January

BILL MOYERS BUSTS THE BABY BOOMERS.

Hi All,

This is another one of "those articles." It takes the problems of the world, and lays them clearly at the feet of today's leaders. There is a fair amount of projection of the usual shadow material.............but I am inclined to overlook that, because of who this man is.........and the insights I have gained by sitting down and letting him have his way with me.

As you know, my way of processing is to take all the events that are going on "out there," and hook them to my core of understanding about what's going on "in here." I call it "grounding the issues unto myself." And it is this process that is being used to gather building blocks for the Reconnection Universe. I take "them" and acknowledge them as "me"............which is the very essence of U.S.................two initials that have come to symbolize the core essence of my country, as it was designed to be. People come from "there" get on boats, so they can come and settle "here." We allow them to do that (far too much, if you would believe some of the current critics). And thus, we get some of the best essence of "there" mixed into US. They inherit the American Dream, by enlisting and blending their different ways of thinking to what we already have going. It creates a stronger, richer fabric of being.

It is our UNITY, which is being put to the greatest test in history (so it seems)........coupled with our honest appreciation for DIVERSITY.........that makes this Reconnection Universe strong. We open all our present gifts, and we look around the world and ask: "What else could there be?" We leave an extra seat at the table, just in case someone opts to pass by and join us for dinner.

Thus.........as I read over Bill Moyers' ideas.........I am finally coming to recognize the (not so) hidden motives of George Bush and Company........and so many Corporate Wizards..........who are gathering unto themselves (ourselves) as much power and substance that can be gathered, so we can play out our lives (the last lives on the planet, if we would believe the prophets)...........in style. We practice the law of the jungle. The strong get to survive, and the weak fall by the wayside. It makes a certain amount of sense, but there is no HEART in it.

The reasoning is: "If you help the weak to survive, you're polluting your own gene pool." We try not to spoil our kids, because our Dads taught us that each bird needs to learn to fly on its own. Well..........there is truth to that, but it is not the WHOLE TRUTH. It is just a piece of truth. As the oldsters realize, later in life, EVERYONE needs help.........and birds don't LIKE the idea of flying on their own. They prefer to flock together.

AND HERE IS BILL'S GREAT INSIGHT...................which I had never considered.............

We don't save for our children because we do not expect another generation to play itself out. The end times will come, and we'll all be catapulted SOMEWHERE, ANYWHERE............according to our desire and design.............and there'll be no more reason to save, or conserve, or even INVEST time and attention into our next generations. Deep down, inside ourselves, we don't even believe that THIS GENERATION will ever die. We will EVOLVE.............and that will be that.

And yet.......... underneath it all is that same old FEAR OF MORTALITY..........even amidst the prophetic mutterings of ancient sages, or modern-day channels. We all get older, and our children get older (mine are 31 and 27)..........and we seriously wonder about the impendingness of Generation X, as it is about to step onto the World Stage.........and assume it's role as our upcoming "Cosmic Messiah." Jesus was 30 when he began his ministry. Generation X is just about to begin it's bid for the future.

We Baby Boomers are no kids anymore. We ain't gettin any younger. Personally, I have a host of places I would like to see, a bunch of things I would like to do, before I transition from 3D. Do I take my resources and channel some of them to my kids, so they can get a "leg up" on this task that is before them..............or do I let them fend for themselves (like my Dad pretty much did with me)......and feverishly try to fit in all into my "to do" list before I shuffle on? Will I borrow, borrow, against the future............so that, perchance, I might be able to fill in some voids that I believe existed in my past?

Chances are, I'll probably do a bit of both.........now that I see the underbelly of my world's angst. I'll embrace my 55 year old self, and give him a peck on the cheek, let him play a bit...........and then I'll look into the eyes of these youngsters and whisper: "Come on in. Take your place among us. How can I help?" It will be a struggle, I know. George and Company tell me that.

All this insight from Moyers, about the Apocalyptic Mindset of the Fundamentalists clearly matches the anxious mutterings of my Metaphyiscal Brethren when they say: "I'm tired of this 3D crap. I want to go home." It is no different, except for the rhetoric we use.

I don't want to die. I want to EVOLVE.............

I don't want to fade into nothing. I want to TRANSCEND................

I want to sit at the Right Hand of the Father...............AS A CHRIST....(one of many fragments that have existed, or DO EXIST now on the Earth)..........a Unified Oneself.

And yet, I also want to be HERE, in this place, to get what I........as an individual man........ feel I may have missed. And, I want it NOW. I don't want to save, conserve, or hesitate. I don't feel like I have time for that. And it is this angst........this pain.........that makes up a huge portion of the HEAVY ENERGY that now shrouds my universe. The other portion is the continuous, ongoing suffering and lack that has been with us since the beginning, and continues on.........despite our "concerned mutterings" about humanitarian agendas.

We aren't just the Chosen Ones anymore. We're the ONES WHO CHOOSE. And so, what will my/our choice be? To live, or to die by our own hand? Warring......struggling.......ignoring consequences. A super race, are we? The ILLUMINATI (enlightened ones)?

I feel like some big choices are before me, and within me as an individual...........which is what rattles around inside my brain these days, especially in dark, reflective moments in the middle of the night. And that same rattling is echoing through my world these days.

Thanks, Bill........for writing this. It touched me, and helped to wake me. I'll run it through my grid and try to pass it on.

I'd love to hear more of what y'all think about this.

There Is No Tomorrow http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/013105F.shtml

By Bill Moyers
The Star Tribune
Sunday 30 January 2005

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.
That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption.

The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total and more since the election - are backed by the religious right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once
asked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

         That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.
·       That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
·       That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
·       That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.
·       That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
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Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

THE LEOPARD AND THE POODLE

A wealthy old lady decides to go on a photo safari in Africa, taking her faithful pet poodle along for company. One day the poodle starts chasing butterflies and before long he discovers that he is lost.

Wandering about, he notices a leopard heading rapidly in his direction with the obvious intention of having lunch. The poodle thinks, "Uh-oh, I'm in deep trouble now!"

Noticing some bones on the ground close by, he immediately settles down to chew on the bones with his back to the approaching cat.

Just as the leopard is about to leap, the poodle exclaims loudly, "Boy, that was one delicious leopard. I wonder if there are any more around here."

Hearing this, the leopard halts his attack in mid-stride, a look of terror comes over him, and he slinks away into the trees. "Whew," says the leopard. "That was close. That poodle
nearly had me."

Meanwhile, a monkey who had been watching the whole scene from a nearby tree, figures he can put this knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the leopard. So, off he
goes. But the poodle sees him heading after the leopard with great speed, and figures that
something must be up.

The monkey soon catches up with the leopard, spills the beans and strikes a deal for himself with the leopard. The leopard is furious at being made a fool of and says, "Here monkey, hop on my back and see what's going to happen to that conniving canine."

Now the poodle sees the leopard coming with the monkey on his back and thinks, "What am I going to do now?" But instead of running, the dog sits down with his back to his attackers, pretending he hasn't seen them yet and, just when they get close enough to hear, the poodle says.....................

"Where's that damn monkey? I sent him off half an hour ago to bring me another leopard!"

MORAL: SOMETIMES BULLSHIT AND BRILLIANCE ARE THE SAME.