{"id":36517,"date":"2011-04-02T06:28:50","date_gmt":"2011-04-02T11:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=36517"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:05:27","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:05:27","slug":"taking-the-pledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/taking-the-pledge\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking The Pledge"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Perhaps you heard that the Dalai Lama retired. That was a WTF moment for me. How do you retire from being God-incarnate<\/a>? How does that work? Turns out, the Dalai Lama is just backing out of politics, no longer assuming his position as (exiled) titular head of Tibet and stepping down from national leadership. I suppose that’s rational enough in the 21st century, but somehow it doesn’t feel right. I mean seriously, the Pope doesn’t get to retire, does he? Some gigs you just don’t get to put behind you until you give up the ghost.<\/p>\n

That was just one little blip on my rationality radar. It’s been beeping like crazy for quite a while. I’m sure you’ve noticed that rational thinking is under siege in this nation. Most days I pour my morning cup of coffee, sit down to scan the headlines and then run around with my hair on fire, screaming, “Wake the fuck up, people! The battlements are being breached!” That initial response, courtesy of my many fire signs, lasts a moment or two before I settle into a fact-finding mission to see just how absurd the news has become.<\/p>\n

Not counting the truly terrifying, of which we’ve had more than our share lately, illogic has gotten thick out there, closing in on Dorothy’s Oz or Alice’s Wonderland. To say the joke’s on us is a kind of twisted meme since nobody’s laughing, but seriously, folks — the joke’s on us. For instance, in a rational world no one other than myself would be interested in what I do with my uterus. From Texas, where they make an art form of irrationality, Mrs. Helen Philpott — 80-something year-old blogger and national treasure<\/a> — wrote of her governor’s insistence that women considering abortion be forced to listen to the heartbeat of the fetus:<\/p>\n

I find it odd because I know that Rick Perry, the Governor of my state, is really upset about how big government has gotten. Evidently it\u2019s not big enough, however, because \u2018ole Ricky seems to think it’s small enough to crawl up my vagina with a sonogram machine and a recorder so that Ricky can tell me how to think based on what God whispers in his ear when no one else is around. To be truthful, it could just be something he picked up in church. I\u2019m not sure. It might have happened at his office. It\u2019s really hard to tell the difference between his office and his church these days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Helen and I would no doubt be dear friends. In a truly rational world, my having terminated a problematic pregnancy twenty or more years ago would remain a personal sorrow but not a contribution to the holocaust of the unborn that is putting Social Security in danger<\/a> due to lost workforce. The IRS would not dig into my personal life to see if any public funds went toward my procedure. In a sane world, the doctor who provided that service for me would not be targeted as a murderer, nor would legislation be considered to allow his own murder to be called an act of “justifiable homicide.”<\/p>\n

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Furthermore, in a world that gave a good-gawd-damn, billions in tax cuts given to the rich and the corporations would have been weighed carefully against the necessity of squeezing kids out of Head Start, eliminating them from food stamp rolls and dropping them from health care services. In a world with its wits about it, the welfare of living children would take precedence over those not yet born, and a woman’s body would rightly be her own. See? Over the cuckoo’s nest.<\/p>\n

In a world that takes its politics seriously, we should have minority presidential candidates announcing by this time. Campaigning has been inching its way out to start earlier and earlier, and last season we had a full two-year display of pre-election flags and flappery. We hear about who is traveling to Iowa early but it’s much ado about nothing. This year, the Republicans can’t find challengers with saintly-enough track records to please their \u00fcber-religious base.<\/p>\n

Consider, then, the absurdity of Donald Trump’s stepping into the ring. He brags that he screwed rent from Gadaffi when the Colonel visited New York. He insists that there may be something written on Obama’s birth certificate we don’t know about (like … religion: Muslim.) His track record of marriages, bankruptcies and reality shows defines him as an eccentric, not to mention his overt belligerence and anachronistic comb-over. Well, hell. What did we think would happen after taking Sarah Palin seriously as a candidate? It wasn’t like she raised the bar on brainpower, achievement or ethics. And standing on his pile of money, Trump seems intent on running for POTUS. The giveaway? He’s secured a slot<\/a> on FOX News.<\/p>\n

