When I was working at the Pinon clinic on the Navajo reservation, in 1991, somebody rushed in and called for me to "come quick, a lady has been shot". I rushed down the dirt street to see a middle aged Navajo woman's head and shoulders on the ground and her bottom and feet up in the passenger side of the open truck. I pulled her out onto the dirt and stabilized her head and airway. She breathed.
A hysterical white lady was praising God, "She's Alive! Praise God!"
The woman had been shot in the right eye and the bullet came out the back of her head. Her heart was beating.
Her breathing became deeper, more gasping, periodic, then occasional gasps, then no more.
Her pulse weakened, then trailed off.
A Young Navajo man wanted to do CPR. I said, "no, she just herniated her brainstem. She's dead."
EMS arrived and I declared her dead.
I walked back with dusty trousers to finish seeing strep throats and diabetes at the clinic, hours of ordinary work for the people.
It was really hard for me to keep moving, ploddingly practicing medicine, but I had to do it. They needed me to provide their care.
There is that no-way-out feeling. We have to do this together. Individual humans just don't survive.
Any one of us has to come forward into the new world with the rest of us.
We have to co-create a living world. Selfish motives cannot work any more.
Sharing-paradigm-or-bust.
That's the conundrum, like in the dream, when you are just about to hit the ground and you wake up.
Spiritually, in Buddhism, this anguished helplessness is the situation to drive the soul to transcend the physical constraints.
The only way to change the hopeless situation is through spiritual engagement.
I practiced channeling love to each person I saw, or whose presence I felt, on my bike rides to work Thursday and Friday.
I both did so and noticed my impediments in doing so.
MC on the Titanic theory and existential crisis. Absolutely. My version points to the fact that the SEC was created after the 1929 crash that was caused by 5% margin trading. An equivalent of 5% in-the-money call options (ITM). It's widely publicized that in 2020, the dumbest of the dumb are driving up stocks using (deep) out-of-the-money (OTM) call options, particularly on leadership stocks like FANG and TSLA in spades.
Think about that for a second.
The Great Depression and FDR. The New Deal (voted down by the supreme court a few times, until he threatened to pack the court)... Also the securities act, the adviser's act - top notch regulation in the world until even today! Also a brief multi-decade stint and corrective course of socialism and central planning taking over "capitalisms-first US". Because that's what happens with leverage running amok!
And things were "fine" for many decades. Until early 1980's de-regulation, cause "big gov't bad". Late 1990's repeal of the division between commercial and investment banking... Cause socialism died and capitalism is THE truth. Uh-oh, right?
And now in 2020. We go back all the way to 0 and deep past it into the land of obscene leverage for the masses - AGAIN. Even 5% ITM margin is 20x leverage. It's always literally game over with 5% ITM. There's no bet in the world that doesn't take you to BK with 5% leverage. You have to bet tiny portions of your capital to not run the risk of ruin. As if!
But it's way worse!
When the SEC patiently looks the other way and lets armies of Robinhooders (tails) wag 60% of world's market cap (US stocks) using nothing but leveraged lottery tickets - deep OTM calls... it's because scapegoats are needed for the crash. The crash itself is assured. It's just CYA time.
1. Musk - a rich mostly unpopular white South African with bs businesses barely producing anything, who's know the world's richest person! (Think South Sea Bubble). Think Michel Milken on crack. But yeah, white South African - jail worthy and no one will complain.
2. The masses themselves, who "recklessly" speculated and crashed the system. If we couldn't blame the masses themselves, the masses would come for blood or regulators and gov't and instead they will be told how bad they were and what kind of bread, sugar, and flour coupons they will get each month. Along with a few coupons of circus and chill.
And yes, the reset is global. More of a Chinese/Russian style of more explicitly/admittedly centrally-controlled "capitalism". US has operated on a mirage of "free market" primacy since the late 1930's. WW2 helped. (MC on pearl harbor........). And then after USSR fell, capitalism gunned itself into the wall, on Churchil-esque strawman argument logic.
It's a miracle we bridged it from 2008 for 12 years on a mirage of health. Now it's transition time! And what we are witnessing now is a demolition.
So finely written, Tessa. Thank you once again for softening abhorrent politics with sprinklings of poetic heart.
You wrote: I keep hoping that the “constitution” people finally connect to the indigenous . . .
Yes! I had just written that exact sentiment elsewhere: "If Bernie progressives, we-the-people patriots, the Yellow Vests, indigenous peoples, and all the rest of the world’s 99% would just join hands, we could create a powerful transpartisan movement to abort The Great Reset’s dystopian agenda."
