August 23, 2013
XV
Keep praying for positivity, pray positively, keep positivity in your prose and poetry, in your life, in your dreams, in every effort, every strand, expand the love in your veins.
With the few deaths, or murders, in the past week I am convinced that there is some wack shit at work amongst us. . ever more present. I am not going to exercise anymore energy in that direction, however, I must comment on what has taken place in a couple of different situations. Locally, there has been a death where I know someone involved in the case—and it startles me that drugs can eat a person’s soul. The other case that has me tripped out is a situation including three teenage boys killing someone that they viewed, as the media stated, “for fun”. My reaction to that is silence. The sternness in my face has been present lately, and I notice I clench my jaw quite frequently because I feel like a loose cannon. Usually issues that, especially don’t have anything to do with me-- I am not as concerned about for my own mental health. I listen to and endure enough pain and heartache to subject myself to anymore by choice. I pray for positivity, love, and abundance for the souls that ache. Its hurts me to the core to think and consciously process what is going on in Egypt, and to even think about the kids that starve in my own city. I try not to consume myself with the things around me too much, but it is not a flaw to be aware—just a great responsibility.
So then people and their expectations lately have surprised me, when really they should not have.
The point here is that my name, Sunny—creates a certain disposition of expected qualities and energy brought forth. Sometimes I feel as though, I am expected to excel, and not be as ‘human’ as others. In reality this is my own perfectionism speaking, but the truth is there because it is based on what I have projected—based on what I have shown. This has been a common experience throughout my academic experiences, but not so much socially…until now. I feel sort of obsolete, like I used to, before I was a mother. Like, if I do not fit into or meet other’s expectations they do not reply to me as often, or they claim—I am worried about you. Of course I am angry and I have many issues to work out, but I told you I was really worried about myself last week. And today I am feeling sturdy and like I am getting back to me, the Sunny I identify with. From the outside looking in who knows what it looks like. This is not the first experience, or year, where friends and family came around with eyes deep looking into mine like a revelation—or like I would listen to them now—I am concerned—or I care about you. Well, thanks everyone, I reciprocate the love. But what I really need is for you to say: I love you, or I am your friend, or I am here for you, to just be there. I usually hear that after I get the tour of their psyche on my issues that I was oh so careful to share with them in the first place. Neither is relevant at this point but I do focus on the positive qualities in people because I love them. I just feel misunderstood. I guess that is why the term ‘dark side of the Sun’ that Maze Forever of Concrete Generation referred to me as made sense: he signed a CD of his to me indicating that I was not as beautiful as everything thought I was. I still appreciate that someone reflected a true measure of self to me. I am the light but I must balance the darkness of my soul just like night satisfies our senses and the stars shine so bright. My weapon is positivity and keeping things light so that I can reflect them. Balance is the key to life and I will never fit into anyone’s expectations, but I can promise you that I will surpass them.
-Sunny
Suicide is pain less…
At least that’s how the theme tune for the US comedy series set in the Korean War called M.A.S.H states it.
Suicide is a very touchy topic.
I have had personal issues with it throughout the years and have had other family members and friends commit suicide. It is a terrible thing to contemplate and even more insidious to enact.
This brings me into the main area of my article.
There have been extensive studies over many years to correlate the rise of suicide rates with the rise and power of Conservative governments.
The research was published by the journal of epidemiology and community health in Australia where a study which pulled research statistics from 1901-1998 found that suicide rates increased under Conservative governments.
Analysis of figures in the UK also noted a significant correlation with the Australian results.
Conversely, Labour/Liberal governments the rates dropped.
WHY??
Well, the lead researcher states it is because material conditions in lower socio-economic groups may be relatively better under Labour because of government programs and a perception of greater hope. There is a strong connection between socio-economic status and suicide.
Studies that support the findings in the UK also noted that under Conservatives (especially Thatcher) there were 35,000 people who would not have died if the Conservatives weren’t in power.
That’s equivalent to one suicide every day for the whole of the 20th Century.
In the USA it’s the same story.
Under Bush Jr. the trend increased.
