WILL it differently

December 20th, 2006

Alright, Dubby and political mayhem be damned — this is a smackdown!

I WILL enjoy this Holiday, I WILL keep a vision of Peace and Goodwill for all humankind, I WILL play my Christmas songs even if some of them make me sad, I WILL wrap my little gifts even if they’re all in the “it’s-the-thought-that-counts” category, I WILL celebrate ALL the holidays including the Solstice with symbols and chants and prayers and appreciation — in short, I WILL put the Sacred Season smack-dab in my Heart … because it is not to be found anywhere ELSE. It certainly isn’t driven by the circumstance of the day … or by the dim-witted Grinch in WaDC.

It’s kind of like the Dorothy message in Wizard of Oz … it’s all in us. Looking for it elsewhere may be an interesting adventure, but it’s the Long Way Home.

Tomorrow I will make my traditional trays of Gingerbread Persons — I will fill the house with their incense and memories of flusher years, family together and dear faces long-gone attending [because time is not linear, it's a loop -- I can recapture those joys if I wish ... and I do.] I will decorate the little cookie faces with smiles … because to do less would be to give in to the darkness, and these days are all about Light. I will play my holiday music and sing loudly, like the Who’s in Whoville, because it isn’t about what is brought to me this season — it’s about what I BRING to it. And then I will pass out those little ginger-messengers of peace and kindness to the neighbors and the mailman and the friends that have blessed me this year in the Pea Patch.

Then, taking a deep breath, I will continue the count-down to the weekend as I refuse to be daunted. I WILL break out the good china and silver, even if I have to stay up til the wee small’s spiffing it up from lack of use. I WILL cook two separate “feasts” and bask in the diverse company of very different groups … separated for their own comfort levels. I WILL keep conversation light and pleasant because … we could all use the rest. I WILL spread as much love as I find myself capable, promote as much frolic as is welcome and be as tender with those I meet as I am able.

The old astrology books used to say “Will” was the key-word for Sagittarius. I WILL. Pluto’s influence on the new moon in Sag could send us spinning off into the echo’s of Christmas Past, the shadows and the regrets … the downward spiral of squashed expectations or lost opportunity.

WILL it differently, my dears … harness the Jovian power you’re being lent. Click your heels — sing like the Who’s in Whoville, post-Grinch. Fill up your space, and the space of those you meet along the way, with moments of kindness and care and remembrance of Light.

It’s in your capable hands … to heal your heart, enter into it. To receive, give. To embody the Light, shine. Inhabit your holiday tradition … and in all ways, Be Love.

Jude

What’s Love Got to Do With It?
J. Terry Edmonds, HuffPo
12.12.2006

“What’s Love Got to do With it?” Tina Turner snapped the question in a hit record more than a decade ago. Today, that song could serve as the national anthem for the culture of cynicism that seems to be rampant in America and around the world. And that cynicism seems to be working overtime as another holiday season is upon us.

From fistfights over under-stocked and over-priced toys at the mall to escalating violence in the Holy Land, the grinches of greed and separation seem closer than ever to turning the dream of “peace on earth, goodwill to men” into just another bumper-sticker slogan. And just because you are not actively trading blows with someone, doesn’t mean you are not directly or unconsciously part of the problem.

While we may absolve ourselves from responsibility for much of the hateful and violent conflict we see around us, this frenzied season creates the kind of inner tension that keeps many of us on short fuses and gives some of us the proverbial holiday blues. In short, this sacred season has come to be about everything other than its original purpose - peace on earth and love.

The hectic pursuit of things…the fear of loss, the need for more…is ripping the heart and soul not only out of the holidays, but out of humanity itself. Add to that the worldwide enmity and violence spawned by divisions of religion, ideology, lifestyle, culture and race and you have the perfect recipe for the inevitable fall from within.

I am not advocating the end of ambition, competition or achievement, but rather a heightened awareness of the fact that though we may live in a material world, we are ultimately spiritual beings having a human experience. That is all well and good as the topic for a Sunday sermon, but what does it have to do with day-to-day living? Plenty.

First of all it means that we are one. In the world of spirit, as we are also beginning to see in the world of quantum physics, there is no separation between us and them, nature and mankind, you and me. As Jimmy Carter puts it in his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, “The blood of Abraham, God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew and Christian.” We are all brothers and sisters in flesh and in spirit. The very real differences between us are simply examples of the inexhaustible variety and beauty within oneness. They should be cause for celebration and joy rather than fear and conflict. And to those who think that oneness means blandness, one look at the dynamic spectacles of nature should remind us that there is great latitude in oneness - for individuality, creativity and harmony.

