Fight Or Flight

is a phrase that needs no explanation in any society
where bullying and being bullied are recognised
as unattractive behaviour that ought to be stopped,
when stopping it is harder than it seems.
The gain the bully gets through his hold
over the situation is hard to dismamtle.

Less recognised where agression is normalised
is one consequence of being bullied: being frozen,
from the bullying that goes on, unrecognised,
unti it all ends where the thought is....
'This behaviour does not have any consequences'.

Frozen agreements look like normal agreements,
informed by consent, but agreements that come
from a lack of presonal space,or choice, are in fact
frozen lives acted out when whoever cares for the result
cares enough that appearances hide what they are not presented as. 

Policeman Quits Job: Shock Headline

When I was seven I asked my dad
at the dinner table, the only time
he was there to be asked anything, 
a sensible adult 'real life' question.

His reply stunned me to an awkward silence.

I asked my dad about how to deal
with bullies [in primary school].
His reply to me was brief, simple,
and indegestible: 'Hit them first'.

I could not process what he said.
I'd seen him angrily throttle my mother
last Christmas, not that I was meant
to have seen that. It all happened
too fast to move me to where I
might not have watched it happen.

I was too young to know how Christmas
was oversold, or how the expectations it raised
created a discontent that could not be quenched, 
once ingited, much less that dad was an alcoholic.

The argument between them blew up,
without warning, right in frront of me.
Following dad's logic I could not see
how he saw my mother as the bully
who he had to hit before she hit him.

She made his meals, washed his clothes,
looked  after his money, and saved him
from a lot of the duties of being a parent. 

How was I meant to process this violence
between adults, when reparations were so private? 
How was I to follow his advice in school,
where the logic behind rules was so much
more complicated than I could explain to myself? 

Fast forward over fifty years, and ordinary Americans
scratch their heads, much the way I once did,
to share their incomprehension at the new
'hit then first, partially explain later' foriegn policy,
where change is heaped on change, until there are
too many wars in the world to explain their origins.

And the former world policeman
has changed sides and quit his job,
signaling he wants to join in with the enmity.    

The Fog Of Post War Rationing

Post war rationing after WW2 ended in 1954,
but a new rationale was ushered in after that:
men were heroes because they 'won the war',
where children were taught to not ask
why their dads were so often absent,
and their mothers were firmly tied to the kitchen,
and could not work, even though, previously,
when single, they had been required to work
in munitions factories and do the jobs for half the pay
that men had done before those better paid men
were trained by the government for life on the war front.

Being a bully was what reinforced
the fog of post WW2 rationing best,
not just in the 1960s, but for many decades after. 

Nobody bullied other people better
back then, and lied about it to themselves
to those around them, than the alpha male
heads of households who measured out
their sense of entitlement in the units of alcohol
they consumed with their equals in the pub,
each night, where with the alcohol induced psychosis
and depressions they doled out on their family,
the family submitted to the head who 'keep order'. 

Everyone could see how those
who the male heads of households froze,
removed all fight and flight from, but....
nobody could not put into words
how the freezing worked, the language
that put the controlling male in charge
was frozen, along with the family.

The result was labelled 'acceptance'.

Anyone who defrosts themselves much later
through sober, mature, and co-equal company
can wonder at who they might have been
and where they might have gone in the world 
had their parenting been more actively helpful.

From The Energy Of Slaves To The Latest Energy War

If in it's first phase, American wealth
was built on the energy of black African slaves,
which like industrial slavery across the world
had to be euphemised after it was ended,
to dignify a history that were it honestly told,
and accounted for fully, quoting the accountant's ledgers
it would be a self perpetuating cause for eternal shame.

The accounts of the discovery of coal, morse telegraphy,
and railways, though the American civil wars,
was the biggest demonstration of their uses
these three major new discoveries could be put to.

Where civil wars led, American corporations
led later where the imitation of life through peace,
but even more for indiviual profit, resided ever after.

Fracking for oil had barely been discovered
in America, so the civil war was the last war
where the control of oil was not
what the war fought over. That said....

The precedent of oil being the reason for the war,
the control of the energy the world  relied on,
had been set by arguments that justifying slavery
being at the core of why America went to civil war,
and the reason behind the Jim Crow laws after.

Fast forward umpteen wars over oil later,
and whilst oil is still the root cause
behind every global conflict in the world,
the world is now divided by digital conflicts.

There data is the new energy and and the more
data individuals put on line for the Tech Bros
to own, the more like the economic systems
of ownership that that once made slavery
the acme of Hellish levels of inequality 
the use of the internet is returning us to.

When we don't own what we write,
we are free to write what we want,
from '***k you' to 'I'm glad we agree',
but getting cotrol of the medium
you write it on has to be the aim.   

Anything else is being dishonest
about how little you/we all own
when we don't own our language.

Citizens of totalitarian countries
and empires already know this
and find it amost existentialist
to find how behind every fascade
and screen of their county's internet
it leads them back to their government,
from which they can never exit.  

Reasons For Disbelieving A.I. Pt 3

This advert on an electronic billboard in Bristol
Airport compounds everything about A.I. I distrust.
It is glossy and slick, it is for a service where the need
is less than the advertisers think, and the male minds
behind it have not thought further than female=cheaap
and practically infinite. When in the real world
 real women want men, want everyone to be real.
 Not fantasists mislead by the doom loops they create
       with technology they don't know they don't have control of.     

 

Money May Talk

And find an easy audience
for what it has to say, 
when it may well talk.

But it does not listen.

Is that why humans
so readily follow
where money goes:
to find the currency
of intentionally avoiding
listening to themselves?  

In These Days Of Post Modern Atheism

It is not the done thing to look too closely
at what Romans, Greeks, and Egytpians
might have believed, or the processes
by which those beliefs were made
to seem entirely natural and logical.

To modern minds those pagan gods,
with their complicated families lines
and love lives and erratic behaviour
have a lot to hide, seemed grotesque,
and lived lives as they were living out
some absurd revenge-driven soap opera.

But those old gods were not created out of nothing,
and were not created to merely amuse their followers.
The old gods were more than figures from history
where history was a hall of mirrors that was so ancient
and distorted we can't see from it what humans believed
about each other for how the gods were depicted as being.

There was an economic playbook that polytheism came with.

Statues and altars require skilled workmen to create them,
people who claim to prophesy the future require being paid.
Belief systems have to be integrated with economic systems,
and such integration required a playbook, to express in theatrical terms
the currency of belief. We ignore this playbook at our peril.

For when some modern demagogue rediscovers this playbook,
and reshapes how political power and modern finance works
according to it, the time for being reminded of the past will be gone:
we will be living it, barely recognising the we are the echo
of how it once worked. The near future of reliving the past
will be closer to us, and more part of how we live, than we thought it was.