5/22/09
Jan’s homework assignment
Mahraiah and I met a veteran, Quaker activist named Jan at a Starbucks in Evanston. She called herself ‘Food Lady’ and gave us her card with her name The Quaker Baker. She was in an electric wheel chair, and explained that she had a nerve disease that I don’t recall. She told us that she was a dietician who once worked at Cook County hospital; she had done her share of bagging bodies at the hospital, too. She shared some of her stories of working in some of the maximum-security prisons like Pontiac here in Illinois.
She approached the inmates where they were, and said that she could help them get food that she realized would often be used to secure favors on the inside. But that was ok with her. She also told the women that she would get them food that would help their babies (the pregnant ones) grow.
These babies she called ‘maybe babies’ since they may not make it when born, or born underweight. One of them, she recounted, was the size of a one-pound pack of butter. Can you imagine? She earned respect from inmates and Mr. Tilden, a huge inmate, protected her during the Pontiac prison riots; when she first met him he pulled her off the ground by her collar; she fought past her fear and said something that Mr. Tilden understood and could use on the inside.
She had just come out of a coma after being in one for a month, and a three-month time of hell, and she went to the county or city poor ward for indigents with mental retardation. While there she met Ms. Mueller who had spent 32 years out of her 53 this wretched place. When she met her, Jan narrated that she had worn down to almost nothing in terms of her weight. She had tubes in places that the docs had to cut out, on her backside, because they couldn’t use her other, natural orifices. Her eyes had not been lubricated, and the whites of her eyes had solidified; she had been diagnosed early in life as being unable to speak.
Jan worked out a coded pattern to teach her the alphabet, and after a long time Ms. Mueller had communicated many messages to Jan. What Jan asked us to do as a part of our homework assignment was to think of what the first words we would say, if we lay in the same bed as Ms. Mueller. Ms. Mueller’s first words were: God is good. There was one other part of the assignment: she asked us to share Ms. Mueller’s story with as many people as we could. She asked us think what it would be like to be in her condition for thirty two years, viewed by staff members who said unkind things, thinking she couldn’t hear them, treated as a piece of protoplasm without spirit or soul.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA
May, 2009
Filed under: U.S. Imperialism
Americana’s Mythology of Innocence
Sitting in our opulent homes in the
new millennium,
staring into neon squares
blinking, blurring, lighting, blipping, and snowing,
we lay asleep in our recliners.
Someone speaks the truth
about the “real” Americana, and
we raise a curtain of myth-full
innocence, aghast and unaware.
Will the real Americana please stand up?
Hitler looked to American history,
of European colonization and
our methods of oppression and genocide–
as the heroes, archetypes and the bedrock
of how to extinguish those labeled with viruses,
as they marched from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
with their imperialistic resource guarding.
We don’t want to believe this,
must be a lie of the Illuminati,
because we’re the innocents,
so how could Americans get called out
as the brutal slayers.
We gasp, recoiling in holy rage and blindness,
close our eyes and sleep on.
Or we vilify, put down, and persecute
the messengers, calling them
extremists and revolutionaries
(indeed we are).
Have we forgotten why we
Europeans came here to Americana?
We came to escape monarchical oppression
and despotic exploitation,
and we went to war to defend
our right to exist as a
free nation.
But when non-whites resist,
violently or non-violently,
we call them seditious,
and subversive.
News flash: thinking is the most
subversive activity in which
we can engage,
but first we have to
de-mythologize our myth of
innocence, then transform.
The American Indian wars
continue on with relocation,
fraudulent privitization of
sacred lands,
abysmal health care systems,
and the triumphalism of
Americana sovereignty over
sacred compacts called treaties.
Slavery grinds on
with one out of four black males,
age eighteen to twenty-five years old,
enslaved in the prison-industrial
trade combine, with its use of
arbitrary laws and punishments
as dirty currency.
Arab Americans are military captives
falsely profiled and renditioned,
taken to secret prisons, detained
without legal charges, bodies held unlawfully,
and tortured to extort information
in order to lock and load our innocence,
keeping our frame in place and in perpetration.
I read the headlines today.
