Japan

Japan is such a civilized country. It remains indelibly Japanese despite all the Western industrialism it has adapted to itself. While it's true we can travel all across the country and have a reasonable expectation of being treated reasonably decently, still, the basic "feel" of America is much less "comfortable," like it doesn't quite fit or it's a little off somehow. But in Japan, it feels natural, more at ease. They never really left the land. And the land is beautiful. They have a third of America's population squeezed into a space roughly the size of California. But it has plentiful water from rain and snow in the mountains and it's clean. They don't pollute their water. They don't clear cut the mountains either but they certainly do use the wood. And their land is made from the volcanoes that created them making it rich and fertile. Unfortunately tho, they too have lost species of animals, namely birds, especially in Tokyo. But their reverence for the land and all of nature runs very deep in them and so they have protected it as best they can. They know where their food and water comes from and how much their lives depend on it.

But they are changing now. Too much infection by the West. It's sad to see. I am hoping they will weather this period of the death throes of post-peak oil and learning to de-industrialize without losing themselves completely. But they are Japanese and deeply Asian. I think they will outlive this period. 

The insane

No one, in their right mind, would poison their own well.

Only an insane person would do that. So what does that say about the world we are living in? About the people "running" things, the ones who've managed to perpetuate a complete fraud thru a kind of mass hypnosis? Conversely, what does it mean to actually live free?

Anyway, given that the people running things are poisoning people, the planet, the air, and the water, and everything that lives, clearly shows that they are insane.

And btw, no one "owns" any of it. The planet, the air, the water, and the land belongs to us all, this includes the critters we share the planet with, for the simple reason that we all depend on these things for our own survival.

People have lived on this planet without oil or money for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. And they lived in every environment from the Arctic north to the plains to the mountains, the deserts, and people had lived there for generation after generation since time immemorial. 

We must go back to the land. It is what feeds us, clothes us, houses us, but none of it will work if the water isn't clean. And no one has a right to poison the well we all drink from. No one.

The line

Do you know where the line is? The line that should never be crossed? Do you know what the line is? The killing must stop.

We must wage peace. The question, however, is what to do about the rabid-minded. 



[The most absolute line is life and death. Crossing that line is the willful killing of another, or the willful depraved indifference to life where actions and decisions results in a death or serious bodily or mental harm. A civilized society should never tolerate these. We should never allow anyone to commit deliberate harm to anyone for any reason, least of all, for money.]


Another line that should not be crossed is losing our connection to the natural world. We must return to the land and live with the land for it is the basis of life. 

We must stop thinking in terms of money and basing all of life upon it. Money is not life. 

We must look at other cultures and see the paradigms they live by. Then, choose which elements we most wish to live by.

Making room

~If you want room for yourself, you must also make room for others

~Exclude no one. Only exclude bad behavior.

~Just saw a cute little film "Little Secrets" on BYUTV. Yes, Brigham Young University TV. Yes, rather whitewashed, but I liked it and it reminded me of my own childhood and the kind of neighborhood I lived in and the people that were around me. Mine also included Japanese people and a few Black folk too. But we all blended together and were basically on the same wavelength in terms of civility, sharing a basic set of moral values in terms of being good, kind, and helpful people.

So, anyway, during this movie the young 14 yr old girl is a violin prodigy aspiring to play with a symphony. In the meantime, we see a busker playing a violin playing a common tune. Then she plays a classical piece and it's beautiful and wonderful. Lots of people threw money into the busker's violin case. Then, much later on, she needed some funds for a good cause and so went busking herself with her violin. 

Again, she played a classical piece. But this time I thought about how you don't hear that kind of music much because it is not in everyday life like it was in this film. And then I thought about how this music and all the arts are considered "high culture" and how it's reserved for the hoity-toity instead of being part of common culture. 

That's when it struck me that that should not be the case. That classical music should be accessible to all regardless of income or station in life. I thought it quite refreshing to see someone in common dress playing such wonderful music on the street in public, and yes it IS wonderful music, tho not at the exclusion of all others, but rather, as another wonderful part of this tapestry of life. 

We don't have to like all parts of it, but that doesn't mean we should exclude them from the world unless we are willing to exclude what we like as well. 

In other words, if no one gives any room to anyone else, then there won't be room for us either. It is only by being inclusive, by giving others the room to exist that there can be room in others for us too. The only thing we exclude is bad behavior.