Hey American Christians, when are we ever not in church?

    It’s Sunday, when I was taught the Devil would get me if I didn’t attend church by in God we trust on their money people who perhaps never wondered when was Jesus ever not in church?

    It’s Sunday, after I watched for a week on TV America’s most well known Bible salesman’s pecker on trial in a New York City courtroom,

and America's Roman Catholic president still helping Israel do this in Gaza and trying to start World War III in the Middle East.

    Sometimes I get into stuff because it interests me, sometimes because I’m bored, sometimes because I’m feeling mischievous, sometimes because something a heck of a lot bigger and smarter than me arranged it.

    Yesterday’s Greetings Christian America from the Melchizedek priesthood in which Jesus is high priest post was an example of something a heck of a lot bigger and smarter than me arranging it.

    As was my stumbling across Free Radio Rulo (Nebraska) and its Church of Dudo and Erik Rittenberry’s Poetic Outlaws newsletters, where raw truth, beauty, love, irony, irreverence and humor still breathe in an America gone batshit zombie apocalypse crazy.

    About two weeks ago, Free Radio Rulo beamed over:
 

Hey buddy! Would you try your hand at writing a fictitious

" letter to the editor"?  for next week's " NEWS FROM RULO".  It would make my day!

    I beamed back:

Ahoy, Wonder Bread truck free radio station Rulu, Nebraska...

I have to say, you are a cornhusker wonder to behold.

I do not say that lightly as a long-time Alabama Crimson Tide fan.

I say it as someone who has shot off his mouth and pen for a very long time, disturbing the self-deemed precious. STATUS QUO.

The HEAD UP WHERE THE SUN NEVER SHINES religion, or should I say, cult?

The POLITICOS and the RELIGIOUS, who FEATHER their and their friends and families' NESTS.

And their LAWYERS' nests.

I am a lawyer, by the way. Or was one. Well, it's probably terminal, like Ebola. But IT takes much longer.

In my past I ran ten times for local public office, claiming God told me to run, if I knew what was good for me.

I detested politics, but I was dragooned in a dream to roll up my sleeves and dive into that raunchy sewer. So, I dove.

I never came close to winning, so I didn’t have to ask for a recount.

I always was the minority report, out of the box, the pissant, some might say.

But, my goodness, it actually was some fun, when I wasn’t moaning about it.

I named my good morning blogs in salute to the VERY SUBVERSIVE “Good Morning Vietnam”, may Robin Williams, the Vietnam war dead and those blogs all rest in peace.

It was many years after that war that I considered JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcom X all got shot dead after they came out against America at war in Vietnam.

I had a pretty big reader following at my blogs.

I spoke hundreds of times at city and county commission meetings, school board and other local government meetings.

I got quoted in local newspapers, one of which likened me to Don Quixote in an editorial cartoon.

I got interviewed by local radio and TV stations.

I gave real estate developers and their lawyers and their captiured city and county commissioners hell, and then some.

But dang, I never dreamed of having my own Wonder Bread truck radio station.

I don’t now recall how I stumbled across you and instantly recognized a fellow kamikaze pilot, balls to the wall, no sacred cow left un-poked, skewered, drone-missiled.

And to beat all, you are a POET!

The SCANDAL!

Once upon a time, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I met a woman disc jockey in Salt Lake City, who had her own morning call in show. She interviewed me several times by telephone, and the Christians and the Momons in Salt Lake lit up the station’s phones.

One day we were to entertain the Salt Lake fooks, she called around breakfast to ask if I had heard what was on the news and did I want to still do the interview? 

The news was the federal assault of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

I said, of course. Just tell your audience ahead of time that you will be interviewing the Devil in Waco.

She laughed.

She did the promo, and oh my God, the station’s phone lines started lighting up after she asked me who I was, and I said, The Devil, and where I was, and I said, In Waco, Texas, and why was I there, and I said, to see how people make my work so easy for me that I mostly hang out on Maui staring at half naked beautiful women on beaches.

I dunno. It just now occurs to me that maybe that was my first plunge into national politics, or any kind of politics.

Now, I have to tell you this.

