Learn From It

We live in a time of Fear. Not because the world is inherently scary or bad—or good or joyous, for that matter—but because the prevailing politickers are solving for their own gain by subtracting from others. And the only way to rob emotionally is to play the vampire, using fear to snare, fear to compel, threat to swoon and then, prey immobilized, take from them all that you need to survive without ever putting something back into the system.

Multi-color alerts (bad guys are bad and imminent!), rainbow alerts (gay are bad!), amber alerts (the world is bad! we must protect the children as they are our main fund-raising, fear-raising mechanism!), soul alerts (we don't hate you, but we know you're going to hell!) all remind us that you can never be too frightened.

The be-afraiders want you to read books that spell out a future of gloom and doom. They've become parasitic to an End of Days kind of future because only that kind of future supports their current raison d'être.

Paint the future as a Wonder of the Possible, though, and you're a hippie or a communist or a—gasp!—liberal. Paint humanity as something that can achieve, that can find a balance and have respect and all that good stuff all on its own without the Republican Party's help or God's Help, and you're Evil. And they'll call you worse things as time goes on, make you lesser and lesser all the time, make themselves more and more superior all the time—for who isn't superior with god almighty on their side?—and eventually, they'll find a reason to call you soulless. Not human anymore.

That's why Utopian literature is so subversive. Isn't is so sad that things are so bad that utopian dreams are undermining to the establishment?

So, onward, christian lurkers and get thee to a bookstore to get

“The Fifth Sacred Thing” (Starhawk)

If you're not afraid of having your worldview disrupted.

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