Future Shock

Future Shock is history.

The Purpose of Marriage

Like life, marriage was not designed to make you happy.  Those who enter it because they want to be happy will always be unhappy.  Happiness is only a byproduct of a good marriage, and a good marriage is hard won.  The purpose of marriage is maturity.

The Meaning of Life

People who consider happiness to be the ultimate value to be persued in life will always be unhappy.  LIfe was not designed to make us happpy.  Happiness is only a byproduct of a good life, not its goal – and a good life is hard won.  Life was designed for maturity – a process impelled by suffering, not by the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  Mature people – elders - value joy, not happiness.

Intuitions

INTUITION 1

DNA  is an organism that has consciousness.  We live in partnership with our DNA.  It provides the container in which we’ve chosen to live.  It was here before us.

INTUITION 2

The so-called junk DNA which geneticists say lie within our chromosomes is not garbage cast aside on the pathway of evolution.  It will be found to be very important.  It will contain things like primal memory – perhaps it even functions as the container of the collective unconscious – of the impersonal psychic forces that Carl Jung called archetypes.

INTUITION 3

We are composite creatures.  Our psyche is an amalgam of various identities.  The most powerful is the one we feed the most.

The Age of Oakley

Dr. Oakley’s baggy eyes looked directly at me as he searched my chest with the cold, round instrument.  Rubber hoses flowed from it, into his hairy ears.  And I looked back in fear, wondering if he would give me a needle.  At seven years of age, I was terrified of needles, and when my father escorted him to my bedroom, the surrounding comfort of comic books and electric train could not ease the fear I felt within.

The ritual was the same each visit: If he dropped the cold thing into his black leather bag, I would not be pierced; but if he placed it on my bed, then…oh then.  I watched him withdraw the probe from my ribbed cage and saw the jowls above me respond to the good news his meaty lips spoke to my anxious mother: the pneumonia had receded; I was getting better.  Thank God…I was saved.

As was his habit, my father invited him to stay a moment to share a glass of wine.  And I could hear them from the bedroom, chatting in broken English telling him how much they appreciated him.  And before he left for his next home visit, my parents would insist, despite his best efforts to decline, that he receive an offer of their best wine.  Every time he came, he always left with a gallon of appreciation.

Nowadays, home visits – let alone a gift of wine - would never happen.  Dr. Oakley’s home visits were more than professional service.  They were the essence of community life in those days, and the warmth of one heart giving to another.  People helped each other, they were fluent in the art of conversation, and built community on the principle of give and take.

I remember the kitchen-parties in our home: Italian immigrants in faded suits: card-playing, wine-drinking, hearty eaters who would spontaneously burst out in songs from the old country; beefy men who cried at Christmas because they were so far from home; smotherly hens who would cluck at their children to behave; and the graciousness extended to strangers.  Everyone was equal in those days, because everyone was poor. 

But some time in my teens, everything changed.  We moved to a different, larger city.  And when my father called our new physician, a young fellow from the South,  the doctor refused to come.  In hindsight, I can understand the decision of that new breed; but it’s a sad understanding informed by the realities of a cooler way of healing.

In high school I learned that Dr. Oakley had died of a heart attack.  And despite my memories of his black bag and needles, I missed him and the laughter he shared with my mother and father.  The age of Oakley in the healng profession is over, as is its warmth.  And I wonder whether we have lost more than we have gained in our trade with the cool steel of science and technology.  The age of kitchen-parties, like those I knew, are over too.  We discareded them, like faded suits, for Armani and stainless steel appliances.

Predictions

Sometime when I’m very relaxed: bathing, walking, reclining…I get a sense of things that may come.  I don’t mean to say that I’m psychic.  I mean that I may have heard about an event on the news and I see the potential ramifications of that event.  The event seems pregnant and it streams into the future where I see it giving birth.  Here is what I see coming.

• The United States will suffer ongoing natural and social catastrophes.  These, along with its increasing debtor status, will magnify the stresses on an already stressed economy.  This will be compounded by its overstretched military commitments.  These issues and others that increasingly plague that nation will cause a major decline in the fortunes of the people.  The economy will crash; there will be rioting.  crime will increase and the people will lose confidence in their leaders.  There will be the rumblings of secession from certain states.  There will be political and social chaos.  No one will know who is in charge.

• The United States will suffer a major defeat from an Asian power.  The defeat will be a naval one and the power will be China.  There will be no outright victory over America but she will be so weakened that she will not be able to withstand the ferocious will of China.

• The Chinese will gain power over the United States – economically.  Because of this, the Chinese will control much of the U.S. and will insist on increased emigration to that country.  They will transform the mores, attitudes and sensibilities of North America as they pour into the continent en masse.

• Five to seven years after the Chinese summer Olympics the conflict will begin.

• Russia will be allied with China but that once mighty power will be overcome – its natural treasures plundered by a two million man Chinese army.  In Russia there will be deep sadness.  It will never again rise to the pinnacle of power it enjoyed.  Christianity will flourish there – as it will in China.

• Christianity will be the rock in China’s shoe – and finally the boulder which will overcome it.

• Canada will be only a memory.  It will divide and the provinces will form economic unions with one another and with parts of the northern United States.

• The North American people will be severely humbled.  The great monuments to avarice – in particular the malls – will be no more.  We will be a chastened people in time and the glitter of luxury will dim.  We will live a much harder life.  The cornucopia of plenty will cease.  No more will we eat and drink ourselves into stupefaction.