Back when I wuz running for local office, you could shoot off your mouth about politics and religion without worrying much about somebody shooting you. But as you have observed, times have really changed, and while I keep shooting off my mouth here and there, it won’t surprise me to walk outside some day and look down to see red laser dots on my chest.

So, while I hope you keep on poking the places that deserve poking, this 81+ grandfossil the Smithsonian is still trying to recapture, after it let me out for a walk one day and I snuck behind a bush and gnawed off the hind foot with the tracker on it and grew another hind foot and hightailed it, also hopes you have plenty of Kevlar and a band of battle angels backing you up, who truly appreciate fools who rush in where angels fear to tread, but if there were no fools, who’d lead the angels?

    That one didn’t get published out of the Wonder Bread truck, but after further discussion with Free Radio Rulo, I beamed this below over and it was published yesterday, along with other wonders to behold you can enjoy by clicking this link: https://freeradiorulo.substack.com/p/news-from-rulo-42e

Letters to the Editor 

Greetings Free Radio Rulo and the Church of Dudo!  

I’m a member of an advanced special forces team from the Pleiades, investigating how our original seeding here of humans ended up going the way it went? What seemed so perfect for a new colony turned out so unexpected that it caused our scientists back home to wonder if our frozen embryos, after hatching on Earth, were tampered by a different not so happy alien race somewhat like the Kingons in the Star Trek tales. For how humanity turned out was nothing like anything the Seven Sisters races had imagined in our wildest dreams! Our mission here, perhaps impossible, is to try to find out what actually happened and then try do something about it, because the Pleiades races know for a fact that what some Earthlings call karma, we Pleiadeans don’t want to visit our home planets because of something we set in motion and perhaps should have stuck around longer to make sure it got off to a good start.  Perhaps if we can figure out what went wrong, we can repair it somewhat. We searched for Earthlings to help us in our investigation, and we did find a few here and there who somehow seemed to have dodged the brunt of the damage most of our distant cousins on Earth now experience, and one of those places we found is your Free Radio Rulu and its Church of Dudo. We hope you will grant us an audience and allow us to use your facilities and technology, perhaps augmented somewhat by our technology, to broadcast our frequencies, which your scientists confuse with various space noises, and also our messages in your English language, which seems to be the main language on Earth today, although the way things are going, that may change in time. So, what do you say? Do you want to join us? It won’t cost you any what you call money, and who knows how it might go? We certainly don’t have what Earthlings sometimes call a crystal ball. You can call me Star Man, if you like, since my Pleadean name is unpronounceable in any modern human language, and you might wish to watch, if you did not yet do so, the South American film “Man Facing Southeast”.

    This happened yesterday at Eric Rittenberry’s place.

Anaïs Nin: Some Never Awaken
POETIC OUTLAWS
APR 27
 
You live like this, sheltered, in a
delicate world, and you believe 
you are living. 

Then you read a book… 
or you take a trip… 
and you discover that you 
are not living, that you 
are hibernating. 

The symptoms of hibernating are 
easily detectable: first, restlessness. 
The second symptom (when hibernating 
becomes dangerous and might 
degenerate into death): absence 
of pleasure. 

That is all. 

It appears like an innocuous illness. 
Monotony, boredom, death. 
Millions live like this (or die like this) 
without knowing it. 
They work in offices. 
They drive a car. 
They picnic with their families. 
They raise children. 
And then some shock treatment 
takes place, a person, a book, a song, 
and it awakens them and saves them 
from death.

Some never awaken.