In my opinion Conservatism devalues life. Conservatives are in favour of individual rights over collective responsibility in a functioning community. It’s the me, me instead of the we society.
An ideology of get yourself to the top no matter who you screw over and destroy to get there.
I must also say that guns in America are a huge contributing factor.
Suicide by guns is the fastest growing method at over 50%.
There are more suicides by firearms than homicides.
So when a Conservative regime comes to power and caters to the elite at the expense of everyone else, suicide goes up, intolerance and persecution increases and hope and opportunity is dashed.
Conservatives are evil.
TDB.
Its easy to be optimistic when your head is above water. Even when you're just below the surface and the sky looks like its boiling you can still make out the silver lining in the clouds. But when life is wrapped around your soles and the panic of your next breath is lighting your lungs up like neighborhoods at Christmas, keeping your chin up goes against instinct when you need to unchain the weights on your feet.
I can only tell you the things I tell myself. Its the only HONEST truth I have, if that makes any sense. I know what the heart feels like when you drift so far below you can't see the sun anymore. I know hopeless and apathetic seem like your best friends even when yours are dragging you by the hand for a breath of air. I'm not sure why we act like our own worst enemy especially when the world is already looking like its about to declare war on anything we have left in us after dealing with the day and whatever surprises came our way.
But I'm positive, some of the smallest gestures of positivities have brought me back from some of the darkest places. Standing at the register with a long line of people for a tail, my debit card was declined for a fucken tooth brush, at Dollar Tree. In case you're unfamiliar with Dollar Tree, everything in there is a dollar. Life was already knee deep in my ass cheeks and all I wanted was to talk to someone like I didn't just eat a peanut butter and shit sandwich. Before I can exhale and watch the bubbles float to the surface while I fell further away the lady behind me said she got it. Didn't even look at me. I said thanks. Still didn't look my way. I know that look. That's I'm struggling to afford my own and here I am buying somone I don't know something he needs because my heart is louder than my worries in the heat of the moment.
Its moments like this that stick with me when I feel like drowning or wake up with water around me and no sense of direction.
I do my best to carry on these vibes to people reaching out or just drifting off. Its hard to help people when they fall down the well of their own tunnel vision. All you can do is reach down and call out. Hope they take your hand or come back up above the surface before they run out of air.
Its human instinct to live. I know the people I keep close will make it through but being under changes you. What worries me most is the damage done inside if they stay down long enough. I know the kind of mess I can be when I'm not concerned with making it home. Its been during those times someone else pulled me put of the water.
I've been a lighthouse rolling across the crashes looking for anyone even remotely trying to take control of themselves back from the darkness. That positivity can take someone a long way. Even something as simple as calling out against the waves carrying them away. No one will ever have their chin stuck in the air. But when you're aware of how thick oxygen can be or how hard it is to just move your feet at the bottom of an ocean you've been drowning in ever since you woke up to bury someone you love, be that strength while you can. Be that hand. That voice calling back in the wilderness. Buy me a fucken tooth brush. Because I promise, we could all use one, and I'll get you back eventually. Maybe not the way you got me. But I'll stay positive and reach under while I can swim and dead man's float when I can't. Float there and wait for someone to call me back to shore.
-DCR
Having devoted almost a decade of my life to studying and immersing myself in history, I am intimately aware of much the brutal details that have been recorded during our time on this planet. Having devised just about every way imaginable to take the life of another human being, often as slowly as possible (thanks, inquisition), the twentieth century in many ways became characterized by the efforts to develop ways to kill as many people as possible, as efficiently as possible. From the development of the more effective and portable machine guns and more advanced chemical and biological agents that made their global debut in World War I, to the unimaginable destruction of first and second atomic bombs in World War II, through a whole rainbow of chemical weapons developed by Dow and Monsanto, and then dumped all over Vietnam, to the cluster bombs, precision guided missiles, and remote controlled instruments of death that we see today, it would appear as if human beings had almost perfect the art of murder on the grandest scale. Combined with the fact that according to www.freetheslaves.net , there are even today upwards of “27 million people in slavery” in this world, and the reality that almost no major news sources ever bothers to cover these issues, for those who have taken the time to educate themselves, the world can seem a very bleak place.