Bush secretly went to Iraq
to sign a security deal
with Malaki’s government, and
a journalist stood up in a
press conference, throwing his
show at Bush, and calling him
a dog. Then he threw the other
one, saying it was for all the
widows, orphans and innocents
offered on the imperial altar;
throwing the shoe was a sign
of utmost disrespect, and most
Iraqis feel the same way
as this journalist.
We wonder, ‘how can this be?’
Mythological innocence never
sees its shadow,
even in broad daylight behind a building,
simply because we don’t
see or know ourselves.
Iraq, present day symbol of
Americana’s killing machine that has
operated on the same dynamics
since its birth, is the perpetrator,
and the rest of the non-white
world hates us for the trauma
we bring…and because we don’t
call it what it is—savage brutality
and sacrificial baby killing,
and even some of the whites,
the Europeans, long to see the
end of capricious power wielded
by a wild-west administration,
the reflection of frontier-busting,
western movement years ago;
power-hungry domination,
our optical illusion
of innocence and messianic mystique.
©Christopher Bear Beam, MA 121508
AUSTIN, TEXAS SYSTEMIC PROBLEM WITH COMMUNITIES OF COLOR AND LAW ENFORCEMENT
By Christopher Bear Beam, MA
May 17, 2009
Many law enforcement agencies around the country have had long standing systemic problems regarding relationships with communities of color. These problems include police brutality, police misjudgment, police corruption, and racial, systemic structures that impede natural processes for respect given to all ethnic groups within the community. These often overlap with other sub-systems within the larger context.
Austin is no exception to this. There have been shooting incidents, much like the one that happened May 8, 2009 to eighteen year old Nathaniel Sanders. Mr. Sanders was shot and killed by an APD officer when found sleeping in his car. This occurrence happened on the east side of Austin–the part of Austin where most of our communities of colors exist. A boundary line appears to be IH 35 cutting the city down the middle. One radio talk show host, speaking after the Sanders shooting, mentioned that there never has been a shooting of an eighteen year old white male by one of the APD (in similar circumstances), but the list of African American and Latino American victims, over the last several years, has been numerous and brought vocal and political protests from these communities.
What we might ask is this: why haven’t white communities expressed chagrin and anger at these
Killings by the APD? Why haven’t whites, as a group, moved to work together to activate against this kind of discriminatory action? Since I’m a European American, I think I have an inkling of the answer to this question that has been a result of my own work in anti-racism. Whether the officer in this case was justified in the shooting of Sanders is only the first question that needs to be addressed. There are far deeper, systemic questions that need to be asked in this writer’s opinion.
Historically, there are much deeper issues of institutional racism that under gird the actions of many organizations within any city’s structure. There are psycho-socio-historical precedents for law enforcement action, as well as policies and procedures that continue to be perpetuated in the city. Civil Rights legislation is needed, and we’ve made some progress here but there are other reasons for institutional racism to move on unhindered, even when de jure processes have been enacted in ways that should provide safety, protection, fairness, and non-bias to all members of the community.
Thinking systemically is a new way of thinking for many of us; however, it’s this writer’s feeling that when looking at a case of police intervention, where there are serious questions around an appropriate response, this is the kind of thinking called for. Thinking in this way provides a process of clarification illuminating causes and consequences for such incidents.
To think systemically means that we take a holistic perspective on how the structures within any group or city work. The increments within a system function interdependently, even though we may or may not be conscious of them as they operate in a dynamic way. Thinking only in terms of event, not process, will tend to lead to community members blaming one of the players in the incident. These aren’t bad judgments–they just may miss the systemic aspect of seeing the whole from the parts. Within any system, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts–there is an exponential component which means there are outcomes that may be much more intense than individual actions. When we think systemically, we don’t need to confine ourselves to only seeing one person(s) actions which we may label as “bad,” “harmful,” “crazy,” “sick” or “criminal.”
As I was growing up in my family of origin, I felt a lot of rejection from my loved ones. I felt in many ways that I could never reach the kind of perfection that my father demanded. So in order to survive, I decided to become the “sick” one in the family. I found how easily I could manipulate and control the entire family by choosing this role. The family energy aimed at “fixing” me was astonishing as I look back on it. As I reached adolescence, my survival mode changed, and I emotionally and physically cut myself off from my family. I became the sullen loner who lived in a shadow of mistrust of most people, institutions, organizations, but especially the government.
