Who Am I to Say?
21 January 2018 Leave a comment
Below a bright, white sun there were clouds
Scudding across the clear, sharp sky,
First white and puffy, then flattening and smearing,
And now faded into a grey obscurity.
I know who I am – says the Black girl.
Yo sé quién yo soy – dice el abuelo.
We know who we are – say the Grange men.
We are who we have always been – say the Lakota.
I am not who you say I am – says Samira,
But I know who I am. So who are you to say?
Who are we? And who am I to say,
If we have faded into grey obscurity?
January 2018
... JAEZZ Views 
Never a Truer Word
28 January 2018 Leave a comment
Things are not going well with the world. I have recently pondered the overwhelming, perhaps overshadowing, general sense of dysfunction, this decay of civility we now endure. It blares out of politics, economies, technologies and even organized religions. It erodes our quality of life, our access to necessities, our feelings of safety, our sense of humanity. As is natural, we strike out at the things that threaten us, usually people whom we are predisposed not to like. And we declare our injuries, real and anticipated, demanding justice, yet accepting revenge which is more tangible.
Even when justice and/or revenge is achieved, the sense of impending doom remains and seems to envelope us in a vague fog of unknowing. A place of victimization and powerlessness becomes the abode of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions. Much of what we hear when we listen are the screams of rage and fear. Reality is cracking.
There is a churning cloud of words and images hovering behind, around and over people, a cloud so unstable and so filled with threat, yet so impervious to any efforts to quell it or fend it off, that it can only be called the Darkness. It is as if the Void and the Chaos that were banished in Creation have truly crept back in, not from the starry heavens, offended by arrogant space venturers, but from the inner depths of the very people whom it afflicts.
It is as if malignant insecurity, buried under the nurturing soil of civilization is reaching up from its grave to fuel the chaos of misinformation, accusation, incrimination and virulent conflict that surrounds us. Nothing is as it seems; everything is confuted with evil forces reckoning to destroy each of us, isolated and confused. Yet, it is from within ourselves that this malignancy originates; it is our own internal dysfunctions, made manifest and fed on by parasites of power, that have created the Darkness that threatens us. We feed the turmoil we dread.
Walt Kelly’s words have never been more true, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” (Pogo, 1971)
jay@jaezz.org
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Filed under Philosophy, Politics, Social Commentary Tagged with Chaos, Civility