Sloan Bashinsky
poignant-
getting married, 
birthing a child and having it die at seven weeks,
birthing two more children
and raising them,
or trying to,
watching them grow from nursing and shitting their cotton diapers
I washed out in a toilet,
watching them learn to walk and fall down and walk, and talk,
watching how curious and full of energy they were,
watching their mother and I grow apart, 
watching me not being the father my children needed,
watching my life go to hell,
watching my children have their own struggles,
some their doing,
some because I was not the father they needed.
watching me get married 7 more times,
each wife remarkable,
each wife woke something up in me I did not know was there,
they enriched my life,
I hope the same for them,
since i was not easy to live with,
nor was it easy for me to live with me,
how empty and I suppose boring my life would have been,
but for those women and the three children,
the one who died suddenly
so unhinged me
that I was never thereafter able to fit into the molds and plans
made for me by my ancestors and me,
he broke my heart and set me on my journey,
a dozen different lives in one lifetime,
I did leave the old, many times,
and start anew,
in places where I knew no one,
but now I’m back where I started, 
my hometown, 
a blue southern city surrounded by MAGA counties,
the local churches seem right where they were when left
and came to wonder when I ever was not in church?
Most people I once knew here 
seem where they were when I left the first time in 1986,
I have lived in this same old apartment building three times
after I stopped running away from home,
It was all-white, then it was somewhat integrated, now international,
the Internet makes it a lot easier to run away for a spell,
but everywhere I go,
there I am,
can’t run away from me,
nor from many, many memories,
waiting for the Lord to take me, 
hopefully before I am in assisted living 
or a nursing home 
or nut house,
I crawl out of bed each morning
and engage what gets on my plate today,
chop wood, carry water, I suppose

    This happened yesterday at religiousforums.com:

How Much Do You Doubt God's Existence?
Nakosis 
Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member

Is there any room in your belief to doubt God exists?
Or do you believe in God with 100% certainty?

If you're agnostic does that mean you believe there is a 50% chance God exists and a 50% chance he doesn't?

If you don't believe in God or gods are you 100% certain there is no God(s)? 90%, 70%? 

If you believe in more than one God are there some gods you don't believe in? How certain that these gods you don't believe in don't exist?

What do you base this percentage of non-belief on?

Redneck Mystic said: 

I know for a fact that God exists by any name people might use, and angels and demons, too, and ETs, as well. But I would be nuts if I thought I could prove it to anyone else. I tell atheists, if there was no God, that topic would never come up. I tell Christians, to the extent they live as Jesus lived and taught in the Gospels, they are saved by him. I tell Christians God doesn’t care if someone believes in God or not. What interests God is how people live and relate to other people and the planet.

I wrote about my heaven and earth experiences many times at blogs I published, and now there are around a dozen of my digitized books at the free internet library, archive.org, which is funded and run by colleges in America, and thanks to technology, that library's books can be read in English and about 33 other languages.
Three of my books at the libary are novels, which are not entirely all made up, and for grown ups, and the rest of my books there are not made up at all, and for grown ups, but some parts might be viewed by some people as stranger than fiction.
Enter Sloan Bashinsky into the search space and icon links for my books come up, which can be opened and read by clicking on the icon, Free reads, no ads, no soliciting.

Nakosis 

I believe what you experienced was 100% real but not necessarily reality.

Redneck Mystic

Belief is just that, belief. If you lived in my skin, you would know what I experienced regarding God, angels, demons, ETs was and continues to be as real as hitting your thumb with a hammer is real. 

 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Greetings Christian America from the Melchizedek priesthood in which Jesus is high priest

                         

    Yesterday evening, I talked with my friend Bob on the telephone about watching an episode of The Vikings on Netflix, in which a young boy was killed by marauders and my heart started heaving and I felt the presence of my son who died of crib death in the the 7th week of his life, which so unhinged me that I was never able to fit myself in to the plans my parents and their parents and I had made for me, and I went off and had an entirely different life about which I wrote many books, which are free reads at the internet library, archive.org, thanks to Bob.

    I had told Bob of sometimes feeling that metaphysical experiences with my son actually were experiences with what I was raised to call the son of God, Jesus in the Gospels. 

    Yesterday evening was pretty topsy turvy, and I was not feeling well, and around 8 pm I laid down on my bed wondering if, given my experience while watching The Vikings, my time was up?

    Around 3 a.m. this morning, I woke up and texted Bob:

Fell asleep on my bed around 8 p.m., wondering if my time was up? I awoke around 3 a.m. out of a dream in which I was the new police chief in some town on or near the Florida Gulf coast. I told a woman I was a lawyer, who didn’t charge money. 

I’m wondering what that’s about? My novel Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale is set in Birmingham, Port. St. Joe, Apalachicola, and St. George Island. I wrote it  in 2001 in the Helen, Georgia library on one of their desktop computers in 2001. After I was done writing it, I met my Helen, Georgia friend JE while I was hitchhiking. He loved the tale. He was on St. George Island recently.  

