Schoolroom Roulette
I know I’m beating a silent drum
In more ways than one
Watching from our sanguine seats
How soon till the violence repeats
The student’s passion is very inspiring
All because one had some loose wiring
Unfortunately their work will not be done
Based on how easy it is to get a gun
Blaming a video game has no merits
When responsibilities lie on the parents
Scapegoating games is for alarmers
Otherwise we’d have more farmers
Okay, enough bad rhyming for a moment.
How is it, that on one hand, it is entirely acceptable to take a volunteer (dangle enough college carrot cash in front of a high school graduate / GED recipient with perceived minimum alternative options and a minimal risk of life and limb, roll of the dice, you will get your volunteers) feed, house, train and pay him or her to get in good shape.
Then teach some of them how to use, clean and fire, similar assault rifles. Send them off to some sovereign citizens section of the sphere to selectively steal their resident resources and if they refuse, empty ballistic bullets into bodies and onto buildings.
Yet, on the other hand, when a loose cannon does it here for no reason or resources to steal from students, we are left scratching our heads trying desperately to hide the hypocrisy. When our taxes support it over wherever and are paid out here trying to prevent it.
Maybe that is why no agency or agent wants to restrict their use. It would wake up too many people.
That would be dangerous.
“Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control.”
– Bill Hicks
I have GPS for driving
Need one for writing
The title is my map
Which subsequently
Gets thrown in the
Glove compartment
Leaving me trying
To remember where
I planned on going
With any particular post
Find after stopping
For coffee and peeing
Donuts and distraction
Subsequently end up
Taking the wrong on ramp
Am still on pavement
Just in a different direction
Could use the
“Authorized” vehicles only
Turnaround but don’t
Want to lose my
Poetic license
Besides it is not a
Good road / screen trip
Without a little
Side adventure
Also, the back seat
Drivers (voices in my head)
Are all feeding me
Way, way, way way
Way too much information
Would need a fourth
Or fifth set of hands
To stenographically
Capture the suggestions
To get to a destination
Any destination
Regardless the original
Blog post road map
Which is still lying
Dormant in the glove box
Which may or may not
Be a Good Thing
“If A is a success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. Work is X; Y is play, and Z is keeping your mouth shut.”
– Albert Einstein
Whoever the proverbial “they” are, said.
“The squeaky wheel gets the grease”
The way it was taught to me was.
“The squeaky wheel gets replaced.”
Methinks have been better served by the latter, as the arrogance of my humility reminds me as to how replaceable I am.
Epidemic just sounds large and must affect a lot of people.
Crisis is a critical point at which things change.
As they relate to “opiods” the only crisis will be is if the pharmaceutical companies stop over grossly stop profiting from it.
“This is a place where alcohol ruins more lives than cancer, and everybody gets upset when some athlete gets hooked on cocaine.
You know Time Magazine and Newsweek put cocaine on the cover, but they put the liquor advertisements inside the magazine.
It’s the old American double standard, you know say one thing and do something different.”
– George Carlin
Out of everything I perceive that I might remotely think I understand, the least of which, would be is taxes.
For as taxes relate to money, the trouble begins with its abstract existence in the first place.
Save for a few dollars in my wallet, as a physical tangible “currency”. Occasionally exchanged fairly for a snack or a soda.
“Something else that bugs me, // people who pay for inexpensive items with a credit card. You know, folks, take my word for this, Raisinettes is not a major purchase.
Get some #ucking cash together. No one should be paying a bank 18 % interest on Tic-Tac’s.
Your holding up the #ucking line too, // waiting to be approved for a bag of cheese doodles.//
Get some #ucking money. Next guy ahead of me online pays for Newsweek with a credit card is getting stabbed in the eyes.”
– George Carlin
The rest, which is allegedly something that I “earn” from “working”. Also “grow” or “shrink” from investments, does not “exist”. Other than what is printed on a piece of paper or digitized as pixels on a screen.
Numbers, that’s it. Graphic lead, ink or digitized geometric curves and lines that at sometime, somewhere, someone made up.