Waves of criminality are engulfing our planet in a crescendo of wickedness. And yet, opposing the end of civilization as we have known it, I am highly impressed and inspired by a vast flowering of creative thought, trenchant humor, principled politics, and spiritual renewal.
One promising way to subvert the oncoming juggernaut is for pods and pods of communities to self-organize and then reach out and connect with other pods and pods of communities. Small can stay small, and yet become big. And if everyone also actively connects to the morphogenetic field, we can unleash our own version of 4th gen warfare with Hundredth Monkey quantum energy.
If I sorted all of the writings about our current situation based on how well they resonate with my own thoughts and feelings, this would be right in the center. If I could amplify this a million times, I would. Too many of us pretend to know the truth, when in many cases the truth is unknowable. To express uncertainty and intuition is not weakness; it is wisdom. Fear drives us toward authoritarianism, and both sides play the game equally. When we are afraid, we seek to control those who disagree, those who we fear, and so even as the pendulum swings messily back and forth between "left" and "right" we follow a zigzag path toward the controlled, managed, feudalistic vision of the Great Reset and away from the ideals of representative democracy.
We need to speak against fear, to somehow collectively start to let go of fear and rebuild trust. To engage in "noncomplementary behavior", in confronting radicalization with compassion and thereby defusing rather than accelerating division and violence. We need to recognize that our fear-based desire for safety through control and dehumanization of dissenting views is almost certainly leading to a more violent and dangerous world, that could be avoided if we could let go of our fear and accept the humanity of the the opposing side - and begin to dialogue and compromise.
We need to somehow put a damper on the media "hyperbolization" of current events that is driving the fear. I'm not sure it's entirely intentional, as it can perhaps be self-reinforcing in a world where tribalism runs high, echo chambers are increasingly sealed, and the most dramatic stories get the most views and sell the most ads. But it needs to stop. Trump was not effing Hitler. The protest-turned-riot last Wednesday was nowhere near a coup. There is no parallel whatsoever to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The "violence" was pretty minimal relative to just about anything, and certainly to the sorts of violent coups that the US government regularly cheers and supports elsewhere in the world.
The mainstream media - on both sides - writes as if we are already fighting a civil war, as if protests are insurrections, as if microaggressions are bullets. And the more we believe that we are fighting such a war, the more possible an actual war becomes, which would be the stupidest and most tragic thing ever, to destroy lives and livelihoods and communities over largely manufactured dissent.
I see Matt Taibbi just published a piece called "We Need a New Media System", which will be my next reading. But how do we expand this movement against fear, this return to reason and return to the heart, from a few writers on the fringes to a movement for change?
has predicted everything that was going to happen once the"pandemic".began.He calls this Year Zero, not just for America but for the entire West.But he doesn't convey your emotion, your yearning for love and beauty. You help connect the heart and mind. And I think that we can heal by putting the right things in our bodies and minds and sharing ideas with open minded and openn hearted people. But we will need to fight to stay human. You remind us that we don't want to become the dehumanized monsters we are fighting.
Bravo, Tessa. Few Americans possess your level of critical thinking, and even fewer can express it in such a flowing manner. Some of your reader's heads probably blew up when you didn't blatantly offer our President up to be crucified, but that's their problem.
Wait until you see what happens between now and January 20th.
As I read through your essay, I kept saying to myself, "Yes! Yes!! That's it exactly!!!" . So many accurate truths presented so elegantly. I don't expect others to have your skill, but it continues to really scare me that I find few who even are attempting to articulate these truths. I may print this on old parchment and hang it on the wall under the heading, Declaration of Truths. I find these truths to be self evident, but continue to be shocked at how few that I know currently seem to share this view.
Thucydides (Athenian veteran and historian) wrote 2450 year ago in his 'History of the Peloponnesian War' how the evils that his Athenian Empire brought to others eventually found their way back home.
That is exactly what has happened to the US today.
The protests and the color revolutions that the US organized and executed abroad to further regime change have finally found their way home.
You have a way with words. Your writing resonates, because I'm too born and raised in under the Soviet regime, witnessed the end of the imperium, emigrated to the West and now I watch in dismay how the world tumbles down the same old shitter again. Greetings from this cranky old Pole.
Say, are you familiar with the works of Janusz Zajdel? He was a sci-fi writer in the eighties. Especially "Paradise. The World in Orbit" and "Limes inferior". Sooo many parallels with what happens today...
That was wonderful and soothing in a letting go with sadness kind of way. Like a breakup letter to someone you still love but know it's not mutual. Thank you. I love your writing.
I recently subscribed here, and I wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts on an often hostile and extremely manipulated internet. I feel like you put into words a lot of the sentiments I have, and I sincerely hope are more widely shared.
