{"id":72615,"date":"2013-12-14T05:28:30","date_gmt":"2013-12-14T10:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=72615"},"modified":"2013-12-15T08:05:52","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T13:05:52","slug":"light-my-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/light-my-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Light My Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Let’s start out today with some good news: after generations of inaction, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is publishing suggested guidelines for the use of antibiotics in meat, a long unaddressed problem that has produced events like that of the Foster Farms outbreak this October, when tainted chicken caused illness in 23 states.<\/p>\n

\"Political Sadly and not uncommonly these days, that particular strain of Salmonella was resistant to multiple kinds of antibiotics and attributed to the decades-long practice of low-level drugging of factory-farm animals. New guidelines ask veterinary drug companies to remove growth-promotion claims from their advertising, and a second step (and proposed rule) would make large purchases of antibiotics, currently available across the counter in feed lots, require authorization from a veterinarian.<\/p>\n

The good news? About damned time! Bad news? Drug companies will have 90 days to notify the agency if they intend to comply, and the FDA will implement its plan over the next three years, then evaluate the results. As antibiotic-resistant infections kill some 23,000 Americans each year, and that number is growing, government regulation seems critical to retard the growth of untreatable superbugs.<\/p>\n

As some 30 million pounds of these antibiotics — billions of dollars worth —\u00a0were sold for use in animals in 2011,\u00a0and just under 8 million pounds were consumed by humans, those who follow the money can’t help wonder just how effective these new guidelines will prove to be, three years hence. Regulation is only as good as the regulators. Just ask Wall Street.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That sounds cynical, I’ll admit it. Seems I’m always giving you bad news, and that’s not a comfortable chair to sit in. There is always a pony in the horseshit and finding it in times like these is not impossible but it takes a certain amount of dumpster diving to locate the pony and pull\u00a0its head up out of the trash. This can have a chilling effect, as I’d suppose you understand, setting the tone for the other aspects of a person’s life, so I keep plenty of sage available to neutralize the slime of negativity. Visitors know what kind of day I’m having by the intensity of the smell of sage in the house.<\/p>\n

Being grateful for the pony is the second ingredient in the healing balm to beat back daily toxic exposure to news, and of course keeping an eye on the larger perspective helps enormously. In fact, perspective is the key to coping with our circumstances, because it blasts us out of our human tendency toward\u00a0black\/white thinking and helps us define how to invest our energy, where to put our focus. When our vision becomes too narrow, we do not see the options awaiting our attention, just out of sight.<\/p>\n

This week, Eric did a fine job providing an overview of our sad state of affairs in the subscription edition, calling attention to the surrealist aspects of our current sociopolitical challenges. ‘Surrealistic’ is a word we’ve been using since the Bush era, and, frankly, there should be a more dramatic description for this fracture in all things dependable, but I can’t think of it. Most of us still can’t wrap our minds around the level of dysfunction and decay we’re seeing all around us. I, for one, refuse to assume that this is the ‘new true,’ the way it will always be, but then I’ve lived through a prior Pluto\/Uranus aspect, navigated a couple of Saturn returns, survived a Pluto\/Sun conjunction and lived to tell.<\/p>\n

Things shake out — they do — but not while you’re in the middle of the curve, and this particular energy is more than just a little goad, it’s\u00a0asking us to release the old ways of being in order to usher in the new. Coping with the end of an era is nerve-wracking. What always did work, what should work, what we’ve depended upon to work, very often doesn’t these days. This\u00a0serves as a point of ignition for Mars, newly in Libra and focused around relationships not just with partners, co-workers and other people, but with everything around us, including our relationship with government and the institutions with which they align themselves.<\/p>\n