The second practical reality of oneness is that its power rests in each and all. That means we don’t have to sit around and wait for governments and institutions or the next Messiah to save us. Each of us has the power to change the world right now. Or, as Deepak Chopra puts it, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way….We must not bring one war to an end, or thirty, but the idea of war itself.”

Until we abandon the belief in violence and war as viable options for settling human disputes, we will continue to perpetuate death and destruction even as we call ourselves a peace loving people.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Some may call you naïve or weak. But an attitude of peace is the ultimate sign of strength. It takes a great deal of empowerment and courage to look your brother or sister in the eye and say, I hear you…I know you…I care about you…I forgive you…I love you. The fractured state of the American family and relationships in general is evidence that we have not yet fully unleashed this power in our personal lives, let alone in the public, political or global arenas. My holiday wish for mankind is simply that we begin to do so. In the words of the song by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson: Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me…
What’s love got to do with it? Everything.

Happy Holidays!

Terry Edmonds is former chief speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a New York corporate speechwriter.

Love, Actually
Joyce Marcel
Thursday, December 14, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Is love the last social taboo?

Looking at our popular television shows, you would think our society revels in failure. People are always being voted off the island or thrown out of the group house or rejected by an Italian price or insulted by a celebrity chef or fashion designer. Then there are the people who feed on human misery, like sob-sister deluxe Oprah Winfrey and her evil spawn, Dr. Phil.

And we have multiple magazines and tabloids doing nothing but chronicling the mistakes and excesses of our celebrities.

When I wonder why so many people enjoy watching other people fall on their faces, I think that maybe, just maybe, it’s because it fills some kind of vacuum left by our taboo on love and happiness.

By love I don’t mean movie-star love, which is often a toxic cross of lust and the need for publicity. I mean regular, every day, old-fashioned heterosexual and homosexual marriage and family love.

Why would there a general prohibition on talking about love? Maybe love and happiness are considered boring - no tension, no drama, we know how it’s going to come out. Lightweight, empty-headed, chick-lit compared to Russian tragedy. After all, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is how Tolstoy opened “Anna Karenina.”

Maybe we don’t want to look shallow. We don’t want to look smug. And we certainly don’t want to incite envy and resentment.

Film director Peter Bogdanovich tells about the time in 1971 when he was in love with his leading lady, the young and gorgeous Cybill Shepherd. He went around telling everyone - including the newspapers - how happy he was.

Then he got a phone call from his friend, Cary Grant. “Don’t tell people that you’re happy and in love,” Grant warned him. “Because they’re not.”

Grant may have had a point, but my favorite page in the Saturday paper is the one carrying wedding announcements. The pictures of the younger folks getting married with stars in their eyes are fine, but I enjoy best the pictures of couples celebrating 50 or 60 years of marriage.

I want to interview them all. I want to sit down and ask personal questions about how they pulled it off - 50 years with the same person! How did they meet? What were the bad times like? Why did they stick it out? How do they deal with the terrifying fear of losing their partner? What can they teach us? What can we learn?

Maybe it’s superstition that keeps us from talking about our own personal happiness. My parents believed in a custom brought over by my grandparents from the old country. It’s called kine hora, and it warns that when you describe something as good - “Oh, what a pretty baby!” - you can attract the evil eye.

Maybe we think love and happiness can’t exist on a personal level when the world is going to hell?

How can we talk about love when Americans and Iraqis are exposed to violence and death every day? When genocide is an on-going reality in Darfur? When our country is torturing people? When people are hungry and living out on the street?

Or how can we be anything but cynical about love when our culture makes it appear to be about a glittering diamond necklace or an expensive car with a fancy red bow on the top?

Or how can we talk about love and happiness without seeming insensitive when so many people are old, alone, lonely and afraid?

Or how can we talk about love when our government’s values are so misguided that our president, vice president and Congress think only of money, macho and military might while they protect even the child molesters among them?

Or how can we talk about love when so many are being persecuted for their gender or religion?

The truth is, the world is always going to hell. It’s never going to be without hatred, wars, greed and lust. So why wait to openly celebrate love?

In his 2003 film “Love, Actually” - which has become the “It’s a Wonderful Life” for our century - writer and director Richard Curtis put it this way:

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.”

Our government may be trapped in a pale cage of crazy, and the world may be filled with anger, pain, despair and rage.

But as we head into the holiday season, most of the people I know are into love, actually.