    Heavy Wait is about a Birmingham lawyer named Riley Strange and two very different women, who look like twin sisters. They have some seriously intense experiences with God, and with church people, who think they know everything there is to know about God.

    After texting Bob, I crawled out of bed and looked at my email and saw:

PERSONALITY DISORDERED followed you on Substack

I was brought back to life. Not by medical miracle nor my own strength. Isaiah 40:31 - but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

    I went to her substack and found at the top:

Have you been called by the Holy Spirit lately?

PERSONALITY DISORDERED

APR 2

I feel I’ve been called by the Holy Spirit to come back to Christ. I answered that call in a heartbeat. 

Has anyone else noticed a supernatural shift lately?

PERSONALITY DISORDEREDApr 2

Regrettably, all my life was lived as a lukewarm Christian. It was only recently I discovered biblical seminars on YouTube. Primarily Bible study focused. I never understood the parables in the Bible until I started watching these. It was as if everything just clicked and suddenly, as a revelation on its own I grasped it! 
Likened to an automatic download, the information was infused into my body, heart, soul and spirit. Since I don’t have a church to go to as of yet, I continue to use audiobooks about the word of God, Jesus’ life before/during his teachings and the Gospels of John, Paul (all the apostles).
I truly feel throughout my life, there were so many times I was being called by the Lord and Holy Spirit but I didn’t recognise it.
After sustaining a life changing spinal injury, it took away my sanity too. For the mind is susceptible to deception, especially in times of conflict/crisis. I allowed anger, grief and frustration to take hold of me. In the destitute state I fell into there was no room for faith in our Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit to dwell upon me. The cadaverous influence that entered my life was malevolent and most certainly contributed to a multitude of strongholds which consumed any hope for my future. Then a miracle came.
Through repentance and prayer, I sought forgiveness for all of my transgressions and sins. I surrendered and submitted my body, heart, soul, mind and spirit to God.
As if was being prepared for this amazing spiritual awakening seven years ago (which is quite prophetic in itself), I finally removed myself from a violent, abusive relationship that plagued me for five years. I also abstained from all fornication, alcohol, drugs and completely cut out all negative, demonic influence from my life. 
So seven years on, I feel emphatically that it’s so important It share my testimony. My journey on here began before I was called upon by the most merciful and loving God.
In keeping with sharing my journey living alongside mental illness, that facet of this publication won’t change. In addition going forward, I’ll be including the spiritual transformations in my life. 
For the first time my spirit is fired up for the Lord. The truth is the minute I was reminded of the word, I came out of the enemy’s strategy of deception and was supernaturally guided back to scripture. 
These days I have a completely new perspective of life. I am blessed, highly spirited, motivated and inspired to share how the unconditional love and forgiveness of our Lord and Saviour can truly transform your life too! 

For many years searching for answers, the Genesis of my pain. Through the Trinitarian guidance I’ve received, I realise the answer was right in front of my face all along. I’m beginning a new journey, and this time I have an advantage. I have the armour of God. 

    I figured that was what my dream was about, and I subscribed to her newsletter and took a while replying to her post.

Sloan Bashinsky
Interesting. In my spirit code, 7 is the mark of God on a person or an event. Paul went through an intense time of preparation before he was sent back into the world. Peter, also. Other of the 12 known men disciples, as well. The women disciples, well, that’s not talked about much in Christendom :-). I’ll get to that in a bit. 
I am pretty sure I dreamed about you about an hour ago, and I woke up thinking the dream might be about my novel Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale, not for the faint of heart, a free read at the free internet library, archive.org. The redneck heroine in that tale had some really awful experiences in her backwoods Christian family, including being raped repeatedly by one of her brothers and being make out to be crazy by her family, after she started talking about it, and she got locked up and fortunately the psychiatrist didn’t believe her family entirely. But she needed a great deal more help than the psychiatrist could provide, and that’s where the hero came into the story, after his heart had been ripped out of him and run though a wood chipper by the love his his life suddenly dying and he had his own time with a psychiatrist in a facility, who figured out there was something a lot bigger than psychiatry going on with his patient. 