I live in a very "blue" area surrounded by middle class white people who have lived in the United States their entire lives (I was born here as well). My generation (I'm 30) has grown up one of the richest and most powerful empires ever, and I don't think they realize just what a historical aberration the post 1990 United States has been. They are aware of many of the historical and current injustices in America, but I don't think they get what true poverty, strife, and authoritarianism look like. That stuff was always somewhere else in time or space. They grew up being able to more or less trust their institutions. Even if they rolled their eyes at the news or the government, the grocery store shelves were full and the lights always turned on.
It's frankly a little embarrassing for me to listen to them call Trump a "dictator." Many of them sincerely think they help vote a bona fide dictator out of office. However foul and corrupt Trump is (and he is), he simply does not have enough support among the elite to be anything close to what they imagine him to be. If he truly was a fascist dictator, he would be spoken about in hushed tones and certainly wouldn't be able to be voted out of office, or have the appearance of that happening (I don't know or care what really happened. There are bigger things going on).
I think the middle class generation I've been talking about has been raised on the promise of progress. Our society was supposed to be progressing towards one of universal satisfaction. Things like Trump and 'global pandemics' are Not Supposed to Happen at this point in their timeline. I wonder if the emotionalism about both is in reality a crisis of faith in the religion of progress. It may be less scary for them to help destroy our society over these events than it is to start to truly question the notion that we can solve all human problems if we try hard enough.
At this point, I'm trying to connect with people who are keeping their eye on the biggest threat of them all: The attempted technocratic takeover of human life (which is itself rooted in the idea of progress). I don't think progressive realize how well their worldview aligns with the goals of the ultra wealthy. Whether its through manipulation or coincidence, the society of universal satisfaction progressives want and the total control the technocrats want are converging and may be two sides of the same coin. The imperial and colonial projects are snapping back on to the United States. As unpleasant as this is for someone who lives here, there does seem to be "karma" involved in this process.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and perspective. I value your work and your insight on these topics.
Good one, Tessa. Thought I'd put up a reply I just sent a friend regarding a new piece by James Kunstler, because it focuses on these same events you write about here:
Yeah, gotta agree with your friend who thinks Kuntsler is the 'real deal' - I think he's the real deal myself - a real gatekeeper for the empire! I'd call that piece of his a mixed bag at best, but right in that first sentence he confirms my earlier assessment of him. On 9/11, he's pushing the good old 'they knew it was coming and let it happen' misdirection, which is their #1 'alternate reality' scenario for those who are skeptical of their official narrative, the version which appeals to the most mainstream oriented skeptics. There were numerous pre planted bits of 'evidence' to support this misdirection, just as there were with the other 'alternate reality' misdirection ploys on 9/11 such as the 'missing 28 pages' that have been intermittently hyped in the media (which Trump promised to declassify and never did) but never published, which we are led to believe would reveal that 'the Saudis dunnit!'. Then there is that very interesting story around 'the dancing Israelis' which many take to be proof that 'the Israelis dunnit!'. Of course the Pakistani ISI and the Saudis played minor supporting roles in abetting the misdirection ploys, and both the Israelis and the Brits played major supporting roles in the misdirection ploys and/or the actual events of 9/11, but anyone with a grain of intelligence who has delved deeply into the mass of evidence should understand that the overwhelming majority of the culpability can be laid upon various elements of the US government itself.
His comparison of what happened in DC to the events of 9/11 seems semi plausible until you think about it further. Yes, absolutely - in both cases there was plenty of 'evidence' that they 'knew it was coming'....but this is only because they had carefully planned both of these events well in advance, and in fact had been planting 'evidence' and telegraphing the coming events months before they happened. I have no doubt at all that the 'insurrection' at the white house was fully orchestrated, including government infiltration and manipulation of Trump supporters, and of course ordering the DC police to in effect 'stand down'. As you know, I firmly believe 'Q anon' is a CIA psyop, and what percentage of those genuine Trump supporter demonstrators might we guess were also ardent aficionados of 'Q', who has been cheer leading them on? So, of course they knew the demonstrators were coming - they actively encouraged them to come via 'Q' and other agents of theirs such as Kuntsler - and of course they could have stopped them if they had wanted to.
