From outside the box

The republican party is so hard up for a hero, they had to invent one! When you look back at the presidents they have given us since Eisenhower, it's easy to see their dilemma. So I guess Ronald Reagan was as good a choice as any. The only problem is, spinning the truth alone cannot make a hero out of Ronald Reagan. It has taken outright lies. Lets skip over my opinion and just look at some facts about Ronald Reagan....

Reagan oversaw the largest tax increase in the history of California when he was governor. Governor Jerry Brown actually cut back the tax rate when he became governor after Reagan. As president, Reagan expanded the federal government by about 90%. The national debt tripled under his presidency. Families living below the poverty line increased by 1/3. During his terms 138 administration officials were either convicted, indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal investigations. His deregulation of the savings and loan industry cost the tax payers 500 billion dollars (this is on memory, I may be wrong about that figure) to bail it out. He made major cuts to medicaid, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children, and the school lunch program. He not only did nothing about the aids crisis, in his authorized biography he is quoted as saying, "maybe the Lord bought down this plague because illicit sex is against the ten commandments." After a major tax cut there was a long recession and unemployment hit 10%. Reagan gave us the Iran Contra affair in which his administration secretly sold arms to Iran, which at the time was considered a supporter of terrorism, to secretly raise cash for Nicaraguan Contra rebels, despite a congressional ban on support for the Latin American insurgency. Personally, I'll never forget Oliver North crying about what a great American he (Olly) was when he was questioned about his role in all of this. Reagan even invaded Granada for whatever reason. Probably a wag the dog thing because of all the internal investigating going on. He told us ketchup was a good vegetable substitute for poor kids and he also gave us the "just say no" to drugs....pure genius.

Enough of the facts, now for some opinion....I guess Reagan was at least partially responsible for the Soviet Union spending itself into economic collapse, by introducing "Star Wars" to the world although there is much evidence that The Soviets were already headed into collapse, no matter what Reagan would have did or didn't do. Reagan gave us trickle down economics, the idea being that if we make the rich richer, they will give us more jobs! The middle class shrunk under Reagan as it always does under a republican president. Reagan was a simpleton, a friend to the wealthy as well as corporate America. As with all republicans, he stood for smaller government which is always code word for "deregulate". And as with all republican presidents, government grew and the national debt escalated under Reagan.

I know the conservatives are desperate for a hero (there's even been talk about putting him on MT. Rushmore!), but still it's a little painful to hear all this glorifying about a man who in reality was a very bad president.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I used to write a lot of letters to the editor about things of a political nature. Even my earlier blogs started out with a lot of political overtones. Then over the last few months I just got bored with politics. Bored and fed up. I know that politics affect all of us and that as citizens of a democratic society it is our responsibility to keep our eyes on the ball, but sometimes you just need to step back and take a breath. I've been asking myself why I am sick of politics and government. The answer I come up with is that after a while you get tired of dealing with same old crap, year after year.

Most of us are just plain working folk. We work, we pay taxes, we vote, we argue and disagree over who should be running things, and we trust that those in charge will, to some degree, take their responsibilities serious and remember who they are working for. But here's what always seems to happen....nothing! OK, that may not be completely true. Things do change, they get worse. Nothing ever seems to change for the better. How many years do we listen to promises of campaign finance reform and nothing happens, IRS reform and nothing happens, immigration reform and nothing happens, health care reform and nothing happens, the list goes on and on.

I remember when Reagan "simplified" the IRS tax code. Paper work for filing taxes tripled and tax forms became more complicated than ever. I also remember a speech by Reagan saying that it was time for the world to reduce it's nuclear arsenal and biological warfare poisons. "Therefore", he announced, "I am asking congress for more money to increase the size of our nuclear arms and biological arsenols in order to motivate the rest of the world to shrink theirs"....or some words to that affect. I'm not trying to get on Reagan here, I'm just saying that this is typical of what politicians do. They get nothing done or they make things worse. How long can our economy survive doubling the national debt every four years?

We the people are living in an abusive relationship with our elected leaders. The leaders are the abusive husbands who do what they want and we the people are the wives who get bitch slapped for questioning them. The way that abusive men keep their marriages intact is that they keep promising they will change. They beat their wives and then they buy them flowers and apologize with false promises and worthless tears. But change is always too little too late. And we want to believe them so bad, we keep agreeing to their false promises. Health care, fix the IRS, campaign finance reform, doing something substantial in Iraq, immigration reform, better education, fixing the infrastructure, fix social security, reducing the national debt....it's all coming, soon, we promise. Keep that carrot extended on a stick. As long as we can see it, we can almost taste it.

