todd

[Guest guest]

Todd

Your comments were thoughtful and obviously informed. My take on the

Bush/Iraq situation is driven to a large degree by a world view that goes

something

like this:

 

The lights in the sky are generally as they were for thousands of years.

Countless creatures are born and die at any given moment. The cycles of life and

death go on in spite of technological, medical, literary and communication

advances. The only difference is that in modern times we have drifted from being

threatened by wild animals, enemy tribes, superstition, absence of

refrigeration, ignorance about germs, disease and hygiene…to a pampered,

insured,

protected, homogenized, pasteurized and legalized lifestyle. We have abandoned

some of

the intuitive and instinctive abilities in favor of rational and calculated

solutions.

 

Our old superstitions that used to be inspired by natural phenomena,

encouraged and interpreted by shamans/priests have gradually been replaced by

ideologies encouraged and interpreted by ideologues, professors and media. And

gurus.

We now have plenty of choice as to whose interpretation we want to believe. We

also can choose to be gullible or discriminative about what we believe.

 

All in all, human suffering has not been eliminated, it just shifted from one

set of causes to another. In light of that, the nature of karma/dharma or

simply life itself, requires that death and destruction and suffering be present

in some shape or other. Remember the joke about the health nut who worked out,

ate well, took such good care of himself that in the end—he died of nothing.

 

The exactly same amount of people that are born will die eventually. That's a

tired cycle if there ever was one, but how does one change it? Can we? Must

we? I don't know. I have sympathy for the Iraqis too. And for our troops. And

for everyone's mothers, fathers, children, lovers, friends and pets.

 

During the apex of our mechanical/technological age, around the turn of the

last century, people were heard making statements such as: "Everything that can

be invented has been invented already." It truly happened and at the time

nobody laughed.

 

My argument is against a similar mindset, but in the realm of ideology,

particularly in the field of sociology, more specifically Marxist type

ideologies

where most human interactions are reduced to economic reasons. We look back at

decades of similar statements coming from ideologues like Noam Chomsky, Howard

Zinn, and Gore Vidal and still don't laugh. They have spent the better part

of their long lives portraying the nation that has protected their freedoms as

the base of worldwide oppression. The self-refuting nature of their work has

never dawned on them. Vidal’s jaundiced view sees America operating behind the

curtains during the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. Zinn penned a

million-selling America-bashing history that reads more like fiction. Chomsky

overlooked the very real sins of anti-American governments but saw with

amazing clarity nonexistent offenses committed by the United States. The MIT

professor denied Pol Pot’s mass killings in Cambodia, for example, but

imagined a

“silent genocide†conducted by the United States against Afghanistan. The

trio

has never lost faith in their theories, only in reality.

 

With educators like that, who happen to be among the most quoted and regaled

in academia, is it a wonder that entire generations who went through academia,

have also been infected with their articulate but delusional thinking?

Indeed, I would be surprised if a serious student of Vedic Astrology could

remain

respectful and be impressed with a teacher who consistently would make wrong a

nd outlandish predictions and then simply move on, like nothing happened.

 

Another example, biologist Paul Ehrlich warns of the proximity of doomsday.

Giving Ehrlich the benefit of the doubt, one could say that he never intended

to deceive others. Perhaps his many predictions for environmental apocalypse

were merely wrong. That he continued to issue such dire forecasts after

deadlines for earlier predictions came and went is a sign that Ehrlich should

have

been dismissed. He wasn't. He gained celebrity and credibility from the media,

higher education, and the world of philanthropy. The more wild and inaccurate

his declarations, the greater his stature became. Since Ehrlich issues his

proclamations from Stanford University, and not from a sidewalk pulpit, the

intelligentsia confuses his delusional fanaticism for wisdom.

 

We now are bombarded by experts on politics, government, war and Iraq. Some

experts actually know what they are talking about, but the majority are just

opinionated and guessing. Particularly those who express the sum total of their

illuminated opinion with a NO WAR bumper sticker.

 

Anyway, it's a long rant and I'm just venting some frustration, more at the

interpretations rather than the world events themselves.

 

Jola

 

In a message Todd writes:

 

<< I am not comparing my

 

government to any other idealized states on the planet I am just upset

 

that our country is perpetuating a tired cycle. I feel sympathy for

 

the people in Iraq who are suffering at the hands of US soldiers and

 

terrorist and insurgent alike. >>