Waking The Dead

From Independence to Resurrection

To JS/07 M 378

This Marble Monument

Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a

   saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content 

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.

He was married and added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his

   generation.

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their

   education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

W.H. Auden

Identifying the dead or hopefully the only sleeping, is, of course, a necessary aspect of resurrection. Can’t raise the living. They are already raised or awake so to speak. So, if comfort, as the Master said, is the cemetery of the spirit, then we know where to find the sleeping, the dying and already dead. They live next door to the Unknown Citizen in The Waste Land about which T.S. Eliot talked so eloquently in his great, celebrated, but neither heard nor understood, and praised, but not practiced, poem by that name.

Since the titanic struggle for Independence was waged in 1775-76—titanic because of the Principles involved rather than the number of dollars spent or people killed—we have become the “most powerful” Nation in the world. That struggle involved virtually every one of the approximately 2,400,000 people in the Thirteen Colonies who was big enough to participate at some level in the Struggle. Gradually, over the intervening two and a quarter centuries or so, many, many millions of “We, the People” have become disengaged from the vision and vitality that drove our struggle for independence.

Among the estimated 212 million eligible voters in 2008, 81 million did not vote. Of the 131 million that did vote, 52 % voted for the present President. 45% voted for the losing person. This is Democracy.

Probably a large number of these eligible non-voters are members of the lower rungs of the economic scale. These folks do not participate because they have been disenfranchised by their poverty. They feel futile and useless. In resurrecting these brothers and sisters, we need to reignite that spark of fire that drove us in the beginning to fight and die for our freedom from the then most powerful nation in the world, Great Brittan.

However a huge number of these sleeping or relatively dead whom we must resurrect, are not the poverty stricken or “dirt poor”. They inhabitant the so called, rapidly dwindling, “middle class.” These folks are in the “middle class” because, on the scale of material accretions, or shell like bodies that turn humans into lobsters, they stand between the poverty stricken and the wealthy. Many of the wealthy are beyond resurrection because they are already lobsterized or simply beyond resurrection or, more bluntly, soul dead.

These folks in the middle are the sleep walkers the dying, the almost dead. These are the “Hollow Men”, the somnambulistic “head pieces filled with straw” about whom T.S. Eliot was talking.

“Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass.

Middle class, in my life time, has always been an euphemism that meant not really acceptable but not quite noxious. Like W.H. Auden’s Unknown Citizen, the family had a house, or at least a mortgage they could pay, a car sometime even two cars. The kids had shoes and relatively stylish clothes to wear. Christmas, a time of incredible disappointment and emotional stress, was still a time of presents even if they were disappointing. We went on vacations around the country. Maybe the mother worked which meant that we could “upscale” a bit, move, maybe a couple of blocks closer to the beach, or to a slightly less obnoxious neighborhood.

It also meant that little attention was paid to anything that did not have to do with sustaining and working to “upgrade” this “life style”.

There were no mental patients walking the streets. In those days. If by chance one had the uncomfortable experience of seeing a mental patient or a homeless person—which was the operative euphemism before there were literally tens of thousands of certifiably sane homeless people who were, able and employable human beings living in the cars they had somehow managed to keep out of the hands of the repo men or just walking the streets and pushing their grocery carts full of black plastic bags and random collectibles that may be useful on a cold night—the only attention they got was a phone call to the police, and, sort of, like a disfiguring weed in the dichondra, the comfort offending person was pulled up, or sprayed with something so he or she would go away.

Little attention, if any, was paid to foreign anything. It took 50,000 dead and several murdered and wounded children at Kent State to get the attention of enough of us long enough to stop the Viet Nam war. The primary reason the current boondoggle war—Iraq and Afghanistan are two phases of one war—, is entering its ninth or tenth year is that there is no draft. The children, who were killed wounded and/or mentally destroyed in Iraq, and are still being killed wounded and/or mentally destroyed in Afghanistan are usually not members of the Middle Class. Thus, they do not disturb our comfort.

Nothing makes this so clear as the almost total absence of “welcome home” parades or celebrations for the returned Iraq veterans.

So, what’s the wakeup call going to be this time?

In the present economic landscape, it is said that the income of the middle class has stagnated and is falling. It was bound to be that way. A cooperative driven system of any kind produces an evolution toward the greater Good of the whole system. A competitive based and driven system produces a devolution toward the ultimate failure of the whole system.

In a 2004 report, the top 1% of our population controlled 50.3% of the total financial assets of the U.S. (It is necessary for us to start realizing that “financial assets” and other such terms are euphemisms for the Life Force or Blood of the system.) The bottom 90% only held 14.4% of the total US financial assets. It was estimated that the bottom 20% of this 90% had 0, that is Zero, wealth or Life Force or Blood.

This situation in the past five years has accelerated to the point where some estimates place 70 to 80% of the worlds wealth in the hands of the top 1%. The other 99% shares, very inequitably I might add, the paltry rest. The “dirt poor” or Lifeless have increased correspondingly.

We all know about unemployment. Many millions of us have intimate experience with it and with the destruction of any shred of the “American Dream” into which we may have worked ourselves over the years. And for the “lucky” ones, those still employed, or those whose “retirement funds” have so far evaded the Greedy Clutches of vulture corporations such as Bain Capital—or Bane, as it should be spelled type—the concept of “upward mobility” which was the backbone of the Dream has suffered several fractured vertebrae. It was recently observed by Arianna Huffington that we were behind the French in upward mobility which she compared to the French being behind us in croissants and afternoon sex.

Well, it looks like this situation is finally getting some recognition at least from the millions who have been demoted from the comforting life style of middle classiness and the additional millions who daily hear the threat of their own impending devaluation. The descent into the lower class reality is not anything that these people have ever expected or been prepared for. It is an absolute mind blower. It consists of realities that have been totally off the screens of the comfort zones with which they have become accustomed: unemployment, after the 99weeks of unemployment, zero income, eliminating their own, let alone their kids, cell phone coverage, turning off the heat in every room except the one they are in, food shopping, if they have the cash, at Costco, otherwise looking for food banks at which they will not be recognized, no new shoes, clothes from Good-Will for everyone. Forget Christmas!

It’s like falling off a cliff that has no discernable bottom. The story keeps getting more and more horrendous. Soon there is no medical insurance. You get to watch the children get and stay sick just as you get and stay sick.

This is the Big Knock on the Door. Can we wake up yet?

This is not the Nation for which we, when we were the Forefathers, gave our lives. This is not the Nation dedicated to the fact that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”

This is a Soul call. We can if we have the will straighten this mess out. The least thing we can do is exercise that bottom line Right for which so many of our brothers and sisters have died defending, the right to vote, to speak our hearts and minds to make sure that “…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”

Friends, if you are one of the many millions who did not vote in the last election, or if you have some friends who consider themselves above “politics” or who have been rendered irrelevant by breathing the poison gas of cynicism, the fog that sees everything as “fixed’’ and “my vote means nothing” help them to wake up!

In a true democracy, in a true country where justice and liberty for all actually exists, every voice is responsible. Every voice speaks. When we all speak, the Truth will dominate and sweep from the face of the planet these carrion who feed on despair and discouragement.

Lets quit singing about overcoming “some day.” That Some Day has arrived. Fact is we are overcoming right now. We need to sustain the drive that has been generated by our Brothers. The time is now, and we will prevail. We always have.