Bless All The Dear Children In Thy Tender Care
Christopher Cooper
Thursday, December 14, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

“You have already delivered,” my dear wife said to me several weeks past, “your first tirade of the year against Christmas.” It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I had, or to argue against her perception that this has been a recurring event in our lives together, or to claim that most persons do not find such utterances appalling. (Perhaps I’d beg for a slightly less unrelievedly unpleasant description of my remarks than tirade if I were to quibble or object at all, which I shall not.)

What I will say is that I am aware of my propensity for blurting out the odd objection, for rendering finely-wrought sarcasms that good and decent persons going about their preparations for the birth of their blessed Holy Savior or camping on the sidewalk outside the Maine Mall Thanksgiving evening do surely find annoying. I know I say these things; I see the looks of horror and disgust I draw. I am not lately so bold, nor do I declaim so forcefully or as long as in my impetuous youth, but if I am now tempered, restrained, self-regulated to a degree, I am still nobody you’d want to have along for a day of shopping.

And one may understand one’s faults but be unable or unwilling to change. But I do come before you here tonight to see if I can claw my way back some distance toward common ground, that we may in some measure agree that we have something worthy of celebration and decoration and maybe even a degree of blessed, blight-blotting drunkenness, that we might in our mutual inebriation hug and kiss and tell each other what grand fellows and lovely ladies we are and enjoy the pretty lights (those that don’t blink) and the warm fire, and wish each other a harmless, generic “Happy Holidays.”

Not everyone faults the Christmas season the same. Some object to its secular excess; fewer, but some, (more Muslims and Jews and atheists than Christians in this camp, of course) think the religious aspects should be purged from any public appreciation of the day. I loathe it all: faith and folly alike creep me out. I consider the Christ-centered Christmas to be the greater humbug, but it is Santa Claus and all that follows from him that is the unavoidable, inescapable flood of Christmas as the free market has defined it in our time.

Jesus was born on December the twenty-fifth because early Christian myth-makers and spin-doctors needed to co-opt the solstice revelries of hard-partying pagans. It was necessary to get Jesus born (and born without the stain of his mom and dad having had any joy in his engendering—just a long donkey trip through the desert). He must be born so he could be flogged and nailed and tortured to death, by which effort each of us who would buy into the whole of the church doctrine might gain life everlasting. And if Jesus didn’t suffer enough to get that job done, you can add to it the millions of hours of anguish loosed unto the heavens by those of us alive after 1958 who have been subjected to a hundred (all bad) renditions of the thoroughly execrable “Little Drummer Boy.”

But all that can be done privately. Mammon, however, lays his blanket of excess over all of North America from “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving until the frenzy of gift-returning burns out a few days after Christmas. Of course some pulsating displays of lawn decoration (often co-mingling Christ, camels, snowmen, Santa Claus and a great green Grinch without seeming favor or prejudice) do remain a drain on the power grid until almost the equinox.

I spent an hour walking through a large toy store a few weeks ago. It was a saddening experience; it left me shaken. All was plastic; much required batteries; virtually every product had been manufactured in a country where waste is dumped in streams, workers are abused, and children younger than the likely recipients of these amusements work for pennies an hour so that we may have our humming light sabres, our motorized toddler Jeeps and Hummers, and mind-deadening video games. Yes, my friends, it is precisely the complaint of the paragraph you even now struggle toward a desperately-hoped-for end to that Mrs. Cooper has had to endure, many times over each season, for over thirty years.

Great SUVs choke the parking lots, not a few with lighted wreaths over their radiator grilles. Have you ever been poor at Christmas time? Have you ever spent a cold December day swapping batteries or mending hoses or desperately trouble-shooting a fuel or electrical system, or hitch-hiking to a junk yard for a starter solenoid?

You’ve heard the story of how President Bush asked James Webb, the recently elected Senator from Virginia, “How’s your boy?” Mr. Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.” Bush rejoined, “That’s not what I asked you; how’s your boy?” “That,” said Webb, “is between me and my boy.”

And there’s as revealing a vignette of a modern American appreciation of the “Spirit of Christmas” as you’ll find. Thousands of our boys and girls, men and women, sons and daughters are standing under the gun in the made-up nation of Iraq, each one at great risk of getting shot, burned, dismembered, killed between now and some vague future moment when President Bush shall have picked “a way forward” from among various suggestions filtering in to his small consciousness from Bush family fixer James Baker and his cohorts, from the Pentagon and its new “I’m Not Rumsfeld” Secretary of Defense, from whatever crew of neocon theorists has the upper hand just now at the State Department, from Dick Cheney and the American oil companies, surely phoning in daily from his Undisclosed Location.