But what Kuntstler and Trump supporters in general (the latter whom are partially aware of the orchestration, but fail to absorb the fact that the genuine Trump supporters who showed up for that demonstration were in fact a key part of the orchestration!) who fail to see and will never admit even when you point out the proof, is that Trump himself has been part of that orchestration of these events, going back to the 2016 campaign. His repeated race baiting since that time has been an important element in egging on the overt and covert racists among his supporters, and of course has been an important element in provoking a predictable response from blacks and progressives who (like so many Trump supporters) simply are not paying attention to important details about what has been going on and thinking through the implications. Furthermore, it was Trump himself who was one of the leading actors doing the telegraphing of these events months before they took place. It was his own ridiculous statements long before the election took place, suggesting that he would refuse to accept the results of an election loss due to 'voter fraud' (which is itself a fraudulent concept, if you understand the important distinction between election fraud and 'voter fraud').
I am sick to fucking death of Trump supporters and Trump sympathizers (among many others who should know better!) referring to Dems and the corporate media as the left. This is part of the empire's very deliberate program to blur or even invert the old definitions of commonly used words, so that it becomes essentially impossible to have coherent discussions about events because nobody means the same thing when they use words like liberal, left, conservative, right, communism, socialism, fascism, etc., etc. The mainstream Dems and the corporate media are anything but leftist, they are demonstrably well to the right of center by the metric in common usage for decades.
And of course, both the 'left' and many elements that might more closely align with the actual left have been infiltrated and manipulated just as Trump foot soldiers have been. This has been going on for a century at least, but has gotten to be so prevalent over the past 20 years or so that it boggles the mind. Just like 'Q anon', 'antifa' is a classic Soros/CIA creation, nothing other than agent provocateur front group serving the agenda of the empire - and of course if you understand Soros' role in numerous 'color revolutions' around the globe in recent decades, including the CIA coup in Ukraine triggered by the Maidan massacre which they orchestrated, then you know that Soros is anything but the 'liberal/leftist' benefactor he pretends to be, and is generally seen as being by both the 'left' and the right.
The puppet masters obviously have their fingers into every single police agency in the US. They are the ones who have created the institutionalized racism in the US, every aspect of it from the hiring/recruitment policies of cops, their training by Zionist fascists in Israel, their DHS 'active shooter' training courses for cops, the racist drug laws deliberately targeting blacks, the CIA's introduction of crack into black ghettos, the 'stop and frisk' laws directed at blacks, the '3 strikes your out' laws which disproportionately target blacks, the immunity from prosecution given to cops which grants them impunity to commit murder of unarmed citizens in cold blood, etc., etc. The steadily increasing epidemic of cold blooded murders of unarmed and unresisting citizens - especially black citizens, most especially black men - at the hands of the police is all too real. The long simmering bitter outrage among blacks (and those that understand their plight) at these things is well justified, as are their efforts to organize resistance to these criminal depredations of their people.
Unfortunately, this has only created one more perfect opportunity for the oligarchy to exploit the emotional instincts and responses of both racists and their victims. They obviously have no compunction whatsoever about funding, infiltrating, and manipulating organizations on all sides, and inducing their unwitting members to participate in protests and counter protests that are used to serve the agenda of the empire.
Obviously, this whole 'civil war' skit has not yet fully played out, more is certainly coming. Kuntsler and Trump supporters are just as delusional about the idea that the insurrection act being triggered would work to the benefit of their chosen pro wrestling hero, as Dem foot soldiers are that any sort of martial law being imposed to stave off a 'coup' by Trump and his supporters would be to their own benefit. Both camps of partisans are oblivious, as always, to the indications that the national level politicians, including both Trump and Biden, are on the same side, in full collusion with the national security state and the corporate media to pull off this grand deception. Once again, please refer to my longer analysis to see the evidence from various sources I have presented there, which I believe spells out pretty clearly where they intend these staged events to lead us - i.e, the FEMA/Pentagon/CIA martial law state finally emerging from the shadows to 'restore law and order', and just incidentally, to impose the most draconian elements of their 'pandemic' agenda, including the full implementation of 'Operation Warp Speed'.
A final observation on what to me clearly are secondary yet important elements of their agenda with all of this, which Kuntsler touches on yet inevitably ignores Trump's role in - which is the way it is being used to engender support (or manufacture consent) for further measure to impose censorship and restrict free speech, and also their plan to pursue a major new propaganda campaign around 'domestic terrorism'. Interestingly enough, Trump himself is betraying his own supporters and endorsing this latter agenda.
Thanks Tessa. Same feeling. Feeling so heavy right now.
https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/01/toiling-together.html
When I was working at the Pinon clinic on the Navajo reservation, in 1991, somebody rushed in and called for me to "come quick, a lady has been shot". I rushed down the dirt street to see a middle aged Navajo woman's head and shoulders on the ground and her bottom and feet up in the passenger side of the open truck. I pulled her out onto the dirt and stabilized her head and airway. She breathed.
A hysterical white lady was praising God, "She's Alive! Praise God!"
