{"id":45130,"date":"2011-09-06T17:05:51","date_gmt":"2011-09-06T21:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=45130"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:49:11","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:49:11","slug":"self-care-in-the-age-of-political-insanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/self-care-in-the-age-of-political-insanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Care in the Age of Political Insanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making sense of America’s political world today is like trying to ride a centrifuge.\u00a0You can’t help but feel dizzy by the spiraling further and faster from logic, Constitutional law and actual common sense, let alone compassion.<\/p>\n

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Over the last month, in time for the Mercury retrograde,\u00a0I found myself jumping off the centrifugal ride —\u00a0turning off the television, switching the car radio from the news to the sports station, turning away from one more headline and walking faster up the street —\u00a0\u00a0just to stop the idiocy of one more talking point entering my head.\u00a0I did it to prevent myself from going just plain fucking mad.\u00a0At the very least, ceasing contact with the dissonance helped bring down my blood pressure.<\/p>\n

With everything in 2011 geared towards 2012 and the general elections, today’s opposition party in Congress is doing everything it can — standing on their heads to defy even their responsibilities of office — to hamstring government and the revitalization of the economy so President Obama can take the blame for government’s dysfunction and our economic collapse.<\/p>\n

House Speaker John Boehner handed the negotiations for the federal debt ceiling and the fate of the world’s fiscal stability to the Tea Party’s Congressional Republicans — a group that hates government and loves Medicare but can’t connect that Medicare is a government program. The fate of Social Security, once the third rail in politics and sacrosanct for over 70 years — has been up for discussion. Following Hurricane Irene, Majority Leader Eric\u00a0Cantor — vying for the title of Chief National Asshole — demanded that FEMA’s shortfall of funds, needed to address hurricane damage on the East Coast, should come from existing funds covering disaster relief for the Midwest.<\/p>\n

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The Republican party wants to break government so that they can blame the rest of us for not fixing it, daring us to pry away their tax cuts for the rich from their cold dead hands, willing to deploy the nuclear option if you dare mention raising taxes to the levels paid while Reagan was in office.\u00a0It wasn’t always like this.<\/p>\n

Even though for thirty years the anti-tax revolution has been part of the national dialogue, over the last ten years, Americans have been pushed further and further back across social, cultural and economic lines in the sand. Every conservative notion, especially the more extreme ones, started taking on a hyper-profile, making conservatism unrecognizable even to Reagan Republicans. Permission was granted to flaunt existing laws regarding race and gender discrimination and voting rights. With the Patriot Act, two illegal and unnecessary wars, suspiciously timed color-coded fear level barometers, and\u00a0the suspension of Habeus Corpus for ‘enemy combatants’ held in detention camps, the national conversation devolved from a two-party system to a single party and a mob.<\/p>\n

Christian sects set Q’urans on fire without regard for the ramifications of vehement anti-American feelings ignited abroad. New Yorkers can’t place an Islamic cultural center nearby the site of the former World Trade Center without generating serious national backlash based on hard-headed ignorance.\u00a0A duly-elected President of the United States has to continually be asked for his birth certificate to validate his citizenship and thus his legitimacy to office.\u00a0We equate Muslims with the same vehemence reserved for African-Americans, Mexican immigrants, homosexuals and women seeking abortions.\u00a0Since Bush left office, 9-11 has evolved to become not only an historic event but a syndrome: this is what happens to a society forced to live under the lash of fear. When you give people continual reason to fear, they start wanting to tear things down.<\/p>\n

Is it really a wonder that our current political discourse is so charged and so off-kilter that it’s unable to focus on the problems at hand?\u00a0The things we did, the rights we gave up, the hatreds we allowed ourselves and had permission to express in reaction to the attack\u00a0have subsumed and shamed our better natures into hiding.\u00a0It allowed all the monsters out of the bottle, and we gave up not only our fortune, but our future and pieces of our collective soul.\u00a0It’s no surprise that aspirants for the Republican presidential nomination are vying for who has the most fervent desire for the Apocalypse — it would be an easy way out of trying to fix the financial mess we’re in.<\/p>\n

9-11 is now as much a drug as it is an event. This week, it will probably be packaged like a news product, perhaps even a pharmaceutical. A pill venerating the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and administered in discreet dosages for large viewing audiences hooked on that riveting series pilot launched 3,650 days ago. Like\u00a0with other news drugs of the current day — Hurricane Irene and the scores of reporters-in-parkas along the eastern seaboard, the sad-eyed Casey Anthony and her trial and verdict — we have potential for getting doped up to a new level of numbness.<\/p>\n

After ten long years and the serious problems we face as a country and a world, could it be time to hop off the centrifuge?\u00a0The world has changed rapidly since ten years ago when we chose as a nation to be spun off our center. Maybe, it’s time for another look.<\/p>\n

Self-care, in the world of substance abuse and addiction, is a process where you remove yourself from the circumstances leading to the drug abuse, commit to your sobriety, and surround yourself with a strong network of support to prevent relapse. It is a conscious effort to bring yourself back to a healthier, more whole place where you’re acting with, instead of always reacting to, life itself. In the act of self-care, you make better choices. You take better care of yourself. It is not an act of selfishness to focus solely on healing yourself. It’s an act of conscious concern for yourself and your community. You stop knee-jerk reactions that lead you to back step into decline, and you watch to make sure you can tell when the same old bullshit leading down that old dark road rears its ugly head. You make a choice to stop harming yourself and others.<\/p>\n

It’s clear for those of us who have long tired of the charade honoring the false flag event of Sept. 11 that small acts of\u00a0self-care this week include turning off the television and the pundits to stop purposely triggering yourself to feel fear or even re-visit the memory of fear.\u00a0This is not a denial of history but a rebuking of the fear and everything that was done in its name to us and by us.\u00a0Are we able now to take further steps down that road? Can we start with caring for ourselves, and continue with caring for others? How can we retrieve our better natures, embrace our personal evolution, and grow while the wound at that piece of real estate in Lower Manhattan heals?<\/p>\n

Are we ready to take on a new future — leaving the past and that drug called fear — forever changed yet willing to grow? Who has taken these steps? Who among us are ready to?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making sense of America’s political world today is like trying to ride a centrifuge.\u00a0You can’t help but feel dizzy by the spiraling further and faster from logic, Constitutional law and actual common sense, let alone compassion. Over the last month, in time for the Mercury retrograde,\u00a0I found myself jumping off the centrifugal ride —\u00a0turning off … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45130"}],"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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}