As sentient beings, we are in relationship with all the people, places and things in our lives. We are in relationship to all that is occurring around us, and we are capable of reading the smoke signals, depending on our ability to stay focused on the larger picture. In fact, I’ll bet these next few days will find us tracking fires lit from all the current\u00a0Sagittarian signatures<\/a>\u00a0that are urging us to enlarge our view, perhaps even witnessing a lightning strike or two around the Gemini Full Moon\u00a0on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The little smoke signals always indicate a fire somewhere. For instance, on the heels of Rush Limbaugh declaring Pope Francis — who practices the dreaded and dangerously un-American\u00a0liberation theology<\/a>\u00a0showcased in the Gospels — a Marxist, Glenn Beck decried the Pope’s selection as Time’s “Person of the Year” rather than that of Ted Cruz (who was third in consideration, well behind Edward Snowden.) I’m reminded how tentative is the cease fire between Catholics and Evangelicals, a pragmatic d\u00e9tente only a few years old.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that Glenn’s personal bias may be showing. He’s miffed that his daughter, who earned a scholarship to Fordham University, has been convinced\u00a0 — Glenn calls it\u00a0brainwashed — by “liberal Catholics” that dad was intolerant on LGBT issues (among others) and that the Bible was nonsense. This is what happens when we send our children to institutions of higher learning far from home, intimates Glenn, proving Rick Santorum’s point that such education is dangerous “indoctrination.”<\/p>\n

It seems to me that Beck is poster boy for these times in which we find ourselves, even as a bit of an anomaly, out of the limelight but every bit as bizarre as he’s always been. While his quasi-End Times (and constantly shifting) philosophy lacks a clear point of view, he just makes shit up and people believe it.<\/p>\n

House Representative Cruz, our resident radical mover and shaker, was overlooked, says Glenn, because ” … progressives are fascists, they are for fascism.” Evidently, in Beck’s bubbled world, proportional redistribution of wealth through taxation, social safety nets and egalitarian principals equals totalitarian government, reigning tyranny on the Gawd-fearing. If a listener doesn’t know the definition of fascism, Glenn is within grabbing distance of the strings of their fears and bias and … for some of us, that’s all, folks.<\/p>\n

You might say, “What the hell, Jude? Who cares about Glenn Beck?” and I’ll give you that, I don’t much — but it’s imperative that we understand how people like Glenn grab the consciousness of those resonating at his level of paranoia, holding them prisoner. They are then a kind of focus-group, demanding energy from the whole of us. You’ll find them everywhere you look, too many to count or pay attention to on Face Book, on infomercials, in reality shows and entertainment venues. In politics.<\/p>\n

It’s imperative because there are so many Glenns out there, looking to hook us in, and that’s where we find ourselves today. Thousands of little groups of purists, true-believers of something-or-other climbing on the moving train of opinion, disproportionately representing a movement that may or may not be viable, which may or may not catch fire. There are too many to tend to, thousands of them, all attempting to suck up our attention, distract us from the larger view, constrict our sight from the vast colors of the universe to focus on\u00a0some measly black and white issue.<\/p>\n

Think of them as smoke signals, representing fire before the spark even catches, threatening to snatch us up. We’re waking up to the truth that we gave our power away, bit by bit, over the last several decades, and — harsh truth — we did it willingly, so as not to be bothered by the responsibility of citizenship. We’re waking up and finding the world has changed while we dithered. Now, without true discernment of what is ethical, of what is of benefit to all, and the necessity of making choices within elevated consciousness, we simply become victims of our own confusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Back in the 1970s, we had a spate of what were called ‘cults.’ They were, I recall, a big damned deal and those who tried to retrieve lost friends or relatives turned to self-proclaimed ‘deprogrammers,’ hired to kidnap their loved ones and provide\u00a0reality therapy, holed up away from the cult-family. This often smacked of brainwashing in its own right and was eventually determined to be illegal. Then along came Ruby Ridge and Waco, bringing a rise in Libertarianism with it, and that whole conversation changed.<\/p>\n

This week, while Glenn Beck and others like him double down on cultish rhetoric, something interesting just happened in the House of Representatives. Beck has\u00a0insisted that\u00a0Time<\/em>\u00a0magazine overlooked Cruz in an attempt to deny him additional power; power he has yet to earn and may be prevented from earning, given the fault-line that has finally become visible within the ranks of the GOP. Several steps behind the Chamber of Commerce, who broke with the Baggers over money matters, House Speaker Boehner has finally stepped out to try policing his motley crew of right-wing zealots, sparks shooting from his fingertips.<\/p>\n

