A Living Magazine - Day 284 - Homecoming - Colonial Heights: America - Time to Rethink Our Priorities

The morning wake up and pack up went almost exactly as the morning before. I went to Starbucks to write and check on my much-anticipated hotel room...

Starbucks in Colonial Heights.

I worked most of the afternoon, getting two more of my tardy posts published. Then, when I knew I was all set with the hotel room (at Value Place), I left to walk there...

These two were inseparable.

The song of a Virginia mockingbird.

The southern birds have a different accent than the California

mockingbird I recorded in Livermore.

Check in was quick and I went up to Room 302...

I worked some more on the blog, and processed a bunch of pictures from the 100 mile walk. Seperately I had been thinking much about the presidential campaign. It looked like Donald Trump was making some politically fatal errors (including saying that if abortion becomes illegal, women who get one should be punished). I suddenly and intuitively knew that he would not become president. I wanted to write something that would address this new paradigm, include many of my past observations and actually offer some solutions for those who supported Trump's and Ted Cruz's hard line approaches to dealing with ISIS. The former would consider using nuclear weapons in the Middle East, while the latter would carpet bomb indiscriminately.

I wanted to tie these extreme views to a more balanced perspective about just how dangerous ISIS really is, when compared to other things that threaten lives in the modern world. I came up with the following...

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AMERICA - TIME TO RETHINK OUR PRIORITIES

Trump's gonna lose and not become president--even if he wins the nomination. That is a great thing, folks. Trump was only dangerous, because of the growing numbers of his blind supporters. Finally, the idiocy of this filthy rich, exploitative, incompetent and deluded fascist is being recognized as a an unwinnable proposition.

Now the emphasis must move over to a much more insidiously dangerous person: Ted Cruz. He is also a racist, Islamophobic, hating, war monger. He has said he would carpet bomb the Middle East, despite civilian casualties.

ISIS is definitely worth destroying completely, but that is not the way. Never has a conventional military campaign completely wiped out a radical Islamic group (Taliban--no, Al Qaeda--no). And if you disagree about my historical assertion, I encourage you to link to one single time that conventional war has defeated a terrorist group. In fact, it has usually emboldened them and transformed them into more deadly forces. Thinking that the traditional way of fighting these assholes will work is ridiculous and extremely dangerous to America and all other civilized nations--indeed to the future itself. ISIS wants nothing more than this strategy to be taken up by an American administration.

Civilized countries have to play by the rules of war (as they should), but terrorist organizations have no international rules, nor do they face justice for making up their own rules. Carpet bomb the Middle East, and the thousands of sleeper cells in Europe, Asia and the US will be completely unaffected, and then activated. The ham-handed minds of hopped up military supporters are not dealing with the reality of the situation.

Military Solution?: Increase surgical strikes--by coalition forces, with heightened police actions based on intelligence and real evidence. And, do it with exceedingly strong tactics.

But, the most important solutions will come from fixing the things that drive people away from the democratic and representative nations' cultures, and into the fantasies of religious extremism as some kind of answer to the world's problems.

1. FIX the racial divides, ethnic inequalities, and religious biases--by creating laws that have real teeth in them and leaders who walk forward toward overall progress in an intelligent way, instead of looking backward toward outdated and failed discriminatory policies and procedures in the insane expectation of achieving different and successful results.

2. FIX the greedy, self-serving, and morally absent control of the billionaire class, by buying only what you need and not giving into their commercialistic corporate brainwashing on your TV's. Religious-minded people (over 90% of the world's population) give  this greed-laden behavior in secular society as a reason to disobey laws. It gives license for hatred and violence. Society - in its public policy - needs to remain completely secular (while providing for fully and exclusively peaceful religious freedom), and must wholly and utterly stamp out any violence suggested in the name of religion, whether it is ISIS wanting to install authoritarian control over the world's governments by bombing soft public targets, or Christian fundamentalist wackos who want to bomb abortion clinics.

3. FIX the materialistic, thing-fetishizing, consumerism-at-any-cost, that has hijacked the American mind, and thence spread out into the third world nations as the promoted way they should be living. Wasting food, squandering fossil fuel, shopping for sport, idealizing the outsides of things and people.