Maybe sometime in 2008 the survivors of them may come home. Then what little is left of the fictitious nation of Iraq will be allowed to disintegrate and we will have “finished the task”, “achieved victory”, certainly not “cut and run” prematurely. What do you think, Dick? Does it feel like “Peace With Honor” as you look down on us from Heaven?

If you don’t believe every one of the almost three thousand Americans killed so far in Iraq in pursuit of invisible weapons, elusive Democracy, vengeance or vainglory has died for no good purpose, you surely must see that every mother’s son still quick above the sand but doomed to be bagged or boxed and flown home (what of him they can find) tomorrow or next week or when the lilacs bloom again or as another year turns toward Christmas, or yet another, will have been wasted while politicians pandered, pundits pondered, and several pathetic “ways forward” were parsed as Americans slept and shopped and sipped eggnog or iced tea as the season suggested.

See how we love our brave soldiers. We put their video Christmas cards on the local news shows. They say hello and we love you to their fiancees and families, to their unborn babies, to their mothers and fathers. Fade to commercial. Send them cards. Send them candy. Donate money to buy them body armor. Ship Don Rumsfeld over to give ‘em a speech about getting the job done.

“We’re so proud of our soldiers, and they’re in our hearts so far away at this special time” say the pretty plastic ladies paid to look sad about trailer fires in Buxton and giggle over the sparkle of the lighted spruce in Monument Square. And now, here’s a message from Discount Bob about his unbelievable leather sectional sofa deal.

Of course, they’re in our hearts, you stupid corporate caricature of a human being. They should be in our homes! Two Maine sons were slaughtered pointlessly last week. Watch their funerals at six o’clock and eleven. “It’s especially hard to lose someone at this special season.” Bullshit. Sorrow knows no season. Death and loss and grief are always and ever, unrelenting and unyielding. From the moment you learn your child is dead, he or she dies again every morning you wake, every evening you lie in bed bereft, every instant of every day a memory surfaces. When you blow up a twenty-two year old you kill the baby, the toddler, the youth, the man, the memory, and you blight every day his mother or father may yet live.

We will continue to play out this pointless, violent video game for months, for years. Bush is in disgrace. Baker says we can’t “win”, but he wants to prop up some fiction for the benefit of the oil business. The Democrats are playing it close and cautious. Hillary Clinton is raising money and Barack Obama is speaking modulated platitudes. Nancy Pelosi says impeachment of our war criminal president is “off the table.” America shops.

This might be the worst Christmas yet, and it’s my fifty-seventh. I’ve been interrogating myself and my former and alternative selves, looking into my own heart and soul and intentions, answering an array of questions designed to tell if I am fit to adopt my just-turned-two grandson, Karter. On balance, I think it’ll come out ok. I only gave the adoption caseworker a few essays where I think I could pass for reasonable, and I don’t think she has a source to supply the more revealing ones. So he and I will find our own “way forward” (God, I hope that fades the way of “down the road” and “at the end of the day” soon!).

But what will I get him for Christmas? I think a cardboard box, which will have more play value, a longer life and a smaller price tag than any toy I’ve seen. And a promise. A promise that, however much my audience recoils from its repetition, I shall subvert the space I am allowed before my small public to say as often as I can, as forcefully as I must, that so very much has gone wrong in our country that it will require everything each of us can give to bring us back to decency, to humanity, to rationality.

I am more sorry than she may believe that I hammered my Mrs. Every year with my dark holiday invective. I do decry the excess, but I am not unmoved by bright colored lights and small kindnesses and allusions to peace and love.

I’m not sorry for displaying my distaste and disgust on this page because that is my job and my duty.

I hope my grandson, my friend, my future, Karter Austin Shaw, two years and six days old, smart and funny and the joy of my aging days, grows up strong and brave and skeptical. I hope he seeks and speaks truth. If he does not succumb to religion, if he does not bow down to the state, if he understands that ideas, not things, engage the open mind and fill the hungry heart, our time together will have come to good end. How’s the boy, Mr. President? The boy is all right! And I mean to keep him that way.

Good night. Good luck. Peace on Earth to men of goodwill. To all men. All women. Of all religious persuasions, not one having more to recommend itself than another, and none worth destroying a single life for. Don’t buy so much. Kiss your babies, and keep them safe from the recruiting officers.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

credit loans business first america union1000 dollar loansassistance student education loans adultadvantage forms loanloan $15,000$15000 loancar loan 1-800d loan guidelines a Map

Entry Filed under: Political Waves