When my mom was in high school up in Canada a school shooting occurred. It was whispered about as an 'isolated incident'. Now mom says she thinks it was early symptoms of a deeper sickness in humanity, most especially the youth.

I have a theory about this sort of thing: the "system", if you will, the ones with power-over in our hierarchal lifestyle, keeps pushing and pushing the already disturbed kids in school. I admit that I was one of those potential school-shooter kids in school. Except I would have focused entirely on administration, not any students. Revise that: not many students. Just a few.

By being cut off from that which spawned us, as we have been since the industrial revolution, and being cut off from each other and the presence in ourselves, as patriarchy teaches us to be (please not that I am not singling out men here--I am singling out patriarchy and hierarchy, which can just as easily be matriarchy and hierarchy--the problem lies in the latter word), we fall into endless despair. We reach out to anything to find what we've lost, but end up finding more nothingness. Some are able to fit in and play along at happiness by never analyzing the gaping void within their souls, but the others, the non-conformists, the freaks, get pushed by their peers, families, and the system for not being 'normal' enough.

I had about 6 nervous breakdowns during high school, all major ones, and the last one had me sobbingly replying "I don't know!" whenever someone asked me my name. I just thank the Goddess that I had Her incarnate in my Mom, otherwise I really would have snapped.

College was much better.

But there is still that underlying authority thing, that thinking of "Teacher knows best, because you are a stupid child, and that is why you are here--to be taught what you do not know".

I think a better solution to this problem (actually, to most problems) would not be to just throw the perpetrators into max-security prison (that is, if they haven't already killed themselves) and consider the problem over, but to actually address the root of this severely antisocial activity.

The root is our culture. We live in a culture of estrangement, of cutting off from what's right or natural. We're taught we have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom, to pee or poop, which are natural bodily functions. We're taught (if we're women) that farting, burping, and sex are done/wanted only by "bad people", and (if we're men) that those same things can be the subject of contests to see who's better in each arena. Tree-huggers and animal rights-activists are the "freaks" in school, and the "normal" kids are the ones who succumb to what's expected of them no matter how far it is off their own course, who develop eating disorders to maintain that 'perfect look', or who take steroids for the same purpose.

We are taught to deny our natural impulses, our natural beings, and our emotions, because they're not "appropriate" to "adult living". "Good" people don't feel anger. "Good" people don't want to kill others. "Good" women are obedient and submissive, and never show their "bitchy" side, and "good" men are aggressive go-getters, who are never allowed to be vulnerable or sensitive, lest they be considered gay. (Oh, what a tragedy that would be.)

As well, “good” people don’t care about the environment, but only about furthering their own agendas—getting the most toys and riches, and being the most influential on the block. Only then may you rest, because you’ve risen to the top. But beware! One slip-up, one tiny thing that reveals you’re actually a “bad” person who’s been faking it all these years and BAM! You Fall, back to the gutter, back into Hell. Only Angels get good lives.

The truth is, Christendom never went away. It just became secular. Sure, we live in a secular society. Then why does everything close early on Sundays, why is gay marriage an issue when it’s not a religious one, why is religious tolerance not the norm, why are abortion workers murdered by Christian fanatics who do then not get prosecuted, why does all our currency say In God We Trust, why are Wiccan or Pagan Veterans not allowed to get a pentacle on their gravestones, why are Easter and Christmas and all those other Christian holidays also civic holidays but not Halloween, why are there still some places where being a non-Christian can get you beaten to death, why is there a stigma to being an unmarried mom, why is prostitution illegal, why are naked bodies “shameful”, why must we ask for permission to do what is natural for our mammalian bodies to do, why does the GBLT community have to even ask for rights that should be theirs on account of their being human, why has every single president been a white man, why is there no problem with See You At The Pole on school grounds but any other religious observation during lunchtime would bring about a stake-burning, why must we deny our natural lives—children, birth, death, love, marriage, grief, bodily functions, sweat—in order to “survive” in the “adult world” if this is truly a secular society?

I do not hate Christians. I repeat: I do NOT hate Christians. Some of my best friends are Christians. And they are the best Christians I have ever met. They are the ones who don’t parade it about, who don’t tell others what to believe, who don’t “fight wars for Jesus” and who realize that there are different paths for different people. This is what we should ALL strive to achieve, an attitude to replace the current one.

This attitude of good/bad people and fitting the mold has been carried into Neo-Paganism, which is hardly hierarchical, with the notions of "good witch/bad witch" or "white/black magick". Like there could be a difference between white or black magick--saying there is only promotes racist thought. Magick is magick. A witch is a witch. Good and bad are matters of perspective--if you ask the villian in any story if he or she is evil, he or she will probably say "No. I'm just misunderstood."

School shootings, acts of "terrorism", etc, are just examples of people who are lost and confused in this culture lashing out with all the anger they've been taught to deny their whole lives, lashing out in very unhealthy ways because all they know is that it is unhealthy to feel differently, period, and that there is no healthy way to let it out.

Instead of just punishing people and leaving it at that, of teaching people that the punishment/reward system is all there is and they better be good, for goodness sake, or Santa will beat them with a stick, we need to re-teach people. We need to re-teach ourselves. And we need to foster a different culture, a culture of immanence instead of estrangement, a culture where we see each other and ourselves as part of a huge web, and all emotions as valid, so we can learn how to be healthy, body mind and soul.

Now, if these people were psychopathic personalities, which I personally believe are born without souls, then that's an entirely different issue.