Here is why these things never happen. To fix any of these things just mentioned, we have to think and plan ahead. We have to make painful decisions now that may not show any results for years to come. That means that politicians will be gone from office before the fruits of their labor will manifest. For most politicians, this would be political suicide. And that's where we the people have to take responsibility. We want instant gratification. We the voter make it difficult for our elected leaders to do the right thing. And why should we expect more from our leaders than we are willing to do for ourselves? The average American is $16,000 in credit card debt. We do not plan well for our own future and yet we expect it from our leaders.

Every now and then a true leader comes along with a vision and they are quickly labeled a farce by the empowered element of their own party as well as the spin masters from their opposing party. Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinech, even Pat Buchanon (at least he had a vision bigger than his own political aspirations) to name a few, are men that have held a broader vision for our future that went beyond feel good politics.

So when do we end this abusive relationship? When do we say enough is enough, the time is NOW to make the changes you've been promising or pack your bags and hit the road Jack. Until I see some real results from our leaders, I will continue to suffer my periodical burnouts from politics. I will become temporarily apathetic until some new issue gets my goat and I feel a need to speak out. Sure, I will always vote, I will keep up with what's going on in the world, I will even send money now and then to my pet causes. But wouldn't it be something if we could be energized by real leaders, people who would not only start making the tough decisions for our future as a country but also motivate us to want to make better decisions for our own lives, for our own futures? Wouldn't it be nice to have leaders who could motivate us to want to be involved in the process of democracy instead of falling into that ho-hum state of political apathy because we feel betrayed and robbed? Wouldn't it be nice if the abusive husband became a compassionate, responsible, and honest working man who wanted the best for his family and was willing to do whatever it took to make it work?

Posted by Joe Shaw at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What is love? This is a question we should spend our whole life pondering. And as with all great questions, any answer should lead to greater questions. There are no right or wrong answers. There is no complete understanding. And any degree of understanding or knowledge of love must come from experience.
God, love, truth, consciousness, universal, light, music, being, eternity, these words are more than nouns, verbs, or adjectives, they are concepts. They go on forever. You can only experience or understand part of a concept, you never got the whole picture. If somebody asked me to explain the meaning of life in one sentence, I would say that life is an opportunity to gain greater awareness and understanding of these concepts.

Love is an illusion as well as a truth. The illusion of love is that we need it, we want it, we deserve it, it must come to us, it must be given to us. This comes from the ego. The passions of youth are really about self survival and self desires. This is when we expect something in return for love. It can be easy to mistake "need" for love. Nature plays a tricky game with our feelings of love when it comes to propagation of the species. Sex, desire, passion, wanting, and need are not love and yet, they can be a part of the experience of love.

I have always enjoyed writing poetry as well as songs. I can remember falling in love and feeling so overwhelmed with passion that I could not find words to express my feelings. So I would often write a song. In a song, you are still limited by words, but you have the extra dimension of melody to enrich your poetry, and often melody can express passion better than words. But now when I look back on these feelings, thru the detachment of time, I can see that I really just wanted to get laid, or I was looking for something outside of myself to make me feel better or to take away the loneliness. But don't tell me that at the time because at the time, I knew I was in love. It's hard when your older and you see younger people over reacting to these passions, knowing that the end result may be a broken heart or worse, an unwanted pregnancy.

When I was 32, I got dumped by a lady that I had been in a relationship with for two years. It hurt like hell! I wanted her back so bad. However, I forced myself to look at it from a different angle. I told myself that if I really loved her, then I should want what was best for her and if going on without me was best for her, then I was happy for her and I knew this was the best thing to happen. Although the child inside kept yelling out, "What about me? I'm dying here!", I refused to give that child too much of my attention. By keeping my focus on the bigger picture, I found that I was able to move on much quicker than I did in earlier break ups where the inner child got all of my attention.

Love is expressed in its greater truth when it reaches out, when it is given without condition or expectation. I believe that mans greatest capacity for love is directly connected to his inability to deny the pain and struggle of others that he is not directly connected to. It's easy to deny what does not personally affect our lives or what we don't see. If I had to define what a true saint is, I would say that a saint is a person who cannot deny another's pain, even if that other person (animal, or cause, or whatever) is not a part of their immediate world. A saint has no limits on empathy. A saint does not have the luxury that most of us have to practice the fine art of denial. A saint is concerned with the bigger picture as well as the smaller one. A saint is one who practices love in it's greater truth.