Having ignored the pressure for so long, it seems something of a surprise that Boehner has reacted to being squeezed, but that comes after months of being targeted by the big conservative money groups like Heritage Action, the Club for Growth and even the Koch brothers’\u00a0Americans for Prosperity, who have criticized him for being too willing to compromise with Dems (??) and not nearly loyal enough to the death of government as we know it. And it may well have been Mitch McConnell’s encouragement that spurred him on, as McConnell and other mainstream Pubs anticipate tough primary campaigns featuring Bagger candidates eager to replace them.<\/p>\n

It’s a sad state of affairs that taking on the extremists\u00a0within creates electoral dangers for party old timers. I wonder if it ever occurs to the right that it’s their own stilted gerrymander that has put a handful of anachronistic, mostly rural citizens at the helm of House politics for the last few years. I rather doubt if they take responsibility for it. The GOP is not much on looking back, confident to push forward into a future they somehow feel will magically turn whiter and more conservative with time. The narrower the view, the less logic has a place at the table.<\/p>\n

Those of us wondering what happened to Congress need to acknowledge that these last years of frustration come at the hands of a handful of citizens who\u00a0have a very narrow focus which does not include the best interests of the whole of us and surely don’t seem positioned to gain control of the Senate in 2014 or the White House in 2016, but — well — cult mentality doesn’t need logic to function, just true believers. And Jesus, like Santa, is so\u00a0very very white<\/a>\u00a0in the House that FOX built.<\/p>\n

But wait! Is that smoke I see rising above the House of Representatives? Don’t think that Boehner has changed his stripes by preferring to avoid another bruising shut-down to government by urging his House to back the new budget deal, touted as an end to the sequester. While it’s true ‘entitlements’ were left alone this round, the legislation is a give-away to the Pubs, with an increase in military spending, new areas open to drilling and no appreciable revenue raised.<\/p>\n

This bill, expected to easily pass through the Senate by Dems eager to get this all over with and get home for the holidays*, comes with an assault on unemployment benefits for nearly 1.3 million Americans and corporate welfare still alive and well. And, spreading the pain to those who ‘make the train run on time,’ retirement benefits for federal workers took a resounding hit.<\/p>\n

We don’t have far to go to find how little this represents the welfare of the average citizen, do we? And, when it seems so obvious that this is class war, why is it so hard to find people willing to stand up for the rights of the majority? Perhaps the cults have got us all, bound in our little petrie dishes of self-interest, protecting against the instability that marks this period in history.<\/p>\n

The system has hijacked the people, but, ultimately, the people are responsible for reinventing the system. And this is a responsibility we can no longer avoid. Some of our brothers and sisters can’t see the smoke signals or even contemplate the need for taking action because of our civic illiteracy, recently fleshed out on\u00a0Moyers and Co<\/em>. by Henry A Giroux. This is an instructive read you’ll want to share with thinking friends. As\u00a0Giroux tells us<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Emptied of any substantial content, democracy appears imperiled as individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery into genuine public debate, social concerns and collective action. This is a form of illiteracy that is no longer marginal to American society but is increasingly becoming one of its defining and more frightening features.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We know this condition did not happen by accident. We’d do well to wake up and smell the rising smoke from every quarter. Like the deprogrammers of a decade past, we have a job to do and not much time to do it. There are good things happening, but they are\u00a0filtered through a rigged and dysfunctional system. If, for instance, we are to limit the antibiotics in meat, we’d better be the ones keeping an eye on the factory-farms, the ones urging oversight, the ones demanding decent public policy. Real citizenship and advocacy are the challenge of our times and the need of this moment in history.<\/p>\n

* Just in time for Christmas, the “Cruz to the Future Coloring and Activity Book” is now available for purchase and flying out the door faster than it can be supplied. Sample it here<\/a>. (And no, this is NOT from the\u00a0Onion<\/em>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Let’s start out today with some good news: after generations of inaction, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is publishing suggested guidelines for the use of antibiotics in meat, a long unaddressed problem that has produced events like that of the Foster Farms outbreak this October, when tainted chicken … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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\/72615"}],"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=72615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}