I'm thinking out loud. This jazzed my mind (sombrero tip). I hate the Whiting out of the fact that every People has the right to self-determination. I consider it my right to be free from others' unprovoked aggression. And I don't expect I have some right to be aggressive to others. Unless of course they bring it on me. Because I feel people have the right to defend themselves. I don't think any one nation has the right to stick bases in every other land in direct contradiction to the will of the natives or residents of that land. I agree with the author of that article; it is delusional to refuse to see how you can't have your cake and smother other people with it, too.

This is big trouble, what the USA is doing around the world, and does on the regular. That seems obvious to me. And I know to you, as well. (Or most of you, I'd guess.) It feels crazymaking to ignore the obvious or worse yet, to dress truth up as falsity. We have an entire set of delusional players with bullhorns, like Cheney and friends, who are under the impression that you can invent a reality for the world or gouge a perch into the side of ancient truths by driving your own mind off a cliff (and the national economy and global health along with it). These delusional players are not just Leaders/Officials and not just Americans...I simply name now who I see at a closer distance. And the USA has been quite active lately, we might say. Dragged her infected frame into the spotlight. Hard to ignore. There is, of course, a greater amount of lesser (and often unseen, though no less important) contributors, without whom the madhouse could not be maintained. I add to that list the people who feel that just because they subscribe to a nationalism that declares others less-than this will somehow keep consequence at bay. Would it be more accurate to say "Whomever is left in the GOP + n" wherein n is an unknown and lesser number of others drawn from various disciplines and ideologies?" Just spitballin' here. Feel free to run with it.

The world remains an amazing place in so many ways. But it could be such an amazing place for so many more people and more often, if we could agree—or get those who get into the halls of U.S. power to agree—that control and aggression are not the way to anything except reactions of aggression in a sane and relatively healthy human or animal! And that there is a dire danger posed to the collective whole by any smaller parts' unchecked greed, and by the imbalances caused by such greed. And that what would infuriate you and I and what would invoke and inflame deep feelings of anger or injustice in our hearts might very well do the same for any others, were we to foist the situation on them. And in that way, we all have common interest in actual justice. That is, a justice agreed upon by all. Which means, yes, less peaks and valleys. Or at least more kindness to most. That we all share the happiness of the world on some level and because so much is interconnected, we all share the mark and the cost of the blight and the rot in the world, too. Your health is good for me. Even if my wealth does not grow. And if someone suffers, I am in some way, made less than. Even if I know not in what way my joy or potential to thrive has suffered. And, on a more somber note, that there are high prices for ignoring and working against certain realities. We will become this lesson, we are becoming the inevitable consequence to our own ignorance and excess and..."empathy deficit," to borrow a phrase I've heard recently from a certain politician. (Although I'm sure it's true that American politicians from every party support the world policing and implantation of US bases, sadly. It's the world we've always lived in, eh? The morality of imperialism and colonization and war. We have a hard time thinking around that.)

I am sad by this time in my life because I fear my country as a whole, and too many of her people even, will not see this before it is too late. Far too late. Maybe not before we become wholly unrecognizable and hideous viewed from each and every side. I certainly don't think I'll see it happen in my lifetime. I want to have hope for the future. And it's easy on a sunny day like this. But I fear the truth is that it won't happen that way, that at the core our "American Way of Life" contains the seeds of its own destruction, and that we will only aggravate our problems by pursuing fake answers doomed to fail or designed to come up short. The kind that our government on the whole seems to subscribe to, and that you and I too easily grow tired of believing in. Or did long ago.

And so the question is left as to how to live through it. How not to spend your time chasing vapors. How not to go mad. How to thrive in (and on) an unhealthy plot, and how to not cut yourself to ribbons inside a shattering palace. And yet to remain unsatisfied with merely surviving. To find a way to clear a corner and build something, or nourish something right there, in the middle of it all.

Spring returns. And I remember that in a culture of crass commercialism, corporate ethics, death, and war, growing a garden can be both an act of resistance and regeneration.