(“Nothing will #uck you up as much, as the realization, that there is no real reason, the alphabet needs to be in order”
– Unknown )
Much like the letters used to make up the words used to make up the definitions made up to describe them.
Made up, arbitrarily and essentially out of thin air, or heavy air. (Air is air, right.) Distinctly representing a “value”.
(Technically, shouldn’t 3 be half (1/2) the value of 8?)
Numbers from zero to nine, with no bleens* between, arranged in a consistent hierarchical “valued” order. Justified using dollar signs, commas and decimal points.
Making me realize the illusion of what I do “have” is essentially zilch, since it is backed by nothing more substantial than ink and paper, diodes and processors, silicone and servers.
The part I do get, is the conscious or unconscious choice that the collective has agreed to, by using these virtual terabyte tokens to play the game we’ve selected to participate in, observe, or both.
How you acquire and spend your digital dollars, then becomes a part of you.
Being impressed with someone who has more than you is like being awestruck by the solidity of a hologram.
Relinquishing your personal power to them sacrifices the sanctity of your soul.
* “The Nobel Prize in mathematics was awarded to a California professor who has discovered a new number! The number is bleen, which he claims belongs between 6 and 7.”
— George Carlin
Continued on “Way Beyond The Pale”
It is kind of bizarre to consider what can be done with or without money/taxes as it has such an arbitrary existence in the first place.
Once heard that if everyone was paid cash from their career/job once a week and someone came by to collect 25 – 40% of it, there would an immediate revolution as to how that money would best be spent.
Meanwhile, most people, including myself, simply accept that a substantial portion of their income gets transfered from their employer to the government to do as they see fit.
Granted, some of it goes to schools, teachers, roads, bridges, sewage, also water “treatment” plants and airports.
All well and good, however, another sizeable portion goes to the military industrial complex. A for commerce killing cadre.
Our sub-un-conscious dark side. That, we know is there……, but fail to recognize.
Hmm. Why? Well, people need to eat, and in general, need to keep a roof over their heads. Plus, it needs to be warmed or cooled, so the people inside are “comfortable”.
Then they need a vehicle to go to and from work and to a grocery store. Am suspecting it would be redundant to explain what we already know.
Redundancies be damned. The only person I am writing this for is me.
Somebody, somewhere is melting lead for a bullet. Someone else is boring out a rifle barrel, someone is putting an engine in a tank. Replacing the release mechanism for a cruise missile on a jet fighter. Putting a “live” camera on it. All of which they get paid for, which in turn revolves into the economy.
“It was pretty amazing, you’ve got to admit, watching a missile fly down an air vent. Pretty unbelievable. But couldn’t we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?
You know what I mean? Fly over Ethiopia, there’s a guy that needs a banana….
Stealth Banana. ……… Smart Fruit…..”
– Bill Hicks
– “The War” (first gulf war)
– “Flying Saucer Tour”
So, we hedge our bet, and roll the dice that we will not be directly affected by it. Meanwhile, it continues to take a larger portion of our income. All under the guise of National security.
Perhaps we should rename the Defense Department the Chamber of Commerce.
I thought that by now, with all of the information and technology available, we would have beaten our swords into plow shares. Making this an evolving peaceful sharing world to explore the infinity of the cosmos, discovering new dimensions.
Yet, kind of understand why we haven’t, since there’d be nothing to write about. I would be floating in space near a nebula pondering what new worlds I might create. Here’s some for starters.
Create new instruments for different sounds, new languages for better understanding and communications. Bigger hearts for more love, larger brains for greater intelligence.
That is the power each one of us has.
To hell with the money and gov’t taxes.
That kind of PR from anyone else but
Sarah Huckabee Sanders
SHS: Tom, your question
Tom: Can you please explain why the president continues to shit on the US Constitution? Is it because he can’t read and thinks it is toilet paper?
SHS: The president can read fine, he told me so this morning, as he peered over his crayon box. Before he tweeted, glimpses of his intelligence.
As for the constitution, it turns out that the president has special enzymes in his digestive tract when so combined with McDonald’s food and propecia residue, it forms a special emollient. His odorless excrement smeared on aging papyrus, brings it back lfe.
