That Thing We Need

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It's all about our courage, eh? 

...Or, that lack of same thereof, 

which festers in profane frustration, 

so endures profound disgust?  

It portends our total failure 

to complete that *final* test—

to separate the wheat from chaff, 

to be, perforce, our very best?

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Too, it shows the path to "shadow," 

which is slippery and steep! 

It casts us in a harrowed plight... 

provokes in us our fearful sleep.

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No one cops the obvious—

we are lacking all control! 

That we're at the whim of forces 

far beyond what we are told...

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That our living time is borrowed; 

that we do not know a thing: 

that a sword of sullen Damocles,

 surely, hangs from threadbare string?

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That our science falls afoul with "lights" 

which pulse through timeless skies. 

That "scientists" are cowards 

at the "feeding troughs" contrived?

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That "hard-nosed talk" is easy 

when you're "safe," remote—detached. 

See, everything you hold so dear's 

too quickly gone—too soon dispatched!  

You and I are conscious dust,

a whiff of cheap cologne, 

separate and apart we live... 

"In flight to the 'alone'."

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Go their distance; pay their price; 

to find, at last, they're not so nice. 

Proof exists of this contention. 

We've trod this path, but still worth mention:

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Few will honor John Ford's courage! 

Ford's in jail, denied—discouraged!

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Johnny Ford is less than free (!); 

he'd had the guts we fear, you see?

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With wit and grace...and bravery (style!), 

it's obvious he stayed his mile, 

going more than halfway—where—

he reached out... ...found you weren't there...

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Contrive your easy, masked belligerence 

brave enough to act indignant; 

challenged by my righteous cry, 

you say "not so," but ...with downcast eyes!

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And I beseech all "honored minds," 

who shared desire, space, and time. 

They, the few, who'll "talk the walk"; 

eclipse the mass who've "walked the talk." 

They're the ones to make grand speeches, 

but act, good friend, like fleas or leeches 

on a corpse of arcane study, 

they won't cop—their feet get muddy!

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They're scared of laughter, sneering peers; 

they won't act out—"They'll think we're queer"!  

Remains John Ford for courage shown, 

where we accept (!) injustice sown.  

See, he may be crazy as a loon, 

driven such by "stooge" and "goon"; 

but, that won't matter, not a wit, 

where Ford's betrayed and innocent!

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We keep our distance from his edge 

which begs (beseeches!); still, we hedge!  

I hope untruth's at last supplanted; 

we're used, betrayed, then disenchanted—

lost in murky "might-have-beens" 

on which we, sadly, must depend.

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It's all about that lack of courage 

we contend with, I disparage!

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We're the ones to find out why! 

We're the ones to ask and try!

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We're to LIVE reality! 

We're to rise up from our knees!!

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We're to question obfuscations! 

We're to know new obligations!

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We're to live like folk, not fleas! 

We would have the truth now, please!

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We're the ones to press the issue; 

we are made of more than tissue!

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We won't crawl upon our knees! 

We SHALL not live our past's disease.

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We're the ones who look up high, 

and see the lights which thread our skies! 

We won't suffer to be teased, 

hoaxed or played... remotely squeezed. 

We SHALL protest disrespect 

as we protest all lies and threats! 

We shall FIND out what we PLEASE... 

concerning truth—the thing we NEED!

• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• www.AlienView.net

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Though, leave us not retreat reflexively to those wounded "frowny pouties," pouties facilitating obligatory "cheap-shot" and so ill-founded recriminations. Let us look, instead, into a MIRROR for the first assumption of blame or the reason for that first "thrown stone." It might be you.

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None of us has the deadlock nut on the aggregate craziness, and one performs a general disservice to suggest that one does. We're grains of sand on a backwater beach with regard to adjacent entelechies and their view of things: a view reflected fractally across a vast range of entelechies if self-awareness recapitulates the same fractal expression of, seemingly, everything else, anyway!  Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny everywhere else, after all... another fractal expression.  Still, anyone is but one grain of sand on the aforementioned backwater beach only presuming to instruct another, eh?

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McKenna nails it. You're your own Guru, or should be where one can.

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Any expressed opprobrium, of course, goes for your garden variety Shermer-smirker or hypo-literate, if rabid, faux-skeptical klasskurtxian skeptibunky.  These know who they are, don't get it, and don't care.  These can pack sand and broken glass passed a prolapsed pore, eh?

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These  personify abject regression, codified their glad repression—abrogated all progression—provide for all our sad depression!

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Restore John Ford!

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Enough IS Enough!

Enough IS Enough!

by Alfred Lehmberg

Sorry in advance for the rant (not!), but enough is enough at 75 with no rose-colored remembrances of where things were, mind you, bad as they were, decades ago... but just how far we've slid even from THOSE times! We were headed in the right direction societally, verily, only to slide back inexorably in the 21st Century?

See, enough is enough where this writer is plainly provoked to point out such that he is just not able to see, mind you, where it has been in any way warranted that Republicans can be awarded "equal status" or "like-points," at all, you know, as a purported and so-called co-equal political alternative... to Democrats! Current Tennessee, Texas, and Florida are cases in point, especially in Tennessee! Jim Crow is unabated!