You can tell the world’s gone wonky when people are unable to tell the difference between the smell of snake oil and Chanel N\u00b05, but rationality requires some honest thought and reflection, not just reaction. We can’t make up our own facts to suit us, like the Christocrats do. Clearly, cave men did NOT ride dinosaurs, and science has more gravitas than any work of fiction, even if it comes leather-bound with gold markings and charts the genuine feelings of ancestors long dead. Sobriety, my son once told me, is the harshest reality, but it’s looking better every day. I think it’s time we took the pledge on bullshit.<\/p>\n

The double-speak that politicians use is really just the natural language of unenlightenment, in all its glory. It projects its own ill-intent onto others, laying traps to try to snare competitors, standing on others’ necks to seem taller, repeating lies until they are believed by the witless and easily led. Politicians’ words come to us not just in the guise of persuaders, but beguilers, playing to our egos and looking for converts. You and I are outliers, obviously, because the sound of them strikes false. Count your lucky stars.<\/p>\n

There’s too much absurdity at play in politics and too much uncharted territory in the wars, revolutions and natural disasters let loose on the world to rest easily, these days. Luckily, in some past iteration of myself, I heard a bit of wisdom that stuck with me: life is much too important to be taken seriously. I bookmarked it in memory because it was the right thing to break me out of some death-grip emotion I was feeling at the time.<\/p>\n

The gods laughed when they gifted me with Venus in Scorpio within seconds of my mid-heaven. In my experience, if you go through life feeling everything deeply enough you’ll get to know yourself pretty quickly. It was evidently my assignment to master intensity this time around, drown myself in pools of passion and sorrow — not up and down the emotional barometer as in manic, but more like swimming in the deep end, leaving no emotion unexperienced, no empathy unexplored or commonality unnoted. That was not always an easy passage. The miracle of my life is that I’ve lived long enough to make some sense of it all. And wouldn’t you know: just when I’ve got a handle on reality, the rational is no longer in vogue.<\/p>\n

Still, I refuse to take all this fear-speak too seriously, dearhearts. I’m pretty sure Helen Philpott feels the same way. I’m pulling a Nancy Reagan with those around me who live in unreality: just say NO. No to heartlessness, no to ‘tough love’ that leaves people without resources or recourse. No to racism and classism, and no to nationalized religion. No to stringency and punishment, no to the money-god and the unreality bubbles it produces. No to cronyism and the plunder of the earth and her people that selfishness demands. No more Bandaids to cover holes in a system we could drive a truck through. Just … no.<\/p>\n

With so many lemons all around us, we need to get crackin’ on the lemonade stand. Tight on money? Maybe this is where we learn what’s really valuable. Don’t know whom to trust? Perhaps this is where we eliminate the dross to define what is trustworthy, gather together to celebrate what is rational and loving, what is workable and creative. The more absurd this season becomes, the clearer the need to step back and look for realism. The more battered our friends and neighbors, the more willing and determined we must be to fix what’s broken. If we put our heart into it, we can’t go wrong.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the joke’s on us. The irrational folks<\/a> think they’re the only ones here, and the rational ones keep waiting for somebody to step up and slap them back into sobriety. The joke is, that would be us. Every day that we wait to see what happens next is a day we lose to powerlessness and fear. Truth is, the Dalai Lama can’t retire and neither can we. None of this happened TO us, it happened THROUGH us — and that’s exactly the way we will fix it: one rational, realistic and loving decision at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Perhaps you heard that the Dalai Lama retired. That was a WTF moment for me. How do you retire from being God-incarnate? How does that work? Turns out, the Dalai Lama is just backing out of politics, no longer assuming his position as (exiled) titular head of Tibet and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36517"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}