Heavy Wait fell out of me in about 6 weeks on a public library computer in Helen, Georgia. I was homeless, and the library let me use one of its desktops to write the tale, which very definitely is not for the faint of heart, and was not entirely all made up. The Preface tells how I was led by the Spirit to write the tale. 
Last year, I wrote Heavy Wait’s sequel, Return of the Strange. Also not for the faint of heart.
Both novels are free reads at the free internet library, archive.org, which is run and funded by American colleges. You might be asked if you are sure you want to open that website, which is used by people all over the world to read out of print books and books by authors who offer their books for free.The free library’s digitized books can be read in at least 33 languages, including English.
To bring up my dozen or so books, enter Sloan Bashinsky in the search space and press Enter, and icon links for the books come up and clicking on their icon opens  them. My books are averaging about 10,000 complete reads, per book, per month. 
My books at archive.org, and my Susttaack writings, and my blogs, granffossil.blogspot.com, redneckmysticlawyerforpresident,.blogspot.com, and afoolsworkneverends.blogspot,com, are for grown ups. 

I tell Christians, to the extent they live as Jesus in the Gospels lived, they are saved by him, and they should not forget he said in the Gospels, many are called, but few are chosen, and they should not forget  he did not baptize in water, but in fire and spirit he baptized, and that was the baptism he lived in the Gospels, and how people live is far more important than what they say and believe.
I wrote to you elsewhere that I was grabbed by Jesus and Michael in early 1987, after I had figured out that church Christianity and the New Age and moving out west had not helped me, and I was desperate and prayed to God to help me and offered my life to human service. 

How those two grabbed me was, they woke me up in the wee hours and I saw them hovering above me in the darkness, but did not know who they were, but I  thought they were angels, white, shaped like shifts, no wings that I saw, and I heard, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it, and we are going to give it to you,"  and I saw a white flash and was physically and otherwise jolted by something electrical, and that happened two more times, and I was sweating and shaking in my body, and the two faded out, and that was how it started.
The changes came slowly at first. I was moved to another city, met a new woman, and had a vision about writing a book about practicing law in a new way, and I tried to write the book and wrote garbage many times, but eventually stuff happened and I actually did start writing the book, and the two used that process and various editors I was provided to force me to take many long hard looks at myself in the mirror, and one fearless and searching moral personal inventory after another became the core of the discipline, still in progress at 81 years and climbing. 
I experienced many wondrous things, a number of what sure looked like miracles to me. I was ever aware of the two’s presence, via dreams, revelations, ah has, body and sensory sensations, some were brutal- corrections, spankings, redirections, etc. Eventually, the two were joined by what I called Rosa Myytca. Then came Melchizedek, and then Kali, in the Hindu tradition. I learned Kali really doesn’t care for how men think.
I was told it is very easy to mistake Lucifer for the Holy Spirit, and I was given many experiences to show me why that was true, inside of me and outside of me, in other people, in the world’s goings on. Every person has a demonic twin, and coming to terms with that is part of the journey. Jesus wrestled with his demonic twin in the wilderness and thereafter, but that is not discussed in churches, where the Devil is pleased to hide in plain view, but is notseen usually.
I was sent into churches and various other situations, and then into politics. I came to view everywhere I was, I was in church, which is how it was for Jesus in the Gospels, and for Paul, and Peter, and for other disciples known in the Gospels and not known there. A number of disciples were women, the most prominent was Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s wife, mother of his child, but you’ll never get Christendom to acknowledge that. Every person in Christendom should read the book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is about their child and its bloodline. 

In 1992, as I recall, this came to me from very far away, very slowly.