If we did countenance the right as co-equal? We would then attempt to equivocate polluted water and an acceptable table wine! We'd observe occluded moons at midnight as equal to non-occluded suns at noon... "opposite," then, as but an understatement unrecognized as "opposite." Black could be accepted as White... as grey would be disserved while a rainbow of color is criminalized and denied. Why? Because nothing comes to mean anything in the right-wing world. That's the history!

No... the right, getting the smallest respect (professional or otherwise!) from the left, today at any rate, is NOT, in any way, earned at this point! This should be publicized as evident and obvious. Delineations shouted from rooftops! ...And, they are.

The "right" is, and has been, entirely bereft of any constructive plan or on-point policy as regards our Republic and its people-driven operation, 350 million persons strong, since f'n Reagan! Efficiency is intelligently sought to serve these millions in aspiration to a sanely secular social efficacy achieved in a government truly of, by, and for real people and when not hijacked by the scofflaws of the well-monied hyperprivileged. Societal sanity is a result of sensible fairness.

All this, of course, is ever as close as choice. It always is.

Currently, obstreperous wide-tie fundies and their lie-in-the-fog sectarian mobs have had their run, reader! Their direly regressive propensity and ghastly malfeasance of governance is daily exposed for what it is: spurious support for criminals and scallywags embroiled in foul treason, just to start!

Their indifferent approach to governance is ambivalent as long as it provides no regulation or oversight on commerce, only its faith-based religious overreach and vagina legislation allowed... Its wholesale worship of the pecuniary one percent authorized... “Prosperity Jesus,” as it's known, and verily, all this is and will be a detriment, a National cancer... is the result. A deliberate cancer, then, seeking control of America's very flesh, is empowered! There's very little inflation or hyperbole in the preceding.

What we *could* be reaching for... Living wages, affordable housing, regulated childcare, middle-class-encouraging unionization, the sensible embrace of climate science, renewable fuels and energies beyond mere dinosaur flatulence, warranted social safety nets, just to start—not because we’re weak but because we’re best judged as a society regarding how the better off of us treat the least well off of us!

An ongoing list of Republican failures would numb one to an aggravated tediousness… Still, the preceding are responsibilities of governance going away completely discounted and non-addressed by the right... ignored for phony-baloney and ever-distracting “culture issues” like Christmas wars, the sexuality of cartoon sponges and plastic toys, Teletubby debate outrages, a nasty faith-based gender rigidity, unconstitutional religious preference, pronouns, their unsupported climate (and disease!) denial, M&Ms... or anything but (undefinably!) “making America great, again.” Eye-roll with me. When ya got nothin’, that’s your lead.

The right has had or done nothing for Americans or aggregate humanity. Any aspirations to enlightenment since Reagan have been Democratic aspirations! Clearly, Democrats, even if flawed, remain to be the only adults in the National room! Republicans, on the other hand, propose, produce, and perform as cretinous and moronic crack-baby children! The hyperbole circuit breaker remains cold.

Republicans? These cater only to an especially short-sighted personal narcissism and insentient solutions of the short term. These are selfish generally, are lathered in psychopathic self-interest mostly, and then are oblivious to the most rewards going only to the worst persons on the planet not among them... betraying them and then abusing them, in turn, verily! The right celebrates the hard right, and East European monsters are feted openly on FOX News and worse, feted as preferred to our own Democratic "duly elected"! None dare call THAT treason! It IS, verily!

So, back to the point. Where do Republicans get off, after all their aggrieving mendacities, their egregious betrayals, their glaring hypocrisies, their hard-edged hate-mongering, and their acceptance of dark money... dark money acceptance facilitating the prosecution of their overtly purloined privilege... a toxic privilege to the *clear* detriment of an America of, by, and for the persons actually composing it… while they suggest sensible solutions for NOTHING else? Where?

How are they remotely warranted in a sensible society preferring facts to rumors, science to superstition, and aspirations to smart as opposed to the senseless pursuit of stupid? When will they be dismissed for the betraying scum that they have EVER been, flushed from their offices and positions, scoured from our courts, agencies, and institutions, and then recalled from our executive governments and school boards? When?!

...And why do they hold any sway at all? That's an easy one! That, reader, is summed up very simply in their ready willingness to masturbate their mendacities, exacerbate their extremities, and legislate their liabilities in a fervent desire to irradicate our Constitutional Republic, embrace color supremacy, and welcome its authoritarian new fascism! No, we know why they win. They are eager to lie, cheat, and steal. It's our corporate "both-sides" media normalizing all that! Finally, where is it writ large that sensible people have to be at the complete whim of miscreants and morons?

Needed? A corporate will to stop fanning the fatuously false flames of "bothsiderist" hypocrisy and then fallaciously equating "merely flawed" with "full-on FUBAR" to keep people scared into staying tuned in... for cash! It’s them extending the credit of normalization to the bad guys just to keep them in the race, at all! ...And? It's not just FOX!

...We’ve got a Civil and two World Wars deciding all this stuff already, right? We might need to reassert all that?

Gylany, readers! Learn it. Know it. Live it. Love it. It’s our best case for salvation.

Wokeness, reader, because "woke" only means the aspiration to conscience... and without one of those, we are as insensate and unaware as BEASTS!