Rebirth

I have decided, more than two years after putting this blog into remission, to restart the Ratzaz Diaries. I was moved to do so for several reasons. First, a lot of the conflict I was experiencing between my earlier posts and the later ones - and between myself and most of the original readership of the Ratzaz Diaries - has dissipated. That is, I no longer see the problems that we as a people (either as an independent culture or ethnicity, or as a species) as definable in any way by the culturally delineated conflicts between false poles - i.e., between Democrats and Republicans (who both work for the same masters), between Christians and non-Christians, etc. So that for me the idea of choosing at this point between Obama and Mitt Romney for example (and what a wonderful choice!) is meaningless. When Democracy has failed in its entirety. And when the only options most people are able to consider are the ones presented them thru media that exists only for the purposes of propagandizing the populace and keeping them ignorant and distracted.

I was in the act of leaving Zen behind, for example, when I wrote my last few posts. It seems sometimes that a break with a belief system is a lot like ending a bad marriage; the energy needed in order to mobilize to make the necessary change generates as either a necessary or collateral effect (I haven't decided!) to make for a bit of bad blood, that hopefully dissipates over time as we heal and move on. That is how I feel about my Zen lineage and background at this time; it was helpful to me and helped form me, and I learned a lot from it. Indeed, the experiences I had in zazen are what enabled me to move past it. And there are a lot of worse things going on in this world that Zen Buddhism! and not a whole lot of better ones, in fact. So if you're one of my Zen friends and I pissed you off, I apologize. Sit on.

Another reason for resuming this blog is that the lack of it - though necessary for a while - has frustrated me a bit in maintaining at least the illusion that I am communicating with people of like mind, people whom whether they agree with me or not, are at least willing to think about the issues. Which people are not normal nor have ever been, in the context of my daily existence. I appreciate and need your feedback, or at least your listening.

I've noticed that I tend, when I don't restrict my mind from doing it, to construct solutions to perceived problems of society or of existence, on a somewhat massive scale. A lot of them involve "what would I do if I were king of the world" type thinking which I have no ability to implement (arguably, a damned good thing). So my construct may appear as sky-borne pies to you and pretty useless. Yet when I break down the motivations for my thinking, I discover that at the root of it are conclusions about the most basic human values that are at great variance with the norm. One of the first things I intend to write after this brief introduction, are how I would change the US highway, passenger transit and freight systems to accord with economy, good sense, ecology and safety. Which, as I study it, involves an analysis of our perverted notion of freedom, twisted by consumerism. We have championed totally illusory and meaningless choice - between an iPhone and an Android phone, or between a Miata and a Dodge Ram, and abandoned some of our most basic and usually assumed rights, like freedom of association, the ability to live and work with the people we choose; the manipulated loss of this basic right has destroyed our communities and destructured society so that we can become a mass of mindless slaves.

Another issue I wanted to address, on a limited basis, is the horror of the US prison system - that wastes money and destroys lives, and is brought into being, controlled by the lowest and most base aspects of man. [This post actually goes on from here, but apparently Google is malfunctioning and posted an unfinished draft, which ends in the middle of this sentence. It may be time to find a different host for this blog, since there is plenty of competition now... and why in the hell did it take hours for someone to bring this to my attention... GRRRrrrrr....].

More soon, I promise....