I am not a saint. I know there are people starving in Africa, I know the rain forest is depleting, I know the ice caps are melting, but I have the shameful ability to block these things out, at least to any degree that requires acting outside of my comfort zone. I also know that when I can no longer practice denial, when I know that the struggle and pain of any of my fellow species, anywhere on this planet, as well as the planet itself, is my concern as well as my responsibility, and when I not only write about it, but act on it as well, then I will have learned more of the greater truth of love.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Recently I was presented with a new writing challenge. Two of my sisters are planning a family reunion for sometime next summer and one of them thought it would be cool if all of us siblings (all nine of us) wrote a book about our life. Each of us would write one chapter and they would all be condensed to make one book. So a couple of weeks ago I sat down and began to write. After three pages I was up to the part where I was born. My whole life? In one chapter? So I backed up and began to gloss over the years. This time it worked a little better, I got thru my whole childhood in six pages. That took me all of Sunday afternoon.

About four in the afternoon, with back aching and two dogs staring at me wondering why they hadn't had their Sunday walk yet, I put the project on hold and went out for a while. When I came back I was anxious to get back to the writing. When I read back over what I had written, I was a little shocked. I had just written six pages about all of the violence in my childhood! I hadn't realized when I was writing, how angry I was, how much unresolved crap there was that I obviously needed to get out. I knew I needed to think about this before I did anymore writing. Did I want to really tell that side of my story? Was it necessary and did anybody really care to read this stuff? Why was I leaving out all of the good stuff from my childhood?

After thinking about it, I decided to finish writing what I had been feeling and then delete it. It felt good to write about it even though I knew it was pretty negative. It also felt good to delete it, kind of like I was deleting the last vestages of whatever emotional attachment I still had to those issues. I chalked up the whole experience as a little self therapy. I have since started writing my story for the third time. Now I know what to do. Keep it short and to the point, make it interesting, keep it more on a positive note but don't skip all of the negative, maybe just mention it without dwelling on it.

When I look back on those years during the fifties, I really do have more good memories than bad. The bad stuff mostly had to do with neighborhood and school bullies. I was a tall skinny kid with red hair and freckles. We lived on the poor side of San Bernardino and the school I attended was mostly black and Mexican kids. They were poor and angry. I stood out. Not good. Then there was the family stuff. I was number eight of ten kids. My folks were pretty burned out by the time me and my two younger sisters came along, there wasn't a lot of patience. You'd have to read the parts of my life story that I've already deleted to get the whole picture, but who cares. I think it was just important to me that I wrote it. Maybe now I can truly move on. Maybe when I say that I have forgiven my parents, I will really mean it, mostly. I'm getting there.

There is, however, one aspect of those early years that I have resolved. That is the deep knowing I have inside that it really was ok that I experienced those things. They helped to make me who I am. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger....so true. Violence can lead us to love. Being in a powerless situation can be the catalyst that eventually brings you to your power. As a young adult, I had to take a good look at the part I played in attracting the kind of negativity I did as a child....that is if I wanted to change it. Sure, my dad was a bully, I don't remember him ever confronting other men the way he could a skinny eight year old boy. But on the other hand, I was a little wise ass. I loved to challenge other kids, as well as my father, to see just how far I could push them until either I backed off or got my butt kicked. It was a game with me. I played this game all thru high school.

As a young adult, I had decided that the game was no longer fun, I was tired of getting beat up, I wanted to relate to people in a different way. I guess we all go thru this off and on at different points in our life. It's called growing up. I've been growing up for a long time now. It's nice to look back at where you were five or ten years ago and see the areas you have changed, hopefully for the better. I hope that when I'm eighty five, I will look back at where I was at when I was eighty and see how far I've come in those five years. But still, how in the hell can you write about all of these things in one chapter? Maybe I'll be a better writer when I'm finished? Maybe I will be a better blogger? Maybe the readers of my blog will enjoy it a little bit more, maybe they both will!

