The Left Column

from poem page 159

Politics for Poets

Researching Hate and Propaganda takes a toll on the Researcher

If you go into that place where the hate is put up and flapping in the wind (the Internet wind) you can't help but worry that all of the feces that you discover won't some how infect you with some kind of poison urge. Like one time I went and stood by a river (the Blackstone River) and it was the day, or the next day after, there was a breech at an upstream sewer plant. Large mist was in the air at that bridge. Wouldn't you know it, I got some kind of sickness right around then. So if you are standing around the cess-pool do you really want to be breathing in the mist?

Others would say 'oh, it is only ideas, how could they hurt you?'

1. You can't talk about the sick idea without knowing something about it.

2. You can't debunk a fallacy unless you 'get into the head' of the person who holds the fallacy. And that means you at least need to know how they are thinking (what ever that means), what their logic is. If you understand their logic are you then standing at the edge of the same abyss that they are swirling down into? You can see them, they are way way down there swirling off into the vortex and obviously going down . . . You don't want to be swept away too.

3. The stuff you find (on the Internet) is often anonymous so there isn't any real person out there that you can reach out to who will listen to you and want to reform his/her views. Anything you do, in this sense, is wasted effort.

Some people say that sickness of mind and of body can be cured by the proper orientation of thoughts. So if you are charting out the cess-pool that is the conspirator's mind, then with what are you feeding your own mind?

~ Selah.

'the media'

'the police'

'the government'

What does the simple mind think about these things? We have child-minds that think that they are 'effecting change' by being violent or by spouting nonsense about 'the media', 'the police', and 'the government' as if these three are all of one mind, which they are not.

On The Internet we find people posting opinion pieces that claim some giant conspiracy of 'the police' as if all police are always doing the bidding of the powerful. In fact each officer of the law is an individual with their own individual morality and their own point of view. They have their own reasons for being police. To lump them all in as 'enforcers of tyranny' is, in fact, a form of dehumanizing police officers.

The Susquahanna River, Pennsylvania from
last fall.


     
  The single eternities
  of the many worlds of us
  floating around in these 
              confusing moral plays.

  Don't pretend to be well.
   Don't pretend to be sick.
  I keep on correcting myself.

 Somethings are only true for 
           the moment not like you.
  Your eternity is the only 
             one thatt you need.

  Cork screw darkstars
    lensing that galactic light
  a light-house is this galaxy 
    the gamma stream from far away 
  every so many thousand or so years.

  There are children off in the 
                fields tonight
                    chasing fireflies.
   Moms all gone to bed early.


     from Poems 188