is not solved by thinking about it, figuring it out, obsessing about it.

It is solved by only compassion or Love-- losing yourself in the challenges of another, where her problems become more important than your own. This is true agapology (Love-psychology) in action!:)

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Desire: A Careful Analysis

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In our society and culture, we are powerfully, repeatedly programmed to believe that the way to happiness is, "Desire much, get much (fulfill your desire), and be happy." But a careful study of history demonstrates that there is no relation between material wealth and happiness (contentment, satisfaction, fulfillment, joy). But the entire advertising universe is based on this premise. And it involves millions of people and many billions of dollars.

We have all received of, or have been imprinted with, this program. The average teen has heard over 150,000 commercials during her short life.

The advocates of increased desire are everywhere, and every store, every bank, every financial institution, supports them. "Desire more and more" is the universal message.

That is why people actually expect that more dollars mean instant happiness. But interviews with lottery-winners prove that they are often stunned and shocked due to their disappointment at profound feelings of unhappiness after having won major lotteries! With all the money that they could ever spend, they have not found happiness.

Our entire society is a witness to the failure of this program. For unhappiness is ubiquitous and pervasive. Even chronic depression is common, the number one psychological disorder in this very wealthy country.

Radical problems require radical solutions. So, in a quest to understand the very, very important connections between desire and happiness, we must take a very careful look at alternative views.

One of these is the view of people of the Enlightenment Tradition
(mysticism) down through the ages. Whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, or from nature-traditions, all mystics agree about this. They all say:

The Way to full happiness is the turning away from, the decrease, even the final renunciation (rejection) of desire. This seems so very odd that it deserves closer examination.

What is desire? By definition, it is a state of dissatisfaction, unfulfillment, incompletion. These factors are more readily associated with unhappiness than with happiness. Advertisers, for example, have only one job: They must make you feel dissatisfied, incomplete. Then, they say, buying their product will make you feel satisfied and complete!

So, desire creates unhappiness. For a person who is completely happy and utterly fulfilled, absolutely satisfied, desires nothing. Desire is a "wave" upon the placid mirror-lake of the calm, tranquil, happy mind.

Let's look at a parable: A little girl was given a red wagon for her birthday. She had been wanting, and hinting, for many years that she wanted a blue bicycle. When she received the wagon, she was miserable.

But the wagon did not make her miserable. It was a fun, fine toy. No, what made her miserable was the desire for the blue bike.

So, events in themselves do not make us unhappy. Instead, it is the desire for them to be different that creates misery. So, if you train yourself to accept whatever occurs in your life, you will have one of the greatest secrets to happiness!

Another parable can illustrate: Two women were born in the same neighborhood on the same day. Each married at age twenty. Each climbed the ladder of "success" to a moderate executive position. But the one, always focused on what she did not have, and what she could not do, was always miserable and complaining. Impressing others, she thought, was a key to "happiness," and she struggled endlessly to impress everyone-- including strangers whom she would never see again! The other, who always thought and spoke about what she did have, and what she could do, was a study in happiness and serenity.

Again, material things do not create happiness. Nor does status, position, or power. Happiness is an attitude, and is internal; it cannot be created by anything external.

Those who, like the happy lady in the parable, diminish and lessen desires require less to satisfy them. They are more easily happy. So, as a rule, those who minimize their desires tend to be happier, while those who follow the dictates of our crazy society, amplifying desires, multiplying them, are more miserable.
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When Life is "No Fun"

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Many activities, people, events, and even things can contribute to joy. But nothing can "make us happy" if we are subconsciously "refusing delivery" on joy, if we reject it. Psychologists have even described a very serious condition called "anhedonia." This is the catastrophic, tragic inability to enjoy anything.

There can be several contributing factors to the inability to enjoy events, things, and people. If we seriously ignore our spiritual needs-- never read anything spiritual, never meditate, never practice Love or compassion, that can and will lead to anhedonia. So, continually be reaching out to others, multiplying friends and acquaintances! The only way to "love God" is by loving people!

But there is another, related, cause of which people rarely think. This is the absence of forgiveness. For forgiveness is the interior "door to joy" in our hearts. Forgiveness is the factor that allows joy to be planted within the heartmind, and to grow, and to thrive.

So, if we are failing, or refusing (out of pride) to forgive anyone, we are cutting way back on our internal joy. In fact, we are helping to create depression-- in its most serious case, anhedonia.

This is an act of ignorance and real selfhatred. So, the heartmind punishes itself by creating interior "hellstates"-- conditions of agony, suffering, and pain-- when we refuse to forgive ourselves or others.

What can we do? One thing that can be done immediately: Take an honest and thorough interior inventory. Scan and search through the "records" of your memory. If you have found that there is someone from your past that you have never forgiven, immediately email or phone that person, and make sincere, honest peace with her/him.

This will have an immediate and palpable healing effect on both your body and your mind. It will make you feel renewed, refreshed, and rejuvenated! So, don't think about it too long, and do not put it on a "back shelf" in your head! Do it now! You will be very glad that you did!
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Bread and the Bread of God

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The text, "Man shall live, not by bread alone, but by every utterance of God," was used by Jesus, in the Wilderness Temptation, to refute a temptation to profit personally from the Powers of the universe (miracles). It is implied that Power is never to be used selfishly or personally. And it is never to be used to show off.

It means also that "bread"-- all material things-- are not enough to sustain human beings emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually. People of our society are always trying to live by "bread" alone. Most will do anything to earn more "bread" or money.

Yet depression is the most common malaise of our time and culture. It is depressing to the Soul (deeper interior Mind) to try to live without the words of God (Love). Not only is it true, as the ancient song says, that "money can't buy you Love," but the attempt to live without Love is a hell of utter depression and pain-- no matter how much money you have.

For the human mind (nature) was not created to be satisfied by money. The truth is that, in the history of the whole world, not a single human being has ever been "made happy" by the possession of money and things that money can buy!

The wealthy, who are often consistently miserable, are proof of this premise. This applies to those who, being very rich, seek escape in sexual promiscuity and carelessness, or in alcohol or other drugs. Money and its offspring, business, make a very shoddy and tawdry "religion." For it does not create warmth, friendship, Love,family, fulfillment, or satisfaction.

Buying sports-cars, indulging in trips and travel, or engaging in various sports, are simply ways that miserable people can use to try to "lose themselves" in kinetic outer activity. These expensive pursuits never bring peace or tranquility.

We are designed to "lose ourselves" in the vast interior Mind of Love. What people truly need-- the "bread of God"-- is Love. It can be available to the poorest person, if she is willing to give Love. To trade Love for cash-- by using our time to earn money instead of developing spiritually-- is like trading goldust for dust.
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