• The church in North America and Europe will be taxed.  Churches will close; the faithful will go underground.  Home churches will proliferate.

• Times will become so hard in North America, and lawlessness will abound so greatly that some people will resort to robbing graves for the jewellery and other valuables that may lie with the dead.

Peeing II

I was bemused by the number of hits I received on my post called “Peeing” - a humorous reference to an entry by Andy Warhol in his diaries.  When I checked the referrers to my post I noticed that many seemed to show searches that revealed hits for pornographic sites.  I’m assuming that some of these people were searching for pages featuring bathroom sex.  Can so many people be turned on by urine?

Bye, Bye Miss American Pie

Last week a Chinese nuclear submarine surfaced about five miles from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, one of the Pacific Fleet’s greatest aircraft carriers.  It seems that the submarine had been stalking the carrier in the same way that Soviet and American submarines stalked the other’s fleets during the cold war. 

China is flexing its muscles and has taken the position of competing superpower, once held by the Soviets.  And this recent game of cat and mouse marks the opening salvo in a war in which America will be humbled.  A dress rehearsal is taking place for a major confrontation in which the Americans will be ill prepared.  This saddens me because a once great and mighty power whose vision of liberal democracy and system of free enterprise, under-girded by the rule of law and animated by the self-evident belief that all men and women are created equal, may be supplanted by a totalitarian regime which asserts its will over the rights of the individual. 

If I were to choose between an American and a Chinese hegemony, I would choose the former – despite its evident shortfalls.  American supremacy, although it has had mixed results, has been impelled by the stirring influences of the Enlightenment which assert the supremacy of reason and the principle that the individual is the measure of all things.  This worldview is certainly incomplete, but not as deficient as that which impels the Chinese will to power.   

While America is invested with a mission of mythological proportions, born in its formative struggle for independence; a mission which seeks to ignite the geopolitical landscape with the torch of Liberty; while it is invested with this mission, the Chinese seem to be inspired simply by the expedient of wealth creation.  In its outreach to the world it has brought investment for its own sake, and without concern for its impact on exploited people.  It is unashamedly disinterested in the plight of individuals within the nations with which it has fostered economic liaisons.  In the pursuit of resources to maintain its burgeoning power it has nothing to give but a self-absorbed scientific materialism, pragmatism and the mandate of the gut. 

China is an ancient power whose socio-political structure and view on humans is informed by an imperial design.  The last emperor did not die in the Twentieth Century; in fact, Mao Tse Tung was the greatest exponent of this imperial pattern and his successors continue to promote it beneath the camouflage of Armani suits and Mercedes Benz. 

No matter how misdirected America may have been during its dominion, at least it suffused the planet with ideas that will continue to transform societies for centuries.  If China can bring only the outdated capitalism and the desire for consumption that marked the last few centuries, it will fail as a great power and will do so more quickly and more traumatically than America, and Rome itself.

Want A New Drug?

I’ve been a therapist for about twenty-five years.  Over this time I’ve witnessed a continuous increase in the number of people coming for treatment about issues related directly to or associated with drug and alcohol use.  I continue to be astounded by the prevalence of substance use within our social fabric.  Our culture floats on a sea of drugs and alcohol.

Most of the drugs used by people, whether prescribed or not, are taken as strategies for dealing with illness, pain or some imbalance in the body or the mind.  If this is so, what does the plague of Cocaine, Alcohol and Amphetamines tell us about our society?  Why, at this period in the history of Western Civilization, is there so much substance abuse and so many communities affected the ramifications of this abuse?

I extend the definition of ‘drug’ to processes like sex, food, gambling and other preoccupations which have enveloped Europeans and North Americans.  We are riddled with hidden addictions that we use to palliate our sense of emptiness.  We are glutted and nothing stirs our jaded experience – not even excess.  And like people made of wood we can no longer feel.

The Western World is sick at heart.  It drifts polluted in a blasted landscape of excess.  I suspect that the patient is terminal.

Marriage

Marriage will make us either bitter or better.  Although happiness, of the kind we imagine in romances, can be one of its important by-products, Marriage was designed to mature us through the constant working out of differences and life changes.  The promise that a white dress and a tuxedo bring to the altar is not happiness; it is maturity: growth into eldership.  The happiness that a life-long relationship brings is found in the hard won depth and intimacy that is current in a seasoned relationship; one in which we move beyond our own needs and demands.

Life is a dream…marriage is the alarm clock.  It challenges us to grow up; to embrace a kind of loving that doesn’t have anything to do with good feelings and emotions.  The kind of love that we learn to express in a life-long relationship has little to do with sentimentality – although it has its place; it has little to do with romance – although it is pleasurable when we experience it; it has little to do with being completed – although it may feel oceanic when it happens.  The alarm rings when the differences start; that is when the ‘real’ relationship starts.

When we are having differences – even passionate ones – we know that the relationship is working and that we will reap the prime benefit of marriage: intimacy: being open, vulnerable and responsive to another human being who wishes the same thing.  When these things occur – even when we are suffering within the relationship – we know that we are maturing.

A marriage breaks down and makes us bitter when we are not able to move beyond our own needs and demands for that which makes us happy.

In any event, here are some uncensored thoughts on the subject.  Leave your comments.  I am interested in a conversation with you all.