THINGS HAPPEN

      .... for a reason. People, when confronted with confusing or troubling events, often think that to say that "there's always a reason" is the best thing to say. It is just that we do not understand the why, it seems and so we are to take some nebulous amount of comfort from those meaningless and even hurtful words. Words can be as soft as a down pillow or as harsh and ungiving as a stone wall.

Where do these words come from? They come from us. They come from the people we supposedly copy or trust or admire or hate. Their words and ours that follow are of dire importance. Unfortunately we forget that and the result: shoot one's mouth off, ergo, something happens. It is a version of the butterfly effect wherein one small inconsequential action on one side of the globe leads to ever growing consequences and finally - disaster.

"Fiction isn't just what you find in books. It's the lies we tell ourselves. They can be sturdy lies we use as scaffolding, lies with an abrasive edge to scour our consciences clean, lies that settle over things we'd rather not see.... There are many other permutations, but whatever form they take, these are lies that we love and loathe. The only way to avoid creating your own fiction is not to think at all."   (Character in novel To Tell You the Truth)

So things do happen for a reason and those reasons for all those happenings often originate in our own minds, mouths and tongues and in our acceptance of them as gospel, refusing to think or evaluate for ourselves. Hence, the confused and confusing situation in which we are presently living. One question arises time and time again. What is the truth and how are we to separate it from all the conditions and feelings and motives that surround that hard to find truth. And once found, how do we incorporate it within our bruised and battered brains and souls? How do we avoid the fiction we create by believing those lies? More important even, especially when the fiction of lies has been flowing in such huge amounts and producing dangerous currents, is how do we reverse the situation, recognize the fiction perpetuated on us and which we so willingly began to believe and spread as etched in stone?

Today, 36 days or so prior to Election Day, a day on which we truly will be judging ourselves, picking our destiny, rejecting or accepting of the fiction we now live in, it is time to sit down and think. Think with an open mind. Think without self pride and protection that will force you to defend your poor choices up till now. Think as a whole, rather than on one tiny part of life. Think and evaluate the core values of this country. Think how we have always held to them even as we made gross decisions, terrible decisions, turned false to those beliefs.

 Yet there were those and are still those, who keep a steady hand on the wheel, waiting for the storm of fiction, of the bad and dangerous fiction, to abate and then step in to turn our country, our America, back on track. Honor, honesty, acceptance, leadership, truth, empathy and caring for the weak and helpless - that is what we are, who we are, and the current toxic fiction we have created - well, it needs to go. Now. This minute, for the hands of the clock for USA Doomsday are hitting the midnight hour. After us, thus follows the world, and that's all the fiction that counts, no erasures any more. All the red lines will have been crossed and that fiction will be the last one we ever do. Things happen.

What is the dangerous fiction we have allowed to take over our lives? What is the dangerous fiction we have swallowed whole, accepting the lies, the coverups, the next lies that refute the first lies, the complete and total abdication to corruption and greed, to crass behavior and a lack of empathy to such a degree that is found only in sociopaths, along with their ability to mesmerize their audiences into believing their fiction, their harmful, dangerous, existence threatening fiction.

For four years we have been swallowed whole by the fiction of Trump and henchmen. We have allowed the erasure of goodness from our nation. We have allowed that fiction to convince us that the morally challenged GOP is really simply admiring the clothes of that truly naked emperor. We have convinced ourselves that it is okay, in this fiction, to hate others, to scream and shout words of hate and to act upon that hate. We have allowed this country to forsake its responsibilities to the world, to its needy, to its struggling middle class. This fiction has catered strictly to the upper, upper wealthy and no amount of lies can cover that over. 

This Trump fiction has finally been truly punctured. After all these years, finally, his returns are open and hello, America!!! This man is a total and complete fraud. He is basically broke or will be in the very near future. He is corrupt and dangerously cynical and noncaring, derisive of his duty towards his country, contemptuous of the truth. He has lied, blatantly so. Even now, he denies the truth and when pushed to the wall, says it is okay, his right to avoid taxes, his right to shirk all that is right in his skewed, nasty fiction.

Worst of all is the fact that his fiction has swallowed ours whole. He has driven nails between the generations, between members of families, driven away the very idea, the very gestalt that is America. Can we defy his fiction? We had better if we want  a viable future for our kids and grandkids, for the world.

            " 'Tis a fearful thing

              to love what death can touch."

       Yehuda Halevi, 12th century Jewish physician, poet and philosopher.

I love America. Period. It is not perfect and at times lives in a fiction that is all wrong. Then we recognize that and redo it. That time is here and now. That time is more urgent than ever.

For the sake of all you love, do not allow it to die, for America to crumble into dust, with only faint echoes to be found in space and in the dirt of its crumbled civilization. Think and reject that which is wrong and then go vote. VOTE.