Melchizedek

Melchizedek is an Order of angel 

Melchizedek comes to a planet in trouble to prepare it to receive the Christ

Christ does not come to a planet without Melchizedek

Mary Magdalene was of the Order Melchizedek

In 1999, I was told to read the Letter to the Hebrews, which generally is viewed as being written by an unknown author. I was told Magdalene wrote it, and she did not put her name on it, because it was known that no man would read anything a woman said or wrote about God, Jesus, etc. Hebrews was written to Jews who had accepted Christ, but had fallen back to their old ways, because the discipline was so rugged. They were told they should be teaching, they should be eating meat, but they were still drinking milk. They were urged to return to the cleansing of the Lord, which I was experiencing in spades at that point of time in my life, and it was awful, and it was completely beyond the ken of psychiatry, medicine and church Christianity. Hebrews is about being turned into a priest after the Order Melchizedek forever, in which Order Jesus is high priest. That priesthood is recognized in the Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Mormon sects, but is not really understood by anyone in those sects, who does not experience the training. Women are just as welcome as men in that training, which is about dying and becoming someone else entirely.

In Judaism, the Spirit of God is called Shekinah, female gender. Christendom made the Holy Spirit male. In the Old Testament, Wisdom is assigned the female gender. In the Old Testament is said, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The Star of David is the universal symbol of the Melchizedek Order. Jesus was a Jew. Jewish men in that day had a solemn duty to God, to marry and make children. There is nothing in Paul’s letters about him being married or having children. He preached men were above women in relationship to Christ. He preached celibacy. His thorn in the flesh was he was gay, and every woman around him knew it. 

Judas, who also was of the Order Melchizedek, did precisely what Jesus asked him to do. If Judas had not killed himself, he would have taken over where Jesus left off, and we might never have heard of Paul, whom Christendom quotes far more than it quotes Jesus, in my experience, because Paul is a bit easier to swallow and digest? Judas was not in favor of making miracles, because he felt they distracted from the steep and narrow Jesus was teaching. Today, Christendom has a fast miracle salvation formula, which is not the steep and narrow formula Jesus lived and taught in the Gospels.  

 sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

living and dying in an America gone mad without brave new world soma to blur the details

    It doesn’t take a genius in pain to turn on a TV and watch CNN, FOX, or WHATEVER FACT AND SPIN to know my country tis of thee has done gone and plunged itself into the shitter in more ways than Nevermore, Dorothy and readin’, writin’ & 'rithmetic ever could have imagined.

    It doesn’t take a genius in pain to cruise the Internet, Facebook, X, Reddit, Truth Social, YouTube, Rumble or Whatever to see 1984 and Brave New World were not Science Fiction.

    It doesn’t take a genius in pain to know that you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you might find you get what you need.

    But if you hide from it in chemicals that alter your experience, you might miss a few details.

    A grapes of wrath catcher in the rye wasteland from Poetic Outlaws yesterday provoked old and ornery me into a rant of sorts.

You’re Painfully Alive in a Drugged and Dying Culture

By: Erik Rittenberry

POETIC OUTLAWS

APR 25, 2024

Photo: Kavan Cardoza

“It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares anymore; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”

— Richard Yates 

 

It’s quiet here in the early morning and no one’s around—just the way I like it. I’m sitting on a bench, sipping black coffee on an old dock, looking out over the ancient lake. I watch with an incredible sense of serenity as the fog dies out with the rising sun. There’s a peculiar stillness here in these early hours. 

The sky grows lighter and lighter. A subtle breeze makes small ripples in the water. The fish jump and splash, the birds chirp and flutter, and everything seems joyful and harmonious. The great hum of life.

Behind me, the world is not so joyous and harmonious.

Behind me is a society I, too, belong to—a society teetering on the edge of all-out madness. We, the people, seem to be half-asleep at the wheel and completely entangled in a web of false narratives and social delusions. Our semiconscious society of disenfranchised people is at war with each other over manufactured illusions and irrational beliefs. We are completely alienated from each other, our deeper selves, and the soil that sustains us. 

“Every realm of society is permeated with falsity and falsification,” the great Henry Miller reminded us so many years ago. He’s still right—probably more so today.

As the morning unfolds, the commotion begins much like it did the day before. Alarm clocks fire off. The TV’s flick-on and the news prompt us as to what we should be afraid of today. Antagonizing headlines heave us into a partisan frenzy before we even step foot in the shower. No one cares too much about the TRUTH because our minds are already made up.

This is the modern world.

The water splashes the face. The coffee is brewed. The social media is checked and updated and the emails are read over breakfast. Tired and heavily medicated souls make their way onto the billboard-littered highway to inch along in bumper-to-bumper traffic to a job they despise.