I share this example in order to wonder out loud if these same processes happen in systems and in cultures—after experience in observing many kinds of systems, I’ve come to believe that the same kinds of dynamics are also prevalent in these municipal systems as they are in family systems. Systems act and react on the need for survival, and to ensure that their positions are kept in place. To acknowledge that something may need to be changed is to think, change our paradigms, and see community life in new ways. It also implies swallowing some crow.
Whites tend to view racism as distinct actions that place others at a disadvantage. This view is largely based on a psychoanalytical, behaviorist model of our human condition. A systemic view counteracts this old way of seeing human behavior. Racism, at least the institutionalized version, and not the blatant actions of white supremacist groups or individuals, is more about the emotional and social processes of any specific community. Institutions tend to perpetuate the preservation of enrichment of the dominant group, or place at disadvantage a less-than-dominant group.
Typically, in communities where a tragic crisis as the death of a young African American male happens (as in Nathaniel Sanders grievous case), there is an immediate response by communities of color; this is justifiable and equitable, because communities of color have long been subjected to discrimination, bias, institutional racism, and oppressive practices by the white, social structure. There will be anger present, and this needs to be accepted. There is an immediate call for change, and a demand to meet together to dialogue about the present injustices by communities of persons of color. The WMS (white male system) responds, but doesn’t appear to fully understand all of the causal factors brought up by the community. There usually is a defensive posture taken by the system. Consciously or unconsciously, promises are made, cautionary pleas for patience are made, heads are turned away in denial, silent hopes for ‘this thing to go away,’ and a return to “business as usual” is enjoined.
Yet these incidents are symptoms of the greater systemic problem of institutional racism as work in the community. If communities of color see no concerted effort at clear and observable changes to rectify the problem, they pull away in isolation and disbelief that anything ever will be done to change the atmosphere in which they live. If the “same old, same old” continues to be the order of the day, why engage at all?
There is one such program in the State of Pennsylvania that appears to be a model in the area of viable and real change within communities and institutions. Its thrust is one of prevention. The program is run under the auspices of the Commission for Human Relations for the state. When any racial incident happens, staff from the CHR goes to the community and begins to look at why the “red flags” are going up. These are red flags that other forces are bubbling up. The contention here is that these are symptoms that are emerging into full view. They interview people in the community, facilitate group dialogs, disseminate accurate information concerning hate crimes, bias, discrimination and racism. One of the unique aspects of this program is the use of several people who have come out of blatantly racist backgrounds like the neo-Nazi and Identity movements. Some of these staff have changed their views about race, and now go out to the community doing outreach, sharing their stories, and giving their witness to what works and what doesn’t work.
The key element in why this program works is the notion that hate can only grow and thrive where there is ignorance, misinformation, perhaps intense social regression, and probably the worst of all–silence and fear. Replacing these above elements with accurate understanding and knowledge by people who know the problem, along side an openness to publicly discuss it, engagement and “buy in” by community members are key parts in the community, emotional process that may lead to change and healing.
In assessing the systemic problems of institutional racism within various segments of Austin’s society, it’s not necessary to find a scapegoat to blame. The Chief of Police shouldn’t be vilified nor idolized here, and neither should any other individual or group come under these kinds of pejorative labels. Only placing the responsibility on the APD is just another symptom and won’t solve the racialized problems in any long-term way. Each party must be willing to look into the mirror to confront their own pieces in the puzzle. Clearly, this is the beginning of a self-reflective process.
But what can’t be overlooked is that our nation is still very much part empowered by a white-dominated structure that has been perpetuated for hundreds of years for one express purpose: that of holding onto power and privilege and the enrichment of white society at the expense of people of color. If one examines our historical reference points–open-mindedly–one will find that this is an historically accurate conclusion that many people have little understanding about. Consider this: ninety percent of our nation’s history has taken place within the structures of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
The only way to get past denial is for people of European descent within the Austin community to do some very hard work, that of self-critiquing the way whites have structured social systems to hoard their own privilege, power and possessions. Racism may be described in a formulaic way: Power + Prejudice=Racism. It’s for this reason that it’s inaccurate to say African Americans, for example, are racist. They may be prejudiced like all of us, but it’s our power, privilege and prejudice that run the show. Perhaps it’s not our fault that we’re sick, but it is our (European Americans) responsibility to get well. Since power is still in the hands of white males, in U.S. (this is why I called it the White Male System above), it’s our job to discover where we came from, where we are now, and where will we will be in the future, and why we desperately cling to our own power. It’s not the role of communities of color to teach us about ourselves–they are already well acquainted with how the system works and how it hurts; but many European Americans have no true, defined understanding of their position in the system, and how it oppresses them as well. A healthy white racial identity—minus the baggage of superior/inferior–for most of us has never been developed.
