Pictures That define American Possibilities
The Barbaric Conclusion of the West
Violence defines us as we ignore the way we have fouled our home with carbon, killed our black and brown citizens, and now white American confronts the virus within as Sandy Hook meets the Las Vegas killing fields in the heart of democratic capitalism. For chaos has unleashed the forces of greed and dehumanization of the natural and human consciousness. If you can’t read the symbolism in the gestures of grace, despair, and ignorance, then the human race is doomed.
Above the epitome of grace and struggle confronts violent cops the way a prior generation marched on the Pentagon in 1967 and placed flowers in the barrels of guns aimed at Vietnam and the American heart.
Here an anonymous young woman in Las Vegas, circa October 1, 2017 despairs in shock as she sits curbside, absorbing fifty deaths and hundreds of casualties at last night’s shooting attack by a lone wolf white man at a country western concert in the heart of American pop culture. The town today of Wynn and Adelson, borne of Mafioso gangsterism never sleeps and offers gamblers the risk and rewards of unlimited games of chance. You can bet your purse and your life on the American way of death.
He answered the anxiety of the world abroad and at home by dedicating a “golf trophy” to the people of Puerto Rico, where three million Americans have been left homeless, hungry, and thirsty amid the devastation.
On a weekend when the epitome of the American establishment symbolized by the NFL owners and players, knelt and locked arms in solidarity, and the ordinary people of the world wandered from terrorism in France to nuclear threats from Korea, while Houstonians and Floridians confronted the effects of floods and hurricanes but here the President of the United States, unlike the psychopathic Nero, who only fiddled while Rome burned, here the tribune of people putted, punted, and tweeted in his magnificent narcissism.
Will the confrontation with anxiety and death, the fear and trembling, wake up the consciousness of the connections to moral imperatives and empirical realities of nature, the cosmos, and the human social experiment? Or will we heed the exemplary warnings of responsibilities to humankind and the spirits exemplified by the “Doings” at Taos Pueblo?
On San Geronimo Day I enjoyed the hospitable very human feast day at the last house on the right on the ground floor above and I humbly acknowledge the grace and practical wisdom of a people, who honor the vital spirit of human beings at home in this place, where they have endured for more than a thousand years. One can know why one lives in Taos, New Mexico.
Don’t Cry for Us America, we cry for you…