The cost of paying attention keeps going up: Increasing cases of thyroid growths near Fukushima. Tar sands. Poisoned water supplies. Drones. North Korea. Corporate welfare. Tainted and questionable food supplies. Chemical weapons. Gun violence. Man-made gases eating the ozone shield.
There's even a recent report of a dormant virus coming back to life after a nap of 30,000 years. After a run through the headlines, I'm feeling very much like I could use a nap of a few thousand years myself.
As hazardous to one's sense of calm as is trying to stay abreast of current events, it's even more dangerous to one's head wiring to start connecting the dots between disparate events. That's where you go from losing peace of mind to shredding, and shedding, pieces of mind.
Show you what I mean: What do you do with the realization that your country and culture is a death cult? Taken individually, there are a number of troubling points of concern. They go deep. Added up, and you start to feel like an accidental conspiracy theorist, thunderstruck on a sunny day, zapped by a bolt from blue sky, holding the lightning rod high when the Big Paranoias have come out to play.
Deconstruction can be a constructive activity. Start with the big, obvious night terrors, like wars of convenience. I have yet to hear even a distantly plausible, honorable reason why we broke a nation and just about bankrupted ourselves in the process. There is no comforting nursery rhyme I know of that makes the leap from This Cradle of Civilization to That Cradle Will Fall.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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