The Pleasure of Restored Health
Seeing Trump as a husk of an old and uglier life form that does nothing but feed
By Mike Meyer
There is something about being down with bronchitis for five days to give you a fresh perspective on things. Well, the disasters continued but at least I had a good excuse not to pay attention. Even at this point I’m reluctant to follow the news too closely in fear of it causing a relapse of some kind.
But it is good to see that things are even worse than I thought. Good is, of course, a relative term in this context but it means that it is almost impossible to avoid being captured in repeated, standard, reaction to things. A break with the small but very human pleasure of being restored to health leaving violent coughing, fever, and wearisome malaise behind seems to make things clearer.
We all are burdened, some not as much as they should be, with struggling to avoid mindless reaction to the mindless quest for reactions we are forced to watch everyday. The critical need (with both meanings of that word) to constantly question what we are seeing and what we think in response to that means being open, mindful, in accepting uncomfortable truths. Massive paradigmatic change guarantees we will be presented with new perspectives from surprising sources and the sustainable future we are all working to achieve may include surprising pieces.
Historically there is always basic truth in traditional conservatism. The truthfulness to be found there is contingent on the current situation and that, of course, is changing constantly and radically. Irony is the basis of life now as change is the thing most feared by the conservative but even in times of great change conservative fear of that change can save us from a whole range of disasters. If we work together.
These are fundamental human truths but that is exactly what has been lost in America and, it appears in England as well as elsewhere. Bigger things are in motion here but back to the small break and recovery perspective that started this.
Yes, it is a train wreck for America and elsewhere but the brief positive of restored health gives us the freedom, often lost in the heat of the moment, to see that people such as Trump and cohort, McConnell and others are symptoms of a much bigger change. An unfortunate bit of collateral damage in the reconstruction of our social structure.
Small solace but it is important as I see this being said in many different ways now. Don’t waste time on Trump and the symptoms of fascist reaction as anything but an immediate problem. It’s the condition of living in a dying culture. They don’t represent anything of value but are a violent flailing of the decaying remnants of what we once were. In that respect this is the struggle to break the husk of previous human form to expand to new dimensions. It’s a painful and violent change.
The analogy is only partially accurate but where it is not accurate it is also useful. The process of breaking the chrysalis of an individual can be seen as a fight between the old and new form but at the species level it is very clearly a fight. It is a fight that must happen for both the individual and the species just as the process of reproduction is locked to one form that must replace the earlier form for the species to survive.
Amazingly, we now know that survival of our species is very clearly dependent on the metamorphosis of our social structure to a planetary species. That we have created the conditions that are forcing this massive change may, in fact, be a necessary part of the process. Sentient beings who may be subject to biological metamorphosis may well have individuals who refuse to change and die. I wonder.
It would be easier if we had no choice but then we would not be sentient.
