Conducting the already known

Yesterday evening there was an ad on TV in which ordinary-seeming people were proclaiming how wrong-headed it would be to tax domestic exploration for gas and oil.  That would hurt ordinary people like us.  I wasn’t really paying much attention, but then it hit me: I’m listening to an Ad paid for by companies like Exxon, using their power and wealth to hold onto their obscene profits and subsidies at the expense of other more hopeful alternatives.  Then this morning I finished this week’s DTS reading and found in it the terrible anatomy of how it is possible for this kind of abuse of power to bring a world to its knees.  It’s easy to find villians, but it’s clear that I’m also caught up in the very process that makes all this possible.  Surronded by confusion and adamant voices, all in their way convinced that their views are alone right, it feels as if any kind of certainty threatens to conduct into the world some new monstrosity.  Isn’t it impressive that books written 20 or more years ago have described this state of affairs so accurately?  It is depressing also.  And what can we do about it?  Are there threads of time that can be woven into some other tapestry than this dismal realm of helplessness and preordained defeat?  In our online TSK postings, we never really write about the state of the world.  I guess it isn’t very helpful to do so.  Our work here must be on ourselves, so that we at least don’t add to the insanity.  But this morning, I felt like bringing up how we don’t have to look far to see examples of the dreadful cost of mindlessly conducting forward such terribly familiar but lifeless images, which thereby replace a living awareness of our lives.  And as for the buying and selling of the empty paper that claimed to be investments for the future (the bundled “derivatives”, which bankrupted the financial sector)–they perhaps went a step beyond the mere “happeneded”; they seem to have completely cut the connection to a greater time in which past and future can potentially recognize their kinship with one another. — Michael