Some Thoughts on Chaos and the Crazy

The other day, I was pondering the chaos and crazy some of my ancestors and relatives experienced in their lifetimes and now, and of course I was relating it to my own life, and I was extending that thought process to the chaos and crazy that's been afflicting the United States and the world at large for many long years now. 

As I go through these exercises, I start to see more clearly how we are not only all connected but in reality we are all part of the same thing, in Buddhist parlance, we are all the same thing. This was a realization I came to (in a form or flash of enlightenment) many, many years ago, but the details were always elusive. As I get older, the threads of connections and the ground state of being becomes clearer and clearer. 

Afghanistan is "falling" to the Taliban we're told, but in fact, it has never not been "fallen" and the Taliban (however they are conceived) have never not been pre-eminent. They are the Afghan people, whether our establishments and ruling class like it or not, know it or not, and beating them back can only be accomplished through a campaign of extermination, genocide in a word. That hasn't happened... not yet... so the end-state, outcome of the Afghanistan campaign was foregone: right back where we started from. 

The whole campaign was a crock from the get... in a manner of speaking. 😞

It was wrong and wrong-headed and it's led us back to where we began, or nearly so, as time is a spiral not a straight line. 

Not unlike the case of Vietnam, to which comparisons are made more and more starkly and openly. We've been down this road before, haven't we?

How many of our lives are just like that? In many ways, mine certainly is and has been.

What have we learned from our mistakes? What have I learned from MY mistakes?

And how much farther do we have to go?

I'm reminded of an opinion column by Mark Morford from 2017: 

HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR END TIMES, AMERICA?

Please read it. And realize he wrote this four years ago. How little has changed. Even though... everything has.