The woman had been shot in the right eye and the bullet came out the back of her head. Her heart was beating.
Her breathing became deeper, more gasping, periodic, then occasional gasps, then no more.
Her pulse weakened, then trailed off.
A Young Navajo man wanted to do CPR. I said, "no, she just herniated her brainstem. She's dead."
EMS arrived and I declared her dead.
I walked back with dusty trousers to finish seeing strep throats and diabetes at the clinic, hours of ordinary work for the people.
It was really hard for me to keep moving, ploddingly practicing medicine, but I had to do it. They needed me to provide their care.
There is that no-way-out feeling. We have to do this together. Individual humans just don't survive.
Any one of us has to come forward into the new world with the rest of us.
We have to co-create a living world. Selfish motives cannot work any more.
Sharing-paradigm-or-bust.
That's the conundrum, like in the dream, when you are just about to hit the ground and you wake up.
Spiritually, in Buddhism, this anguished helplessness is the situation to drive the soul to transcend the physical constraints.
The only way to change the hopeless situation is through spiritual engagement.
I practiced channeling love to each person I saw, or whose presence I felt, on my bike rides to work Thursday and Friday.
I both did so and noticed my impediments in doing so.
I'm a spiritual Swiss cheese.
MC on the Titanic theory and existential crisis. Absolutely. My version points to the fact that the SEC was created after the 1929 crash that was caused by 5% margin trading. An equivalent of 5% in-the-money call options (ITM). It's widely publicized that in 2020, the dumbest of the dumb are driving up stocks using (deep) out-of-the-money (OTM) call options, particularly on leadership stocks like FANG and TSLA in spades.
Think about that for a second.
The Great Depression and FDR. The New Deal (voted down by the supreme court a few times, until he threatened to pack the court)... Also the securities act, the adviser's act - top notch regulation in the world until even today! Also a brief multi-decade stint and corrective course of socialism and central planning taking over "capitalisms-first US". Because that's what happens with leverage running amok!
And things were "fine" for many decades. Until early 1980's de-regulation, cause "big gov't bad". Late 1990's repeal of the division between commercial and investment banking... Cause socialism died and capitalism is THE truth. Uh-oh, right?
And now in 2020. We go back all the way to 0 and deep past it into the land of obscene leverage for the masses - AGAIN. Even 5% ITM margin is 20x leverage. It's always literally game over with 5% ITM. There's no bet in the world that doesn't take you to BK with 5% leverage. You have to bet tiny portions of your capital to not run the risk of ruin. As if!
But it's way worse!
When the SEC patiently looks the other way and lets armies of Robinhooders (tails) wag 60% of world's market cap (US stocks) using nothing but leveraged lottery tickets - deep OTM calls... it's because scapegoats are needed for the crash. The crash itself is assured. It's just CYA time.
1. Musk - a rich mostly unpopular white South African with bs businesses barely producing anything, who's know the world's richest person! (Think South Sea Bubble). Think Michel Milken on crack. But yeah, white South African - jail worthy and no one will complain.
2. The masses themselves, who "recklessly" speculated and crashed the system. If we couldn't blame the masses themselves, the masses would come for blood or regulators and gov't and instead they will be told how bad they were and what kind of bread, sugar, and flour coupons they will get each month. Along with a few coupons of circus and chill.
And yes, the reset is global. More of a Chinese/Russian style of more explicitly/admittedly centrally-controlled "capitalism". US has operated on a mirage of "free market" primacy since the late 1930's. WW2 helped. (MC on pearl harbor........). And then after USSR fell, capitalism gunned itself into the wall, on Churchil-esque strawman argument logic.
It's a miracle we bridged it from 2008 for 12 years on a mirage of health. Now it's transition time! And what we are witnessing now is a demolition.
So finely written, Tessa. Thank you once again for softening abhorrent politics with sprinklings of poetic heart.
You wrote: I keep hoping that the “constitution” people finally connect to the indigenous . . .
Yes! I had just written that exact sentiment elsewhere: "If Bernie progressives, we-the-people patriots, the Yellow Vests, indigenous peoples, and all the rest of the world’s 99% would just join hands, we could create a powerful transpartisan movement to abort The Great Reset’s dystopian agenda."
Waves of criminality are engulfing our planet in a crescendo of wickedness. And yet, opposing the end of civilization as we have known it, I am highly impressed and inspired by a vast flowering of creative thought, trenchant humor, principled politics, and spiritual renewal.
One promising way to subvert the oncoming juggernaut is for pods and pods of communities to self-organize and then reach out and connect with other pods and pods of communities. Small can stay small, and yet become big. And if everyone also actively connects to the morphogenetic field, we can unleash our own version of 4th gen warfare with Hundredth Monkey quantum energy.
