Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Discarding Society, Discarded People.

As a nation, we have a propensity to discard things en masse. Corporate controlled media, the food industry, and in fact, industry in general has shifted over the past few decades toward more throwing away than creating. We delegate creativity elsewhere. fostering an antiquated educational system that leans more toward the dollar as a deity than what can be created with the illusory power of money. Simply put, Americans have been led to believe that throwing something away is cheaper or more advantageous than keeping it. This mode of thought has spread to all aspects of our once civilized civilization.

You may, reading the above paragraph, wonder what the hell my point is since this behavior is so entrenched that no one really cares to change. My point is that we have discarded people. As a predatory species, humanity has a tendency toward the old concept of survival of the fittest, hence a primal propensity (there's that word again) toward putting aside the elderly, children who are not our own, animals, and people we regard as "other."

As a supposedly advanced society where intellect should overtake that primal propensity, we should embrace each other without the illusion of "otherness" based on prejudice. No one is born with prejudice or disdain for that which seems different from us....it is a learned behavior, pushed ironically by people with ulterior motives in the guise of religion or other branches of power. The powerful do not have to prey on the weak, but let's face it, when unchecked and unbalanced, power in the hands of human beings can and will get out of hand.

Witness what is happening in our country right now. Despite the reality that we have always been a melting pot of all nations on the earth, opening our doors to a perceived freedom from oppression, we have ironically chosen to collectively oppress segments of our own population fueled by the illusion of separateness, mainly as a survival mechanism...again that primal propensity. We use the illusion of "not enough money" or "not enough food." These are lies. We produce enough food to feed the world, and throw away nearly that much every year and yet we have starvation right in our own country. I know, I have witnessed it, lived it, and continue to fight against it.

The president taking a stand against injustice and speaking for Trayvon Martin inspired me to write about what I have been observing for years now...we not only discard things, we discard each other. Most notably over temporal, illusory things like race, religion, age, sex, you name it, we have a landfill of sorts to throw it in. We wonder why more prisons than schools are being built and why African Americans are by and large the most populous in those prisons. What better way to rob those you are afraid of, who have little power of their own to defend themselves, than to throw them in a box, or a symbolic landfill. Is it any wonder why a discarded people resort to whatever means they have to survive.

The president sought to rise above the walls of injustice and against all odds, has risen to the most powerful, if only symbolic power, position on this planet. But not everyone has those skills or abilities. When a people is oppressed and treated as less than human, can you really justify your belief that they would, by nature, just collectively ignore that and just brush off their shoulders and succeed when everything is against them? Try putting yourself in Trayvon Martin's shoes. Try thinking that it could be your child walking home with candy and iced tea as "weapons."

Try imagining what it's like to be pre-judged as something you are not. I went through nearly my entire life being judged as something I wasn't. I was called stupid, I was called a fag, and other names I won't bother you with here. My mentioning that is to support the fact that I know full well what it's like to be pre-judged based on perceptions. I struggle with this as I catch myself pre-judging people, perhaps as a result of having that experience so often myself.

We need to stop bullying each other. The illusion is that we're separate; that we're different from each other other than just individuality. Our younger children seem to get it, maybe because they are closer to the divine than we are, having not learned our prejudices and as witnessed in recent times, having exceeded those prejudices.

You can blame music for that. Music and pop culture, whether we agree with it or not, has brought people together and erased borders. I have witnessed it. If we want to survive as a species, we need to stop throwing each other away. We are all Trayvon. We are all one. And boy, I struggled with that every day, especially when I see people acting like pods in government. But as we all know, The Invaders are fictional characters representing symbols that should stand as sign posts...next exit: The Reality Zone.

Be cool, be nobody's fool and don't dismiss the bliss.

 James E Finch, a.k.a. DJ Quantum Mechanic.

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