Tense, Lazy Beasts

I am sitting at my desk at work; I have gotten perhaps one half an hour's work done in 2 hours here. I just spoke with my depressed and malingering daughter who, still abed, passively resists my urges that she get up and get to school. I put down the receiver and try to re-focus on work and hear myself breathing in labored breaths - the endless sighs that are my nature, my gut endlessly tense, endless spontaneous pointless resistance to employment, work, obligation, demands, competition, population, et cetera. I sigh and I sigh. My gut stays taut. Nothing gets done.

At home, my daughter, being my daughter, cannot decide, cannot produce the will and the act, to get up from bed. Not only does she have no interest in school, she has almost no interest in social interaction. Everything social, for her, is adverse. And the non-illness that she feels so acutely - nausea, "butterflies", "funny" feeling in her gut - sounds so very, very familiar to me.

I sympathize. But nature and the world were not made to our order. Institutions like school are formed by others, and are (more or less) for those others. Individuals do not, in nature, matter very much. We have each a little weight, as water droplets do on the side of a cold glass. Others bubble & roar & fly about, like steam, vented, airborne, purposelessly purposive, very good at what they do. But then there are these droplet-people, the bumps on the log, who move little and haven't the heat the steam-people have.

Where does it leave us? Go back to the Virgin, go back to the Temple of Zeus, meditate, linger in Christ's embrace? Perhaps - but, above all, get moving. To be in tune with self or world, we must be in motion.

Very, Very Interesting & Defensible Conservative Manifesto

Salvete, si quiscumque has legat -

A while back I ran across a very interesting defense of Conservatism & Tea-Party-istics by an Internet denizen who styled him-or-her self "kingtroll3". I don't know if the original thread exists still or not but it was: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/10/AR2011011003002_Comments.html . The pertinent text follows:

"This is what 99.999% of conservatives and tea party Americans are like:

• We don't murder people.
• A conservative is an American who has been raped by liberal agendas for decades.
• They cherish god (insert yours here), family, community, private property, work and liberty.
• They have common sense, and know a fraudulent scheme when they see one.
• They want to be left alone.
• They want government to use common sense and be effective at defending the country and keeping our waterways, roadways, and infrastructure working and modernized.
• They want to help others voluntarily.
• They want people to try to support themselves, and when some just can't seem to make it, help those who are truly needy.
• We don't want government running our lives.
• We don't want narcissists telling us what our problem is and trying to fix us.
• We want everyone to look to themselves and determine who and what they are first, before they go out trying to tell everybody else what to do.
• Conservatives are healthy, happy, capable people that are the core of this country and we are here to stay."

For folks who are Progressive or Liberal or simply Good-hearted, there is no need to ignore the problems they can instantly see in this defense - e.g.: You say you've been "Raped by the Liberal agenda"? In what way?; or: Granted, most Conservatives themselves are not murderers, but they do tend to support foreign policies that mandate large numbers of collateral damage, i.e., wholesale murder of civilians; and so on. But I think that if the Democrats and Lefties want to be useful, they will incorporate what is decent in this manifesto into their own perceptions of what America and American Life is all about. For example, the public dole is not always something to defend - after all, it is NOT a good thing in itself: as an institution, besides helping some, it also operates as a major enabler of poverty and brutishness, and it is a huge invitation for people to cheat the government and the taxpayers; even people who are affluent hide that fact and use government programs intended for only the neediest. (Yes, it is rather like corporate behavior in that area.)

This is always the problem: The tough guys want anarchy, the rest of us want a system - and nobody is happy. We tend to forget that this is a Democracy, a federation of antagonistic human types; we tend to listen far too much just to echoes of our own prejudices.

Ut valent Americae Conpactae Civitates!