Posted by Joe Shaw at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Eating protein to get protein is as ridiculous as eating hair to grow hair. Protein is made up of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids in the food we eat. 9 of them cannot be produced by the body and must come from a food source. The best food source for these essential amino acids are grains, legumes, and vegetables. Meat is a very poor source for amino acids. The amino acids in grains, legumes, and vegetables are instantly available to start building into proteins. When you eat meat, the body must first break down the protien into amino acids to make them available for re-assumption as protein. You end up with more saturated fats and other non usable garbage than you do with protein. By going via the garden variety to get your protein, you not only get more protein per pound of food eaten, you also get more of the minerals your body needs and less of the fats.

Although I believe whole heartedly in a vegetarian diet, I have never been one to preach it. I learned a long time ago that people can be very sensitive about the idea of giving up their cadaver based diets. You can challenge their religion, their politics, their bad habits, anything except their meat consumption! So if eating meat is so right for most people, then why do we have to practice so much denial about what we are really doing! That's right, denial. Most of us could never kill what we eat. We don't even want to know what animals go thru from birth to their final moments of life at the slaughter house. Why do you think that slaughter houses are as hard to get into as a top secret military base? I'm not going to go into graphic details about this stuff, the information is out there.

Denial is an amazing thing. We so readily buy into the protein lie because it's what we want to hear, and why let a little thing like facts get in the way of our beliefs? I saw a fellow with a sign the other day that showed an aborted baby along with some anti abortion message. That's great! Lets get real about all of our denials. We should know what abortion looks like. We should also know what a terrified pig looks like that is getting his throat pierced as he is hoisted by his hind legs, screaming on his way to the carving room (sorry, I went into a graphic detail). We should know the sight of 40 caskets being unloaded from a military plane. Teenagers in drivers ed should be taken at least once to an automobile accident scene before they clean up the gory after mess caused by a drunk driver. Maybe if we were more honest with ourselves about the reality of things, we would make better choices.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are very strict rules to life and we all follow them diligently. These rules are etched so deep into our subconscious that it is literally unthinkable to break them. Often, we honor these rules to the death. The rules cannot be changed....until we decide to change them. We write these rules of life for our self when we declare something to be a fact. I can't loose weight, I'll always be broke, people take advantage of me, etc. When we think a self defeating negative thought, we may as well pull out a little book and write them down as a new rule we must live by. Rule #127, I am always tired....stay with the mantra long enough and you will be for sure! It works that way. The subconscious will always honor these rules by manifesting experiences that are within the guidelines of what it has been fed or programmed. It works the same way for positive thoughts. What we think, feel, and say, and to the degree of feeling and belief that we put into these things, will determine how our life must go. Our actions usually demonstrate what rules we have been writing for our self.

The experiences we have today are aligned perfectly to the rules we have laid out for ourselves before today, just as the rules we make for ourselves today will determine our experiences in the future. We are constantly tweaking our rules, either putting more of a negative slant or a positive slant to them. We can change any of our rules anytime we want to. When we change a rule from positive to negative, we do it unconsciously, it's easy. In order to change a negative rule into a positive rule, we must do it with pure intention, or total consciousness.

When we follow a set of negative rules, we get caught up in being a victim. Left unchecked, we may loose all control over our own life. Our experiences are then determined by forces and circumstances outside of our self. Victim's hate everything about their life, and yet, they seem to love being a victim. Have you ever tried to empower a victim? Have you ever tried to change their rules? They will fight you tooth and nail for their right to be powerless. They will argue why something may work for others but not for them. Offer them a different point of view, an alternative to what they are accustomed to thinking, and they immediately set you straight. There is an old saying that says, "Argue for your limitations and they are your's."

I once lived in the victim mode. It gave me chronic depression, killed my energy, and kept me from trying new things. I could never admit it when things were good, I could never say something like, "I love my life!"
The hardest part about giving up being a victim is that you have to take back your power and accept complete responsibility for all of the conditions of your life. You quit the blame game. It's fun as well as addicting to blame others, to judge others, and to constantly complain about all of the conditions of your life. However, once these habits are broken and your rules change from negative to positive ones, you literally get sick when you spend too much time dwelling on anything negative.

Changing your life starts with changing your rules. Just be aware when you are being too negative and if you can't change it, then at least quit feeding it. Often I catch myself writing a negative rule, sometimes I change it immediately and sometimes I don't. A negative thought does not etch a negative rule into the subconscious, it takes persistence. Like I've said before, in the end, we are all right where we want to be. Whatever our rules are, however much of a victim we are, however optimistic or pessimistic we are, however powerful we are, the fact is, we have worked very hard to be in that place, we have earned it, it's our right to be there.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few postings back I did a little light hearted ragging on the catholic church. I feel that as an ex catholic I have that right, although I never want to offend anybodies religious beliefs. Well.... actually, that's not always true, but I do try to present my beliefs as beliefs and not facts....for the most part. And isn't everybody entitled to believe anything they want to? All that being said, I would like to make my case as to why I think the church, and Christianity in general, has missed the boat when it comes to true spirituality.