Suze: Since Jared will no longer be able to walk the president through the PDB how will he get this information?
SHS: The president will soon be getting the PDB’s from Faux News. As they have made their broadcast so nauseatingly soul draining and power glorifying that the only person left watching it, is who it was geared towards.
Bill: Is it true, no previous administration could have blatantly gotten away with so many lies, deceptions, distractions, collusion, false promises, by scapegoating immigrants, holding the constitution in contempt, making policy in 140 characters or less, manipulating markets as insider trading to benefit his billionaire buddies, while schmoozing foreign presidents who manipulated the voting system of our alleged democracy?
Why is that?
SHS: To answer your question, the last thing I would want to do is quote a democrat. However it is the quickest most direct answer I can think of.
As James Carville would say.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Just so Americans keep on consuming
Even though a Korean War is looming
Lest that’s just a ruse used for distracting
From an investigation that is happening
Lives of innocent students are dooming
Availing guns for hands that like shooting
Which could have stopped he’s claiming
Without even a cape 45’s maintaining
Until the teacher’s heat they start packing
Might even help with Johnny’s spelling
Certainly keep classrooms from yelling
On a home planet that we are ruining
Lying about a wall and neighbors paying
By an administration bent on deceiving
Capital fence can’t keep staff from leaving
Take away their guns, his base is fuming
That will start the process of impeaching
Or the 25th amendment be implementing
This new job kind of slowed his groping
As far as we can tell we are all hoping
Still can’t decide if dreamers are staying
Contemplate while a golf game playing
Promised us he wouldn’t he kept saying
One of hundreds of things he was lying
Trying to gain Putin’s affection he’s vying
First clue was the James Comey firing
A quid pro quo for Hillary Clinton spying
Paying a porn star off try keep quieting
A claim that he is not remotely denying
Maintain his reputation for womanizing
Doesn’t understand why Melania is crying
The only thing he has done in legislating
The amount paid in his taxes curtailing
Billionaire’s souls they are forsaking
If guns kill and nobody wants to be killed or have their children be killed. It is a strange argument by the few that affect, effect and infect, the all, of guns intended purpose, infused in the illusion of defense.
Beyond IT IS IN THE CONSTITUTION, IT IS IN THE CONSTITUTION. See, see, bears have the right to have arms.
Fantastic, one of 27 modifications in a document written in the vaguest of language and open to infinite interpretations by a bunch of land holding slave owners, 250 + years ago.
That’s worth hanging your hat on. Besides, if this current administration wipes its ass with the constitution one more time, we will not be able to read it anyway.
(Sorry ladies, still no equal rights amendment. It is as if it gets amended one more time we will have to admit it is too broke to fix.)
Yet, outside of the circular argument of rights and freedom, we want somebody……to shoot the shooter?
Unfortunately I’ve no solution. However soul jarring the ramifications could be of utilizing no retaliation. Like how Gandhi was able to end British colonialism through peaceful resistance.
I’m quite sure no parent would want to hedge their child in the bet that he or she would not be felled next, if no one did anything to stop the shooter and just let them run out of ammunition.
Nor would any student want to self immolate under gun fire to protest the violence. Perpetrated by someone who simply had too much unfettered access and was “defending” nothing.
“I’m one of those people who doesn’t really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”
Jake Epping AKA George Amberson
From Stephen King’s “11/22/63”
(The guns used in the Kennedy assassination were not used in defense.)
One thing that could change is the language surrounding what we believe. One of the affected students referred to the AR as a weapon of war.
More accurate, and truth telling would be if it was called a weapon of commerce.
When the United States Government’s employees, train citizens now converted to military personnel. Ways to use these same weapons as a means of securing the land, for what is in, under and around it. Not only in other countries, this one. Dare I mention the Dakota pipeline?
Making the illegality of looting relative, as to who is doing the looting. What is being looted and the groups profiting from it.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
– Smedley D. Butler,
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
We have sent persons to the moon and back, have vehicles and probes on Mars. Information sensors and data collectors in deep space. Live in an international research lab magically floating above the atmosphere.