I recommend the start of a European American conversation and dialogue on how we play out institutional racism in our nation and in our city. I recommend that we begin to meet on a regular basis to learn about ourselves so that we may change the racialized dynamics in Austin. We can’t change anyone else, but we can change ourselves.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA May, 2009
Filed under: U.S. Imperialism
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?
The list is long, too long,
Consciousness drops its jaw
All over now? Is it?
US imperialism wants to forget/
Wall paper over with scraps of
Democratic idealism and trinkets/
The death of the Timorese, the
Mexican migrant workers/
Murdered in California by pesticides
Guatemalans, Indonesians,
And Indochinese/
By the bloody handed machetes
Of soldiers or by the proxy hit
Men, the US used to set up
Regimes/even coined our own
Term “regime change” since
the norm of Democracy/we own
Millions of Africans, world’s
Biggest genocide yet
“put down” on the Middle Passage/
slave cargoes/
hundreds and thousands lynched in
the “festival of violence” by the KKK
in post Civil War renaissance
In pre-Iraqi occupation, the time of
Clinton’s boycott, one half million
Children and a million adults
Executed by freezing out essential
Supplies like food, medicines and
Gasoline and now/obscene/
Almost a million Iraqis dead
In piles in the beast,
By the hands of the Beast/
US imperialism/ seen by the
Rest of the world as least
Remember your non-history
When the Chinese came here
To build the railroads, linking
East and west, ostracized in
Camps, ridden out of town,
Singled out, attacked as scapegoat
Seen as the “yellow horde from the
East” wearing pigtails, under skull
Tight hats of hope’s feast
“Innocence” and “American” aren’t
the same thing, so ‘bout time we
stopped playing this game
time to stop our genocide/unsane/
rip off the label of “Occupation Freedom”
calling it what it is/911 may just
be justice, awakening\ wiping sleep
from her eyes, her scales falling/
awakening by shock out of sleep
a sleep so numb
The US imperial boundaries
Won’t be seen on the map
But we need a map for this territory
To find the true door behind/where
Real innocence is supine/
Inside our minds, ignorance dispelled
By a rave and a rage
We may now have come of age
To see……our destiny
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA May, 2009
THE EMOTIONAL PROCESS OF DIVERSITY
By Christopher Bear Beam, MA
There is nothing Wrong With You: Going Beyond Hate, written by Cheri Hube, is a Buddhist psychology on self-hate and self-love. As I read her book, it began to dawn on me how much of our perception of others and difference is based on how we treat ourselves.
In her book, Huber takes a look at the self-hate process that many human beings struggle over within their own minds. This is especially notable in Western cultures where we have the luxury of spending often an inordinate amount of time thinking about self-hate and self-love. For we Westerners this is our perceptual lens by which we see the world.
At one point in her book, she describes self-hate as “internalized battering” drawing allusions to domestic violence. Self-hate is hard on everyone, because we beat up on ourselves, then turn on others to beat them up (emotionally, verbally or physically).
Self-hate is birthed as “internalized battering” and is a form of internalized oppression that we’ve inherited from many conditioning sources in our lives. The most intense source is that of those who are supposed to love us the most—our family.
I started to relate these ideas to human diversity. I believe that an accurate understanding of self-hate and self-love is related to our gratitude (or lack thereof) for the interdependent diversity in the empirical world around us.
There are also connections with our feelings of separation from others, our lack of trust of ourselves, and institutions in our culture.
Humans are similar in that we all are emotional and social beings. We absolutely need belongingness, touch and compassionate care to survive. We’re similar in the need to respect ourselves for who we are, as well as others for who they are, and as this writer believes, we are inherently good. We’re similar, especially in the West, in that most of us fight the inner demons of self-hate and self-doubt.