The kids are dropped off at their prison-like education camps, where they are segregated by age and forced to submit to an outdated national curriculum concocted by some inept bureaucratic process. Here, the inherent curiosities of little unique individuals are smashed out, and their little minds are molded and standardized and taught the “virtue” of conformity and obedience.

They become much like ourselves—well-adjusted disciples of the status quo, well-fed but inwardly starving, and spiritually depleted by a senseless haste that seems to be required to function in modern culture.

I sit here in complete solitude as an accomplice to the new born day. The rising sun, with its trembling rays, seep into my eyes. The morning chill dissipates along with the warmth of my coffee. A cardinal sings on the wood railing of the old dock. I breathe in the pure air of a fresh dawn. 

I read somewhere recently that more than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. And yet, here I am, alive, and it’s good to be alive. But so many of us take it for granted — this miracle of breath, this accidental thing we call LIFE.

Sitting here I can’t help but look up at the skies and ask — what the hell is happening to us as a species?

Most of the big cities are uninhabitable. Our communities have all but disintegrated as the pockets of our overlords have fattened. The vast array of self-help books that fly off the shelves daily haven’t helped us all too much. Money and an abundance of toys and possessions haven’t made us happy. The filters on our posing faces can’t disguise the truth of mortality. 

Everyone is afraid. This once beautiful land is now a land of dread. Something is ending. We are at the precipice of something none of us understand.

How did we get here?

How did we arrive at a point in the United States where unbridled consumerism, endless war, vast surveillance, addiction, conformity, obesity, illiteracy, loneliness, victimhood, bitterness, infinite division, mindless entertainment, and an insatiable appetite for OUTRAGE came to be the defining characteristics of American civilization?

Looking around you can’t help but feel this grave, disquieting anxiety slithering all through our culture. A recent article revealed that a third of adults right now in the United States are walking around in a concussion-like daze due to stress and lack of sleep.

More than three in five Americans are feeling lonelier than ever before. Suicide is one of the most persistent causes of death among young people. Obesity, depression, and anxiety rule our days. Chronic disease is rampant along with various kinds of addictions. 44% of older millennials already have a chronic health condition. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are taking at least one prescribed medication and half are taking more than one.

As Richard Yates wrote in his brilliantly intense mid-20th century novel, Revolutionary Road, “You’re painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.” Indeed, we are.

Look at us.

Woven nicely into the fabric of a sick society, plagued with an aching sense of emptiness and self-entitlement, passions snuffed out by the nine-to-five or no work at all, no time for voyages and adventure, too timid and afraid to live creatively and authentically — just good folks splashing around in the shallows as the pills are gulped down and the lights slowly dim.

Author, journalist, and one of the most fiercely lyrical, no-nonsense writers of our time, the late great Charles Bowden, had his finger on the pulse of our whimpering nation when he wrote:

We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young.We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us.

We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life.

And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life.

We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.

Is this life? — this apathetic mode of existence that we’ve created for ourselves? Living at odds with nature, at odds with our natural instincts, unable to cultivate a connection with our own spirit, forever in exile from our own being?

Is this it?

To live in a kind of forgetful fog while letting ourselves be dominated and pushed around by the whims of these institutional-minded bigwigs and so-called experts?

To keep buying and consuming our way toward this phantom idea of happiness? To work soul-sickening jobs to keep up the illusion of success? To be given the miracle of breath only to become life-long servants to the myriad of rules and dictates imposed from the outside?

Is it any wonder why so many of us live lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau noticed?

Are we the society that George Orwell warned about so many decades ago? A society “marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting — three hundred million people all with the same face.”

Seems we’re mighty close. All the ingredients are here — rampant fear, anger, ignorance, blind obedience, feverish consumerism, and immense resentment.

We are people who have turned the elemental emotions that make us human beings — fear, anxiety, sadness — into “illnesses” and “disorders” that must be “managed” and “treated” by an ocean of pharmaceuticals rather than taking the necessary measures to get down to the root of it. As Dr. Gabor Maté once reminded us, “The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.”