You would think that the collective could come up with a less violent and deadly means to share in resources of energy.
Maybe what is missing is reasonable profit sharing, whereas the corporment (corporations and government) would do what is right and simply pay for what they need.
Thereby eliminating the need to have any weapons of commerce to be sold to angry students going after his classmates.
Excerpts from:
Harry Chapin’s
“Sniper”
“The song, nearly 10 minutes long, is based on the shootings at the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966, with some fictional elements. The song does not name the actual sniper, Charles Whitman, or the location. The victims’ names have also been changed.”
– Wikipedia
“He heads towards the tower that stands in the campus.
He goes through the door, he starts up the stairs.
The sound of his footsteps, the sound of his breathing,
The sound of the silence when no one was there.
I didn’t really know him.
He was kind of strange.
Always sort of sat there.
He never seemed to change.”
//
He was such a moody child, very hard to touch.
Even as a baby he never smiled too much. No no. No no.
You bug me, she said.
Your ugly, she said.
Please hug me, I said.
But she just sat there
With the same flat stare
That she saves for me alone
When I’m home.
When I’m home.
Take me home.
He laid out the rifles, he loaded the shotgun,
He stacked up the cartridges along the wall.
He knew he would need them for his conversation.
If it went as it he planned, then he might use them all.
He said Listen you people I’ve got a question
You won’t pay attention but I’ll ask anyhow.
I found a way that will get me an answer.
Been waiting to ask you ’till now.
Right now !
Am I ?
I am a lover whose never been kissed.
Am I ?
I am a fighter whose not made a fist.
Am I ?
If I’m alive then there’s so much I’ve missed.
How do I know I exist ?
Are you listening to me ?
Are you listening to me ?
Am I ?
//
He was kind of creepy,
Sort of a dunce.
I met him at the corner bar.
I only dated the poor boy once,
That’s all. Just once, that was all.
//
(14 students 3 teachers)
Thirty-seven people got his message so far.
Yes, he was reaching them right were they are.
They set up an assault team. They asked for volunteers.
They had to go and get him, that much was clear.
And the word spread about him on the radios and TV’s.
In appropriately sober tone they asked “Who can it be ?”
He was a very dull boy, very taciturn.
Not much of a joiner, he did not want to learn.
No no. No no.
They’re coming to get me, they don’t want to let me
Stay in the bright light too long.
It’s getting on noon now, it’s goin to be soon now.
But oh, what a wonderful sound !
Mama, won’t you nurse me ?
Rain me down the sweet milk of your kindness.
Mama, it’s getting worse for me.
Won’t you please make me warm and mindless ?
Mama, yes you have cursed me.
I never will forgive you for your blindness.
I hate you!
The wires are all humming for me.
And I can hear them coming for me.
Soon they’ll be here, but there’s nothing to fear.
Not any more though they’ve blasted the door.
//
Am I ?
There is no way that you can hide me.
Am I ?
Though you have put your fire inside me.
Am I ?
You’ve given me my answer can’t you see ?
I was !
I am !
And now I Will Be
I WILL BE !!!”
There is no self defense
As there is no self to defend
Not when you or anyone
Is a part of the whole
Yes, you are an individual
An individual spark
Of the divine
What is done to one
Is done to all
Must recognize that soon
Or not
We will still always be
Included in the infinitely
Indefensible indivisible
Greater self
“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.
You’ll never know who you are unless you shed who you pretend to be.”
Vironika Tugaleva
Disguised as a human being
Mirror reflects what I’m seeing
The part missing is the feeling
Except the one that is seething
From which others are reeling
Sounds from the mask is talking
Ranting about nothing squawking
When it is not silently sulking
Moving about looks like walking
From evolving always balking
Have a skewed view of reality
Always grasping the duality
Believing not one an actuality
Stoically hiding the fragility
Having no clue of spirituality
Ability to communicate lacking
Mid sentence always redacting
Save from being too exacting
Of information based on nothing
Revealing still bad at disguising
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.
There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first”
Jim Morrison
Shit…..
Looking at the world through a windshield. 