We have the commonality of emotions and pathos. For example, when we experience fear in ourselves, there are common markers of our fear in non-verbal communication no matter in which culture we originate. Most notably we see common object language and non-verbal reactions on our faces when we feel fear or any other emotion. This is true in what some people define as “civilized societies” and “less civilized societies.” Arguably, this definition of “civilized” is based on our own cultural context, and some would defend the notion of what it means to be civilized or not—this writer included.
This is only one example of our similarities as humans. People everywhere on this planet feel emotions of joy, sadness, pain, anger, pity, fear, excitement, anticipation, mourning, terror, etc.
Differentiation within commonality is one part of our emotional processes under the rubric of diversity. Say, we look at the emotion of anger. Humans express, and perhaps feel internal anger, differently and demonstrate it to the world in a variety of styles. A trigger may spur anger within us—anger may be internalized, a kind of implosion. We drive our emotions out of sight and consciousness. Mixed with self-hate, anger becomes more complex and layered. Homicide has been said to be hatred and anger directed outwardly; suicide may be anger directed inwardly. Many people, on the other hand, direct their anger outwardly in impulsive ways, creating an explosion. This may result in yelling, cursing, belittling with hostility, throwing objects, road rage, giving others the “finger,” contemptuously controlling others, use of violence, etc. Conflict-poured anger that becomes an attitude is more of a habitual way of adaptation, but it keeps the person who holds the anger in a state of fight or flight, and this has health consequences for the one holding onto the anger.
Here, it’s important to recall that societal systems are composed of individuals, and systems are more than the sum of all their parts. They become codified into the fabric of the institutions, and keep the cycle running. They stimulate and perpetuate currents of “internalized battering,” and self-hate.
In the discussions above about anger, the anger siphons off incredible amounts of energy that is basically self-defeating. Anger becomes the first layer of defense, thus keeping the one venting the anger, unable to listen to rational thoughts, and seeing the other side. Many researchers are finding empathy as being a human goal that all of us really seek. When anger solidifies into an attitude or mindset, it’s impossible for us to build any bridges with others. It’s as if our minds create a hardened cell wall that becomes impervious.
It’s been my observation that our emotional similarities as well as contrasts, belies the fact that we can appreciate the huge truism of self-love and self-hate. Self-hate is a form of pathogenic inner violence that we enact against our selves and self-love is the positive energy to defeat inner violence.
For instance, the voices in our head may say to us:
§ “I’m not as competent as she is.”
§ “Why go to the meeting? I have nothing to say of any importance.”
§ “Life isn’t fair. I get all the bad breaks, and always have.”
§ “I always get Cs so why even try.”
§ “I’m the bad seed of the family; I’ve always been the troublemaker. I’m just bad to the bone I guess.”
If we hate ourselves, it will be almost impossible to see the good in others. We simply can’t appreciate our differences and diversity in a positive light, because these factors bring up our own flaws and imperfections. However, loving oneself doesn’t see life from the stance of perfection or imperfection, just what we are feeling in the immediate moment.
Endlessly seeking perfection, we fail time and time again, only to hate ourselves more. No matter how hard we try to fix ourselves, the inner voices of recrimination and feeling as if we are a mistake, dart through our minds like a dragonfly flying in ascending circles.
If any person or group arrives at some deepening degree of understanding self-love, then we are beginning to experience the diversity of emotions and thoughts within ourselves. We may begin to see ourselves as an ever-changing sacred container, that allows and acknowledges all feelings within this space; we can become more comfortable to our serenity; there is a sense of being reconciled to ourselves and to the emotional process of interdependent diversity.
Self-love helps us to value the emotional analogy of our dynamic moods, and to see that all humans experience the same moods that are as variegated as peacock feathers. We may find ourselves more capable of empathy towards those who are very diverse from us. Empathy may then lead to compassion.