Brinkmanship has a way of bringing out
If I sorted all of the writings about our current situation based on how well they resonate with my own thoughts and feelings, this would be right in the center. If I could amplify this a million times, I would. Too many of us pretend to know the truth, when in many cases the truth is unknowable. To express uncertainty and intuition is not weakness; it is wisdom. Fear drives us toward authoritarianism, and both sides play the game equally. When we are afraid, we seek to control those who disagree, those who we fear, and so even as the pendulum swings messily back and forth between "left" and "right" we follow a zigzag path toward the controlled, managed, feudalistic vision of the Great Reset and away from the ideals of representative democracy.
We need to speak against fear, to somehow collectively start to let go of fear and rebuild trust. To engage in "noncomplementary behavior", in confronting radicalization with compassion and thereby defusing rather than accelerating division and violence. We need to recognize that our fear-based desire for safety through control and dehumanization of dissenting views is almost certainly leading to a more violent and dangerous world, that could be avoided if we could let go of our fear and accept the humanity of the the opposing side - and begin to dialogue and compromise.
We need to somehow put a damper on the media "hyperbolization" of current events that is driving the fear. I'm not sure it's entirely intentional, as it can perhaps be self-reinforcing in a world where tribalism runs high, echo chambers are increasingly sealed, and the most dramatic stories get the most views and sell the most ads. But it needs to stop. Trump was not effing Hitler. The protest-turned-riot last Wednesday was nowhere near a coup. There is no parallel whatsoever to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The "violence" was pretty minimal relative to just about anything, and certainly to the sorts of violent coups that the US government regularly cheers and supports elsewhere in the world.
The mainstream media - on both sides - writes as if we are already fighting a civil war, as if protests are insurrections, as if microaggressions are bullets. And the more we believe that we are fighting such a war, the more possible an actual war becomes, which would be the stupidest and most tragic thing ever, to destroy lives and livelihoods and communities over largely manufactured dissent.
I see Matt Taibbi just published a piece called "We Need a New Media System", which will be my next reading. But how do we expand this movement against fear, this return to reason and return to the heart, from a few writers on the fringes to a movement for change?
Thank you for writing!
Mark
A truly great post, Tessa. Thanks.
This article is brilliant.
has predicted everything that was going to happen once the"pandemic".began.He calls this Year Zero, not just for America but for the entire West.But he doesn't convey your emotion, your yearning for love and beauty. You help connect the heart and mind. And I think that we can heal by putting the right things in our bodies and minds and sharing ideas with open minded and openn hearted people. But we will need to fight to stay human. You remind us that we don't want to become the dehumanized monsters we are fighting.
Bravo, Tessa. Few Americans possess your level of critical thinking, and even fewer can express it in such a flowing manner. Some of your reader's heads probably blew up when you didn't blatantly offer our President up to be crucified, but that's their problem.
Wait until you see what happens between now and January 20th.
As I read through your essay, I kept saying to myself, "Yes! Yes!! That's it exactly!!!" . So many accurate truths presented so elegantly. I don't expect others to have your skill, but it continues to really scare me that I find few who even are attempting to articulate these truths. I may print this on old parchment and hang it on the wall under the heading, Declaration of Truths. I find these truths to be self evident, but continue to be shocked at how few that I know currently seem to share this view.
Thucydides (Athenian veteran and historian) wrote 2450 year ago in his 'History of the Peloponnesian War' how the evils that his Athenian Empire brought to others eventually found their way back home.
That is exactly what has happened to the US today.
The protests and the color revolutions that the US organized and executed abroad to further regime change have finally found their way home.
Hallo Tessa!
Finally I'm not too late to the party :)
You have a way with words. Your writing resonates, because I'm too born and raised in under the Soviet regime, witnessed the end of the imperium, emigrated to the West and now I watch in dismay how the world tumbles down the same old shitter again. Greetings from this cranky old Pole.
Say, are you familiar with the works of Janusz Zajdel? He was a sci-fi writer in the eighties. Especially "Paradise. The World in Orbit" and "Limes inferior". Sooo many parallels with what happens today...
Now I go back to lurking quietly.
That was wonderful and soothing in a letting go with sadness kind of way. Like a breakup letter to someone you still love but know it's not mutual. Thank you. I love your writing.
Tessa,
I recently subscribed here, and I wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts on an often hostile and extremely manipulated internet. I feel like you put into words a lot of the sentiments I have, and I sincerely hope are more widely shared.