You can’t help but see it in the eyes and hear it in the voices — the despair, the fear, the animosity. A society of weaklings walking on eggshells, afraid to speak, afraid to offend, afraid to live. A society of indignant complainers and fraudulent do-gooders and sanctimonious political hacks strapped with a fanatical biased worldview constantly projecting their inner shortcomings onto the fruitful.

Somehow, this is the world we’ve created for ourselves — it’s our way of life. We all see it. We know something is severely off in today’s overly-managed society. Everyone is angry and divided because everything is politicized, and no one seems to care too much about the insidious narrative that has been fed to us since birth. 

We’ve lost the appetite for LIFE long ago. 

Instead, we’re eaten alive by our own self-righteous concepts. Because so many of us have neglected our inner lives, we’ve become deluded slaves to our surroundings, blindly giving allegiance to the fear-soaked narratives of our “drugged and dying culture.”

Bowden again:

“… we are all on a train and it is racing toward a bridge that is out but no one on the train cares because they are busy arguing about train security measures or who gets to sit in which car or whether the train is only for people or whether the train is only for one sex or the other or maybe the train should be divided up according to race or language or religion and still the train races toward the bridge that is gone, races toward some chasm that will shatter it and so the people argue and do not care that their behavior means that they can never reach the future.”

Now what? What do we have to do to “break the mold,” as they say? Is there an escape hatch, or are we all destined for the looming chasm?

I surely haven’t found the answer to that question. Perhaps there is no answer, or maybe it’s too late. 

One thing is pretty clear, though — there’s no Department of “whatever,” or a coalition, or some half-smiling partisan handshake coming to set things right. No one is coming to save you or the world you inhabit. No one is responsible for the affirmation of your life. Only YOU. 

It’s on each of us to untangle ourselves from the fear-ridden narratives of our deathbed culture. It’s on us to live beyond our limited, fragmentary selves— the job, the labels, the nation, the race, the sexuality, the politics, etc., and come into full possession of our inner drives, the fire within.

And I know nobody wants to hear it. We seem to need labels and categories to function in this society. We need other people or some irrelevant institution to tell us how to live—the politician, the law, some guru, the preacher. Very few people want to take on the responsibility of their own consciousness, their own brief, miraculous existence on this godforsaken planet.

But it’s the only way.

As the French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre reminded us:

“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

We must awaken and deepen our understanding of the world we live in. The essential task is to provoke a radical sense of self-awareness and transform our passions into action. We must live LIFE directed by our own real interests as unique human beings rather than becoming subjects of external causes who never possess the “true acquiescence” of our spirit, as Spinoza put it.

Becoming free, or at least as free within the contingencies of our finitude, results from intense awareness, effort, and extreme courage. Erich Fromm explained that “in order to achieve this freedom man must become aware of those forces which act behind his back and determine him…If you remain blind and do not make the utmost efforts, you will lose your freedom.”

I want to end once again with the inquiring words of the great Charles Bowden:

“Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. 

Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness…

Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act.”

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter 

 

Well, shucks and hell, Erik

why dontcha tell us how you really feel :-)

dat there old status quo thinks 

it’s God Almighty

and anything that tries to disturb its peace

a mortal threat 

deserving lethal response

all that programming and brainwashing 

its own religion

layers and layers and layers 

of big brother code writing 

fact warping

biological computers 

the status quo's one foundation

mega-wired lemmings gospel choir

suckers born every minute

clueless of strings yanking their chains

so saved by Jesus

they never get to know him

think they are the chosen

even though he said 

many are called

but few are chosen

You nailed it, 

it’s every man, woman and child

for themselves,

if not now,

then eventually,

stone cold sober

no brave new world soma 

to blur the details 

pain aplenty

physical and soul 

and it really does help

I find

to feel the presences

of something a hell of a lot bigger

and smarter than the status quo, 

our coding,

for without that

what’s the point? 

We only exist for a brief moment

in space and time 

and that's it

it’s all over 

finished

kaput

forever?

There is no Eternity,

no Infinity? 

What we do here today

irrelevant in the big scheme?

Certainly,

what we do here today

Is all that matters today.

The rest, 

well, 

who can say

who has not been there

and come back to tell it?

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com