I hit this wall some years ago while still an undergrad, stripped of all faith in humanity by all that I had learned, it almost seemed like pushing forward was utterly pointless, I mean, how could I ever hope to compete with all that is wrong with the world. From poverty, class disparity, and inequality, to racism, sexism, prejudice, murder, rape, violence, to the realities of the corporate control of so many aspects of politics and the the world around us, the problems of the world are nothing if not overwhelming for someone who envisions a much more logical and peaceful existence. Struggling with these issue on many levels for quite sometime, one of the ideas that helped me move through that period was a quote from H.G. Wells that read “ History is a race between education and catastrophe”. While this is not necessarily optimistic, depending upon your interpretation of the world, it did provide me with a sense that perhaps I was on the right track, and that all was not lost, well at least, not yet.
Remaining optimistic enough to continue on, and to still fight for what I believe in, and to continue educating myself in every area possible, I firmly believe that through the sharing of wisdom, knowledge, and information, that we will one day move past the violence that has plagued human existence for its entirety, that is, if we can survive that long.
-Joshua Genius
Education versus catastrophe
Rise back to the top
Zipper Down
If poverty were to pull its zipper down, what would be the first thing it pisses on?
If privilege were to pull its zipper down, what would be the first thing it pisses on?
I fear, as humans, our self-awareness should be top priority on everyone’s donor list. It’s in need of heart transplant in some third world countries, in need of a brain transplant in some schools curriculum’s and strange enough, Self Awareness is truly dying for religion just to give itself a break, or two, or hell (pun attended) three. I’m not a glass half empty person nor am I a shot glass half full; I’m a person that can look out over the horizon and recognize sunrises as sunsets; and sunsets as sunrises; and rainy weather to be depressing, if you’d like it to be; or nurturing like it also is, as well. Most days I feel like I’m just running circles around feeling stupid, attempting to fit my circular motion into someone else’s square box.
We as a human condition are in need of a self-awareness intervention program and a brain biopsy, I swear. We have come so far and yet seem to have never really left our front yards at all. We have genetically created seeds that possess suicide genes in them. So that a farmer’s crop can only be harvested once. Buy more seeds, that are designed to kill themselves, seems a tad less like we are truly a world; that possess all of the tools needed to take care of itself, and more like Money can always buy you survival if needed; That is if our market economy’s crashing credit score can afford it. Idealism, Surrealism, and what the deal-ism are bullying the fuck out of a kid called reality and it seems as if all of the responsible adults aren’t doing shit but looking. Believe me, my own self-awareness is completely cognizant of how pointing a finger, always leaves three fingers on that same hand pointing back. But goddamn, I can’t be the only one seeing that there’s something seriously wrong, out there. I can’t be the only other injury in the emergency room asking another fracture is there anything I can do to help? Or how long have you been waiting to be seen? Or at lease has anyone come out to take your vitals yet? I truly believe our self-awareness needs to be move to the top of everyone’s donors list.
Abundance and Deficit, are twin brothers that never got along, but a village that’s raising a child should do more than just except that they may always argue and do something more productive and at lease not let them be seen arguing in front of our future. I mean our children. I mean if our children are our future, we are All really really doing shitty jobs of letting our bureaucracy baby-sit their present. Man can put man on the moon but cant figure out how to put updated textbooks in every middle, and high-schoolers hand. And I am: sincerely, seriously, and utterly disturbed, by this fact.
There is no excuse for ignorance throwing private parties at our kids expense ya know.
No reason for reason to not make sound, when asked a direct question.
To be able to predict with such accuracy, a passing Haley’s comet visibility, every 75-76 years, but somehow not being able to predict, what our own toilet piss on seat accuracy, is doing to our own autobiographical assassination attempts on being “content,” is not only egregious, its never mind, its not my problem, and Hell yeah it might not be an easy solution but Love never claimed easy as something it has always and forever been, but be we damned, if we’ve known not Love, to always be a wiz kid of an answer.
I’m cpmaze.
I'm concrete generation.
I'm Cum Laude Weekly.
I'm a stargazer at the same time.
Somebody has to be.