I live in a very "blue" area surrounded by middle class white people who have lived in the United States their entire lives (I was born here as well). My generation (I'm 30) has grown up one of the richest and most powerful empires ever, and I don't think they realize just what a historical aberration the post 1990 United States has been. They are aware of many of the historical and current injustices in America, but I don't think they get what true poverty, strife, and authoritarianism look like. That stuff was always somewhere else in time or space. They grew up being able to more or less trust their institutions. Even if they rolled their eyes at the news or the government, the grocery store shelves were full and the lights always turned on.
It's frankly a little embarrassing for me to listen to them call Trump a "dictator." Many of them sincerely think they help vote a bona fide dictator out of office. However foul and corrupt Trump is (and he is), he simply does not have enough support among the elite to be anything close to what they imagine him to be. If he truly was a fascist dictator, he would be spoken about in hushed tones and certainly wouldn't be able to be voted out of office, or have the appearance of that happening (I don't know or care what really happened. There are bigger things going on).
I think the middle class generation I've been talking about has been raised on the promise of progress. Our society was supposed to be progressing towards one of universal satisfaction. Things like Trump and 'global pandemics' are Not Supposed to Happen at this point in their timeline. I wonder if the emotionalism about both is in reality a crisis of faith in the religion of progress. It may be less scary for them to help destroy our society over these events than it is to start to truly question the notion that we can solve all human problems if we try hard enough.
At this point, I'm trying to connect with people who are keeping their eye on the biggest threat of them all: The attempted technocratic takeover of human life (which is itself rooted in the idea of progress). I don't think progressive realize how well their worldview aligns with the goals of the ultra wealthy. Whether its through manipulation or coincidence, the society of universal satisfaction progressives want and the total control the technocrats want are converging and may be two sides of the same coin. The imperial and colonial projects are snapping back on to the United States. As unpleasant as this is for someone who lives here, there does seem to be "karma" involved in this process.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and perspective. I value your work and your insight on these topics.
p.s. what's the thousand words the photo tells? it says nothing to me... ?
Good one, Tessa. Thought I'd put up a reply I just sent a friend regarding a new piece by James Kunstler, because it focuses on these same events you write about here:
Yeah, gotta agree with your friend who thinks Kuntsler is the 'real deal' - I think he's the real deal myself - a real gatekeeper for the empire! I'd call that piece of his a mixed bag at best, but right in that first sentence he confirms my earlier assessment of him. On 9/11, he's pushing the good old 'they knew it was coming and let it happen' misdirection, which is their #1 'alternate reality' scenario for those who are skeptical of their official narrative, the version which appeals to the most mainstream oriented skeptics. There were numerous pre planted bits of 'evidence' to support this misdirection, just as there were with the other 'alternate reality' misdirection ploys on 9/11 such as the 'missing 28 pages' that have been intermittently hyped in the media (which Trump promised to declassify and never did) but never published, which we are led to believe would reveal that 'the Saudis dunnit!'. Then there is that very interesting story around 'the dancing Israelis' which many take to be proof that 'the Israelis dunnit!'. Of course the Pakistani ISI and the Saudis played minor supporting roles in abetting the misdirection ploys, and both the Israelis and the Brits played major supporting roles in the misdirection ploys and/or the actual events of 9/11, but anyone with a grain of intelligence who has delved deeply into the mass of evidence should understand that the overwhelming majority of the culpability can be laid upon various elements of the US government itself.
His comparison of what happened in DC to the events of 9/11 seems semi plausible until you think about it further. Yes, absolutely - in both cases there was plenty of 'evidence' that they 'knew it was coming'....but this is only because they had carefully planned both of these events well in advance, and in fact had been planting 'evidence' and telegraphing the coming events months before they happened. I have no doubt at all that the 'insurrection' at the white house was fully orchestrated, including government infiltration and manipulation of Trump supporters, and of course ordering the DC police to in effect 'stand down'. As you know, I firmly believe 'Q anon' is a CIA psyop, and what percentage of those genuine Trump supporter demonstrators might we guess were also ardent aficionados of 'Q', who has been cheer leading them on? So, of course they knew the demonstrators were coming - they actively encouraged them to come via 'Q' and other agents of theirs such as Kuntsler - and of course they could have stopped them if they had wanted to.
But what Kuntstler and Trump supporters in general (the latter whom are partially aware of the orchestration, but fail to absorb the fact that the genuine Trump supporters who showed up for that demonstration were in fact a key part of the orchestration!) who fail to see and will never admit even when you point out the proof, is that Trump himself has been part of that orchestration of these events, going back to the 2016 campaign. His repeated race baiting since that time has been an important element in egging on the overt and covert racists among his supporters, and of course has been an important element in provoking a predictable response from blacks and progressives who (like so many Trump supporters) simply are not paying attention to important details about what has been going on and thinking through the implications. Furthermore, it was Trump himself who was one of the leading actors doing the telegraphing of these events months before they took place. It was his own ridiculous statements long before the election took place, suggesting that he would refuse to accept the results of an election loss due to 'voter fraud' (which is itself a fraudulent concept, if you understand the important distinction between election fraud and 'voter fraud').
