I’m posting something raw, and I expect predators (if the brit women see this. i expect they’ll be the only understanding party)
This post is far from complete, but the tanking dollar makes my Internet usage quite expensive. I want to bring your attention back to my post about Michael Hampton’s uninvited guests, and to a link he provided in the comments. I attempted to leave a comment on his link, but since I’m in Spain, I’m not on my normal laptop and connection and won’t be able to follow up in a timely manner. My comment on his link will be first and the pics detailing what I described will follow.
I found this commentary perhaps too late to add anything of value. I’ve been in the South African bush and have been totally unconnected to the world until last night. My point of entry into this conversation is via my online support of the Browns and a blog post about Mr. Hampton’s visit from the feds.
A free (wo)man should never experience detention, questioning, or harassament for expressing an opinion. I’ve read, in history, where this type of behavior ends. I’ve seen it now, at the fenceline of Mozambique.
You can be free when there is a real memory of freedom; or you can seek freedom, barefoot, starved, and injured in the bushland, and then go back to your chains because the enemy of freedom has grown bigger than your heart.
miche aka libertarianlady
Some people preach that a lifestyle of freedom is equitable to a dog eat dog world. They are liars. The doc and I watched two lionesses stalk (a much smaller) Impala for an hour only to end sleeping hungry. The doc understands that we should be charitable to animals, but he always attempts to ridicule me for seeing animals as food. It was something deeper than poverty that gave me respect for what I’d eventually eat. It was the ideas of life, death, and control that allowed the skinning or depluming of an animal. But, even in the case of a yard hen, you anguished over suffering and rejoiced in connection. You understood not to waste life.
In Africa, our guide presented a moral conundrum. It was something along the line of spare the lives of many at the cost of one. The question was posed in response to the doc’s never kill something exotic for pleasure stance and my kill only what’s necessary (no matter the endangered status of the day) for food, shelter, and clothing stance and we both found our arguments wanting. To be sure, our guides were in favor of conservation, but their conservation techniques seemed to ring a different tone. Oops, their tunes rang very similarly to a true free market message but they weren’t necessarily politicaly correct.
I’m a bit ripped right now, but the connectedness I’ve recenly felt has been solidified everyday. That solidification is not for country- I could never be found a groupie. I want everyone that might share the same world to realize that we need so little to actually breathe and exist.
It’s our vanity that will fuck us.
As a former vegetarian/vegan, I now also respect the way of nature with regard to consuming animals. I personally feel that most vegetarians are in denial about this, it simply isn’t a healthful diet, at least not for most people. Animals eat animals, we’re just human animals. What you don’t see in nature is the blatant cruelty/torture of animals, eliminating the entirety and quality of their lives. That puts us beneath animals, it’s savage…
“we need so little to actually breathe and exist”
I agree, but the world will change only when the people change. What we “need” isn’t really the issue for most people, it’s all about what we “want,” what we seem to hunger for. Not less, but more. We’re manipulated into wanting more per the ongoing lie that we become more when we have more. But “more” never fills that empty place within us. This must mean we still don’t have enough — and so this wicked excessive cycle of consumption continues.
That “not enough” fuels our enslavement, our multitudinous controlling systems, this nauseatingly artificial life with all it’s cold concrete, metal and plastic. And so we suck the life out of our precious planet to make more and more concrete… And our bodies and minds are becoming infused with all this toxic crap, choking the fucking life out of us.
And why do we allow it? That “not enough,” that self-destruction, is a reflection of our self-loathing and from that comes all of our world’s ills. Self-loving people do not heartlessly destroy (or allow the destruction of) each other and the planet on which they live. They do not torture their animals or other living beings. They do not wipe out the most beautiful and essential part of this life — Nature — in the name of greed. The snake devouring it’s own tail.
All our efforts to heal this world are futile unless they are focused on changing people. In my view, the root of all this self-loathing is based in religion with all it’s wicked judgment and hatred … and the ignorant interpretations of that old book. “Spare the rod” supposedly meaning to beat your children. A potent seed for self-loathing. “Wretches” and “sinners” are how people are viewed unless they follow their rules — and most human beings can’t, and so they pretend to do so…spurring hatred and judgment of self and others. Our laws infused with religion. Our men believing they are above women because of it, women believing this lie as well… Teaching us that we are nothing, powerless, without this fire-and-brimstone “God.” It separates us in so many different ways.
We will heal our world only when we reject these lies, and begin to realize the literal fact of our own true power, that this “God” thing is actually within us, not outside of us. And when we get to the point of truly knowing this, we will without question see that we are most worthy of self-love, and all the wicked fear will fall away. And with that, and only with that, we will begin to love others and our world will begin to heal.
Without self-loathing and unwarranted fear, all of our mega-controlling systems will crumble. That’s a rocky road and it’s difficult to imagine. But it’s the only road that will prevent the total destruction of our world…and to allow us to regain our own power and freedom.
As within, so without. We are the garden from which the world grows.
Peace,
Dove