4. FIX the comatosed mind-set of all individuals everywhere who let other people do their thinking for them and believe that other people know what's best for them. Institutionalize Cognitive Liberty--the last and most important of all human rights; one that, if focused upon, would then supercede and cover all other fights for equality and justice (gender equality, LGBT rights, racial equality, etc.). A major step in this direction (acknowledging the freedom to think what you want) would be to summarily and immediately cease the "war on drugs." It has been a civil war against the freedoms of thinking people for 50 years. It must end NOW. There is no benefit to a slow phasing out.

So, don't let it be said that I complain and don't offer solutions. Start with the above four if you want to truly terminate the attraction of extremism in the world, because here's the deal...

Although what ISIS does is beyond terrible and inhuman, it is a comparatively and statistically tiny amount of expressed evil in the world. It is our fear of it (driven by media and wanna-be leaders) that keeps it at the top of our collective consciousness.

Add up all of the deaths caused by terrorist groups in the last twenty years and the number is high. However, compare it to the losses of innocent lives from actions like George W. Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (actions that, by the way have directly led to the rise of ISIS!), and terror - by comparison - is actually less of a threat than first world military action! Think about that.

Next, compare such terrorist atrocities to the number of preventable deaths by heart disease, diabetes, and cancer in America. If there is an issue to get behind "fighting" against it could be this. The number of terror-related deaths, compared with the last 30 years of these preventable deaths, is insignificant. Yet, the few corporations in charge of everything we eat still push the same unhealthy crap onto the American psyche. I'm not calling for legislation against what the consumer does (eating habits, amount consumed, etc.).

I am calling for a study of the correlation between the number of sugary, transfat, GMO-laden, commercials and the demographic who is likely to consume such things and than die from such consumption. And, then make it financially disadvantageous for these companies to continue to harm and kill people. Their current actions maybe benefit hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the mortuary industry, but for godsake if death is the measure by what you choose your battles, you might want to look at what you are stuffing into your face each day.

There are dozens of other things that kill human beings in vastly larger numbers as compared to ISIS. Making the above four actions a major priority - both personally and socially - would curtail disaffection with Western culture in general (as well as help save it from itself), pull the wind out of the sails of ISIS membership and the draw it gives to (mostly) young, angry men--something the world is filling up with (check census data).

Couple these four priorities with a merciless, but highly focused and strategic series of unrelenting surgical strikes on ISIS and any other similarly minded extremists, by all major world powers, and terrorism will become a very unattractive alternative to peaceful coexistence.

Not doing these things will assure that ALL of these negative catalysts that spur each other on - and create a feedback loop of hatred, intolerance, mindlessness, violence and evil in the world - will continue indefinitely.

None of us should complain about any single one of them, if you are not willing to face the facts of their inter-reliance upon each other and therefore the need to address them as a whole.

It can be done. We adults living today are the generations that can do it. Not trying is like selling away the futures of our descendants--who will not look kindly upon our inaction.

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I was quite hungry by evening and decided to head out to Walmart to buy a couple days worth of food. When I returned I surveyed my horn of plenty...

I also saw, while at Walmart, that the particular watch batteries which would fit my pedometer happened to be on sale for only $3.00, so I picked up a pair and installed one. Boom! It was back to life again. Although the strap was gone, now I could at least carry the pedometer in my pocket...

I nibbled a bit on some of the veggies and then decided to make up some hearty and healthy finger food for dinner...

French wheat bread, layered with pepperoni, roasted pine nut hummus, tomatoes, avocado,

and bacon cheddar cheese. They were so delicious! For a moment

it reminded me of my culinary creations before leaving Maine in 2014.  

When I'd done a respectable amount of work for the day, and a good amount of eating, I actually took a rest, and relaxed! I took a shower and did a desperately needed shave.

Then, having a TV was my excuse to watch the Travel Channel and the Food Network! So, I did, and enjoyed them (except for the many commercials) well into the night. When my eyes grew heavy, I climbed into the covers of my bed - that's right, bed - and slipped off to sleep.