Integrating what Cherie Huber suggests in her book and what I know about the connection between appreciation of diversity and our levels of self-hate or self-love, I can summarize the following:
· We are who we are
· We all have inherent goodness
· We all have been conditioned to being separated from each other
· We have no need to fix ourselves because we have nothing to fix
· We don’t have to be obsessed with changing ourselves
· We can own all our own feelings and need not feel responsible for other’s feelings
· If thoughts or feelings keep us stuck in an unhealthy place, we can simply acknowledge them and say to ourselves, “this is me, too”
· We may start to embrace what we think are our mistakes
· We have the human intelligence to look at our own inner violence
· We can learn to love ourselves and know this is a life time process
· Loving ourselves means loving all of who we are
· When we come to love ourselves more fully, we can love others more freely
April 16, 2009
THE GOLD FISH HOOK
You ask why I wear this gold fishhook as an earring? There’s a good reason. There was a wonderful inlet where fish lived in abundance. All the local fisher people went there, mostly early in the morning or at dusk into the evening. On colder days, you could see the fires going, that kept the fisher people warm, and smell the brewed coffee and hot chocolate, a sweet and earthy aroma that folks could smell from a distance.
Most of the fisher people used bits of old, silver metal for hooks, unless they had enough money to buy customized hooks or the normal commercial ones. Some would use bright colored lures to draw in fish. But there was only one person who used a gold fishhook. This fishhook was very special to this particular fisher woman. It had been in her family for generations passed down from one father or mother to the children. It was special because it had a special shine and twinkle once it went under the water. When something gold is under water, with the light streams hitting it from different angles, it gave off a special shine that most certainly would attract many fish.
The old ones said that this was because of the similarity with the golden color and the sun’s rays. The fusion of these two elements carried with it special attractions and subtle brilliance that transfixed the fish’s eyes. They were bound to follow it to its source, and would fight off all obstacles to get to the golden hook.
These kinds of lures, made of silver, chrome, aluminum, and tin gave off a sort of silent commotion. Fish would see their reflection in the water, and then came a mental disturbance so that they were like frightened children leaving a burning building. A commotion of sound, sights, and visual waves caused the fish to begin to swim in autistic circles, and they moved towards the lures in hyper speed motion simply trying to get out of the water. They swam to what was the most impetuous and chaotic source that happened to be these hooks. The origami patterns of the silver lures seemed to beckon them, offering them an escape from the cacophonous net of decibels, calling out for them to come to safety and sanity.
One one particular early morning, the sun was rising ceremoniously with color, warmth and serene tones. Many fisher people were on the inlet that day, poles in hand, sitting on pieces of wood, or standing up on the bank. Most of them had cast out. One particular woman, who owned the golden fishhook, claimed the honor of casting out last. The commotion had started, and the waters rippled with diagonal, watery trails just underneath the surface. Some of the shocked fish jumped in large arcs up and out of the water. Almost all of the fish were turning around in dazed reaction to the silver hooks and they swam in crazy non-linear lines making an inconsistent track towards the silver lures. As they neared the hooks they would take lemming-like leaps at them catching the hooks in all parts of their bodies. The fisher people would simply reel in their lines, grab their thrashing bodies, and throw them into buckets filled with just a little water—just enough so they could writhe in their aquiline grave until they died.
But there was one old, very decrepit drum fish that caught the golden hook’s sanguine shine, and he swam slowly but surely towards it. The burnt gold aura captured every sense and fish consciousness within him. He moved towards it, then opened his mouth and grabbed the hook with a tenacity that would make any fisher person envious and filled with passion. The fisher woman, holder of this family artifact of the golden hook, thanked her ancestors for the legacy of this gift, and offered sacrifices of adoration to the great Self, as she reeled in the old drum. When it was up and out of the water, she took it off the hook. The ancient drum smiled as she did this. She took the senior fish gently and ably, placing him in a bucket filled with water and minnows. The drum knew this was a good sign—the fisher woman was feeding and nourishing him!
By now the other fisher people were taking their catch out of the buckets, placing them on boards, and cutting off their heads. They heaped them in big piles up off the ground over fires they had built on the shore. The heads sent off strong fish smells, and they offered thanks for the catch to Neptune. They then began the task of cleaning and filleting their catch. This was the end for these fish, except for nourishing the villagers with their protein and vitamins and oils.
The fish caught with the golden hook, though, had a much different fate. The woman took the aged drum home in the bucket filled with water and minnows. In the back of her house, she had built a fish sanctuary; it was said that this sanctuary, with its special lighting, water, and food, kept fish caught with the golden hook alive forever. It was called the Fish Fountain of Life. She lovingly placed the old drum into the water in the sanctuary pond, and almost immediately it began to reverse its aging process. The drum’s wrinkled skin took on a youthfulness; his eyes brightened, and his smile broadened. He felt more energy and happiness than he had ever felt before in his entire life. He felt blissful and irenic. As he thought about what had happened that morning, he was especially grateful that he followed the golden lure’s attraction, and that nothing was more important than being caught by the gold. The other fish were dead and gone, but he was alive, he thought to himself. And if the stories were true, he would live forever in the sanctuary’s bliss. He sighed to himself and swallowed down one of the minnows that swam around him without fear.