It was these statements of Trump's that were cited by the organizers of the 'Transition Integrity Project' as the very reason for their 'concern'. You might want to read the last segment of my long analysis of that script again to consider all of the details there in the light of what went down in Washington last week. It was, after all, exactly what they had predicted LAST JUNE! My long analysis which I put together is here: https://markcrispinmiller.com/2020/11/is-this-post-election-struggle-meant-to-touch-off-civil-war-to-justify-the-big-crackdown-long-but-well-worth-reading/
I am sick to fucking death of Trump supporters and Trump sympathizers (among many others who should know better!) referring to Dems and the corporate media as the left. This is part of the empire's very deliberate program to blur or even invert the old definitions of commonly used words, so that it becomes essentially impossible to have coherent discussions about events because nobody means the same thing when they use words like liberal, left, conservative, right, communism, socialism, fascism, etc., etc. The mainstream Dems and the corporate media are anything but leftist, they are demonstrably well to the right of center by the metric in common usage for decades.
And of course, both the 'left' and many elements that might more closely align with the actual left have been infiltrated and manipulated just as Trump foot soldiers have been. This has been going on for a century at least, but has gotten to be so prevalent over the past 20 years or so that it boggles the mind. Just like 'Q anon', 'antifa' is a classic Soros/CIA creation, nothing other than agent provocateur front group serving the agenda of the empire - and of course if you understand Soros' role in numerous 'color revolutions' around the globe in recent decades, including the CIA coup in Ukraine triggered by the Maidan massacre which they orchestrated, then you know that Soros is anything but the 'liberal/leftist' benefactor he pretends to be, and is generally seen as being by both the 'left' and the right.
The puppet masters obviously have their fingers into every single police agency in the US. They are the ones who have created the institutionalized racism in the US, every aspect of it from the hiring/recruitment policies of cops, their training by Zionist fascists in Israel, their DHS 'active shooter' training courses for cops, the racist drug laws deliberately targeting blacks, the CIA's introduction of crack into black ghettos, the 'stop and frisk' laws directed at blacks, the '3 strikes your out' laws which disproportionately target blacks, the immunity from prosecution given to cops which grants them impunity to commit murder of unarmed citizens in cold blood, etc., etc. The steadily increasing epidemic of cold blooded murders of unarmed and unresisting citizens - especially black citizens, most especially black men - at the hands of the police is all too real. The long simmering bitter outrage among blacks (and those that understand their plight) at these things is well justified, as are their efforts to organize resistance to these criminal depredations of their people.
Unfortunately, this has only created one more perfect opportunity for the oligarchy to exploit the emotional instincts and responses of both racists and their victims. They obviously have no compunction whatsoever about funding, infiltrating, and manipulating organizations on all sides, and inducing their unwitting members to participate in protests and counter protests that are used to serve the agenda of the empire.
Obviously, this whole 'civil war' skit has not yet fully played out, more is certainly coming. Kuntsler and Trump supporters are just as delusional about the idea that the insurrection act being triggered would work to the benefit of their chosen pro wrestling hero, as Dem foot soldiers are that any sort of martial law being imposed to stave off a 'coup' by Trump and his supporters would be to their own benefit. Both camps of partisans are oblivious, as always, to the indications that the national level politicians, including both Trump and Biden, are on the same side, in full collusion with the national security state and the corporate media to pull off this grand deception. Once again, please refer to my longer analysis to see the evidence from various sources I have presented there, which I believe spells out pretty clearly where they intend these staged events to lead us - i.e, the FEMA/Pentagon/CIA martial law state finally emerging from the shadows to 'restore law and order', and just incidentally, to impose the most draconian elements of their 'pandemic' agenda, including the full implementation of 'Operation Warp Speed'.
A final observation on what to me clearly are secondary yet important elements of their agenda with all of this, which Kuntsler touches on yet inevitably ignores Trump's role in - which is the way it is being used to engender support (or manufacture consent) for further measure to impose censorship and restrict free speech, and also their plan to pursue a major new propaganda campaign around 'domestic terrorism'. Interestingly enough, Trump himself is betraying his own supporters and endorsing this latter agenda.
Well said, Tess. You can't figure it out can you? Yep. No one can. We'll all keep trying. :)