As a child, I was taught that we have a soul and when we die our soul will go to Heaven or hell, or as the catholic's believe, possibly purgatory or Limbo. Here's the problem with saying that we have a soul and it's going to go somewhere when we die. When we make this statement that we have something, we are separating our self from being that thing. It's not us, it's just something that we have. If soul is the seat of consciousness, we don't have a soul, we ARE soul. When we say that we have a soul, we instantly set up a division in our mind. The message is drilled into the subconscious that soul and self are two different entities.We are not body or mind, they will eventually die, at least the body will. We are a conscious spiritual being that HAS a body and a mind. This belief negates the statement that says, "I think, therefore I am." A truer statement would be to say, "I am, therefore I think."

A friend of mine once made the remark, "I would like to get hypnotized to see what my higher self had to say to me." He was making the same separation the church makes, and this feeds into the illusion that we are seated in the mind or the body. My thought was, if you practice BEING your higher self, then you will know what you have to say.

Are you your thoughts or are you the seer that witnesses your thoughts? Are you seated in the brain, the "meat computer" as Alan Watts once called it, or are you something more than that? If we are truly spiritual beings then the body and mind are only tools we use to function in a physical world. When we mistake our identity with the mind, or ego, we are at the mercy of our emotions because we no longer see them as being a feeling we are experiencing, but rather we become those emotions and feelings. Instead of feeling angry, we are angry. Instead of feeling depressed, we are depressed. We loose our identity and become helpless victims to the forces and circumstances around us.

Consciousness, not thought, is the basis of spirituality. Connect that to God in anyway you choose, whatever your concept of God may be. But when you separate yourself from consciousness, as the church does in declaring that we "have" a soul, you are no longer dealing with spirituality but rather with confusion.

Hell is another area where religions have got it all wrong. The concept of free will and the concept of eternal damnation cannot coexist. If we have free will and the threat of using it in a bad way will lead to an outcome that is unacceptable on every level, then it is not free will. When the outcome is eternal damnation and suffering, there is no free will, there is no choice, there is only one logical conclusion.... to do whatever it is that does not put us in hell. To do otherwise would be insane and insane people are not responsible for their actions. So why would a Christian who believes in hell, and who is not insane, commit a sin that they believe may put them in hell? The answer is that in their heart of hearts, in their deepest part of self, or soul, they know, we all know, what truth is. And hell is not a part of that truth. But we choose to play along anyway, that is, until we choose not to.

For any religion to let go of fear based teachings, they would also have to let go of their power. Fear creates dependency. Power feeds on dependency and power inhibits freedom. There is nothing spiritual about power and fear. As spiritual beings we are motivated by love and freedom. Power and fear serves only to stifle our spiritual nature. When our spiritual nature is stifled, we either become apathetic to life or we turn to emotions and drama which, if you don't know any better, can be mistaken for spiritual experience. Religions thrive on emotion.

Churches can teach enlightenment, become true spiritual institutions, and still survive. There are many new age churches that do just that. However, it seems that old established institutions teaching old established ideas are very resistant to change. Once an institution is established in it's power it has no reason to change. Then they are no longer leaders, they are slave masters to how we think and believe, holding onto their power any way that they can. This is true of governments as well. They will not change until the people who give them the power demand change.

In western society it seems that true leadership, those that offer enlightenment and new ideas, rarely comes from politicians and priests, but rather from artists, scientist, inventors, and teachers. I would say that people like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, The Beatles, Steven Spielberg, Will Rogers, George Lucas, Steven Hawkings, Mother Teresa, and Mark Twain (to name a few) have bought about more positive changes and created more inspiration than all of the politicians and church leaders combined in the history of our country.

But still, there is that part of me that says it's all good because we are right where we want to be doing exactly what we need to do. We change when were ready, or we don't. To me, life is an opportunity to reach as far as we can reach, to not only be true to our highest ideals but to stretch those ideals into the unknown.....To journey outside the box!

Posted by Joe Shaw at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)