Those who see the gold have gone to lesson learning schools,
You can’t judge a hook by its sister or brother.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA 122108
Filed under: Mental Health
LIFELESS
lifeless, i flop like a white lace slip
on a spring clothesline/
no wind today/
me/like the chickens we hung
up on the clothesline/
white/soft/feathered/eagle-ed cotton
necks/vertical with no
movement, they are still,
almost un-breathing
i pull the mushy, elastic neck/
so soft to touch/queezy/
slice, it’s all over with
lifeless/this is the way
i feel/and,
feeling the dead weight body
smiling towards a night’s
sky and thinking to self,
i’m not separate from you,
Body, i’m the body and the spirit
it reiterates, and my visceral,
gastroentological-body is only
a human carrier
what’s left is genuine goodness,
i have love, at this moment, for me
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA April, 2009
Filed under: Culture
Americana’s Mythology of Innocence
Sitting in our opulent homes in the
new millennium,
staring into neon squares
blinking, blurring, lighting, blipping, and snowing,
we lay asleep in our recliners.
Someone speaks the truth
about the “real” Americana, and
we raise a curtain of myth-full
innocence, aghast and unaware.
Will the real Americana please stand up?
Hitler looked to American history,
of European colonization and
our methods of oppression and genocide–
as the heroes, archetypes and the bedrock
of how to extinguish those labeled with viruses,
as they marched from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
with their imperialistic resource guarding.
We don’t want to believe this,
must be a lie of the Illuminati,
because we’re the innocents,
so how could Americans get called out
as the brutal slayers.
We gasp, recoiling in holy rage and blindness,
close our eyes and sleep on.
Or we vilify, put down, and persecute
the messengers, calling them
extremists and revolutionaries
(indeed we are).
Have we forgotten why we
Europeans came here to Americana?
We came to escape monarchical oppression
and despotic exploitation,
and we went to war to defend
our right to exist as a
free nation.
But when non-whites resist,
violently or non-violently,
we call them seditious,
and subversive.
News flash: thinking is the most
subversive activity in which
we can engage,
but first we have to
de-mythologize our myth of
innocence, then transform.
The American Indian wars
continue on with relocation,
fraudulent privitization of
sacred lands,
abysmal health care systems,
and the triumphalism of
Americana sovereignty over
sacred compacts called treaties.
Slavery grinds on
with one out of four black males,
age eighteen to twenty-five years old,
enslaved in the prison-industrial
trade combine, with its use of
arbitrary laws and punishments
as dirty currency.
Arab Americans are military captives
falsely profiled and renditioned,
taken to secret prisons, detained
without legal charges, bodies held unlawfully,
and tortured to extort information
in order to lock and load our innocence,
keeping our frame in place and in perpetration.
I read the headlines today.
Bush secretly went to Iraq
to sign a security deal
with Malaki’s government, and
a journalist stood up in a
press conference, throwing his
show at Bush, and calling him
a dog. Then he threw the other
one, saying it was for all the
widows, orphans and innocents
offered on the imperial altar;
throwing the shoe was a sign
of utmost disrespect, and most
Iraqis feel the same way
as this journalist.
We wonder, ‘how can this be?’
Mythological innocence never
sees its shadow,
even in broad daylight behind a building,
simply because we don’t
see or know ourselves.
Iraq, present day symbol of
Americana’s killing machine that has
operated on the same dynamics
since its birth, is the perpetrator,
and the rest of the non-white
world hates us for the trauma
we bring…and because we don’t
call it what it is—savage brutality
and sacrificial baby killing,
and even some of the whites,
the Europeans, long to see the
end of capricious power wielded
by a wild-west administration,
the reflection of frontier-busting,
western movement years ago;
power-hungry domination,
our optical illusion
of innocence and messianic mystique.
©Christopher Bear Beam, MA 121508
