Negotiating the New Normal in the Fourth Quarter of Life

I realized recently that I was alienating my friends on facebook by my political ranting, forcing my witty barbs, most of which were plagiarized in one way or the other anyway, onto their social networking experience. Many of my friends are devoted disciples of Obama, but my disappointment in him has becomeg toxic. I am enraged by his weakness as a leader the spinelessness of most politicians overall, and the narcissistic self-interest of world leadership in general. Watching too much news TV inspires the late-breaking diatribes that erupt out of me with the predictability of a high school science project -- on command in a controlled environment where TVs light up living rooms like hearth fires used to. This is what a good audience does -- armchairs its rage from one program to the next, until it falls asleep in thechair at commercial break. I come out of my comas critical and slinging a lot of Obama bashing. And while I appreciate that my friends love me as they do and so put up with my goings on, I’ve ceased my senseless shadow boxing mostly for me. It leaves me sick with hangover. Lays over me like grease on a fry cook, that same hopelessness I felt growing up hostage in my own family, held captive by someone else’s craziness, the meanness of my father, the dehumanization of the silent suffering of my mother.

It is not important that the Republicans eat the young the weak the paralyzed and the Democrats are ball-less wonders. My rage disappointment fear about how the world has spun out is not going change the trajectory of the planet. Already we are lost on the wrong side of the tipping point where all this wiggling the wrong way has taken us over the edge. Bob Dylan said prepare yourself for elimination. This is what I believe. We have descended down that hole so unless you can fly backwards, hold tightly to that which is close to your heart, treat others with dignity and respect, find compassion, and be careful to whom you open the door. Find joy as only joy will lift your suffering. Understand that in the world of man, the truth no longer sets you free. Truth no longer stands on its own because it is no longer required in defining the political realities that unfortunately define the world as we are to know it. It is a different world where the importance of truth has been left behind. In the new normal, it has been dismissed.

But I’m old school born with joy. It’s what I had in my heart when I came into this world to help me solve the mystery of my family without dying inside the plot. I came up hoodwinked and dull, stifled by the limitations that were cultivated in me. I’ve spent most of my 61 years trying to turn my life around and so I carried the seed of joy dormant in cold storage for many years. I forgot I had it I guess until one day I inadvertly opened up the junk drawer and let light in.

Then all kinds of things sprouted out from under that dampness. Like this joy. Everyone has it and it’s there to be discovered. Joy of knowing realization otherness oneness awakening detachment forgiveness endless searching tenacious sniffing around flying to the defense of truth regardless of the irrelevance to which it has been reduced by modern society by the good old boys. Call it out like bullshit. Be an activist -- one should not perish without objection. But everything must emanate from that deep quiet pool within. It’s an inside job from here on out and it’s very personal for each of us. It is our redemption however we frame it.

This is not my path the nightly news show that suck me in hard have their way then spit me out a nervous nut job on the sofa because i am powerless over the stuck-on-stupid mentality of an outside world that has lost its way inside which I have lost mine. This is the point to which we have evolved in our high-minded pretentions, and if we were strong enough as a species to correct our way out of the high-speed wobble of global destruction in which we find ourselves, we would have already done so. So the question is how do you want to go out?