Psychopathic personalities are completely sane and logical, lack any empathy for other beings, and are “never in the wrong”.  A psychopath can waltz into a school, shoot up a hundred plus people, and waltz back out never feeling that he or she has done anything wrong. He or she may even strike up a perfectly normal conversation with the cops if he or she is taken alive.

By the way: we have several PPs running this country right now.

School shooters kill themselves at the end because they’re overcome with grief. Because they know they’ve done something wrong. Even if they couldn’t articulate it, that’s the emotion. That emotion thing again—what we’re supposed to deny.

If the people running this country felt anything for other human beings, or other beings in general, they would have committed suicide long ago. The United States has now been involved in Iraq for longer than we were in World War II – perhaps the only just war.

What we fail to see is that we’ve become the new Nazis of the world—big bullies everyone’s afraid of.

And they have a right to be: the US spends more money on “defence” (read: nuclear weapons) each year than the rest of the major defence-spenders on the list combined. Canada isn’t even on that list. 

You may say what you want about “influences” in youth’s lives today, about how it’s all that Marilyn Manson crap that they listen to, or how you can’t understand how anyone could be so violent and cruel. It’s easy to understand: look around you. Look at this country that you’re living in, in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, turned into Land of Fear and Home of Death, and look at how it throws its weight around in the rest of the world. Look at its use of power-over to force others to do its bidding, the true definition of violence.

This is a country where I’m not even allowed to say something like this, because I may be “promoting terrorism.” That is, if I fear them. That is, if I let them control me.

You can let them make an “example” of the few who stray, and stay safely locked in your pen, never hurt, but never living either.

Or you can fight back, and fuck the lot of them, because we’re human, damn it, and we’ve been fighting for millennia, and you won’t take us without a struggle. We will not go down peacefully.

Because if we do, no anthropologist will even care to document our history. We will be a speck in the history of the galaxy. Because we didn’t care enough to fight for our good name—so why should anyone care enough to talk about us?

Kurt Vonnegut died recently. His words: “It’s too bad. This country could have been something great.”

"We learn from history that when good and evil struggle against each other, initially evil tends to take the upper hand until all of a sudden it disintegrates and collapses."

--Ghandi

perhaps right now is the time to take these words to heart. with such an utter despair gripping the world, the feeling like we can't change anything even if we did try, that it's all over so we should just try to survive every day--and indeed, that is all we can do--we need something to hold onto.

i for one don't want this world to end. because even if we are completely fucked up as a species, even if we are a cancer upon the planet, there are things worth saving. paintings. art. beautiful writing. love. yes, it sounds trite, but i would die if the world became a place where i didn't receive poetry from my boyfriend at odd hours of the night just because he was thinking about me. that sort of thing is worth saving. a mother's love for her child--the kind of love that makes death seem a small price to pay for the continued well-being of your son or daughter. good music. good food. laughter. good movies. even bad movies, because without the bad how would we know what good is?

evil is necessary for the proliferation of good. i do not subscribe to the secularized christian view of good always vanguishing evil for ever and always triumphing and that rewards come to those who wait. rewards come to those who work. the real reward of a good life is seeing the effects of your deeds, not some imaginary feast in the afterlife. i do not even believe in good or evil, per se, because those who we consider evil do not consider themselves evil. it is just a different perspective to them. how do we know we are not the evil ones?

we don't. we just feel in our hearts that things should be run differently, and we can see the effects of the current administration on the planet (not just the US--i'm referring to humanity's administration as a whole) as being generally bad for any other species here.

it could be said that this is supposed to happen--that we'll die out and the world will balance itself out again. even if that's true, how can someone, in good conscience, allow what's going on to happen?

we carry this false belief that accumulating wealth is the ultimate goal of life--or that being the most beautiful is, or the smartest, or the life of the party. these are high school ideas that we carry into life. they come from a culture of estrangement, the culture we were born into. we see ourselves as separate from everything and one else, and therefore we don't see our actions as affecting anyone else. the culture of estrangement, of power-over, of hierarchy, makes teenagers of adults. we've got a bunch of self-centered (admittedly not always knowingly) people running around doing things to accumulate whatever they can until they die, at which point none of this stuff matters anyway.

what matters is not being better than every one else. what matters is to be the best you can be, you, yourself, your individual self, while retaining the knowledge that you are not alone. you are brother or sister to everyone else in the whole world, to every tree, flower, bush, bee, bird, and wolf--you are a strand in a great web that stretches beyond this planet and out into the universe, that is the universe, and energy is what you are made of. the force does not flow thru us, because then it is seen as separate from us. the force is us. and how we choose to be, what kind of people we choose to be determines the 'light' or 'darkness' of it.

the point is not to do good.

the point is to do better.

and to remember, that at the end of the day, you are not alone. you may feel alone. especially if you are disconnected from friends, family, or just like-minded acquantiances.

and to remember, that no matter how futile it all seems, that no matter how much you want to give up for lack of any visible change, that despite all this, your actions will matter. because whether you are directly or indirectly a factor, things will change. they always do. and doing something, whether or not it works, empowers you.

this should not be about guilt.

this should be about feeling good about picking up the litter on your daily walk, even if it's back twofold the next day, because you made a difference in the world's fabric of energy, if only for a second. seeing litter is a depressing sight for most people. by picking it up, you are improving a small corner of the world, for a little bit, allowing some light to shine there, which will touch other people in their busy lives for a while, and reach out to touch the others they see or deal with, and so on around the world.

and the same goes for any little bit of activism. whether it be hugathon, chaining yourself to a fence to protest a nuclear reactor being built, standing on a corner with a sandwich board sign, or blowing up parliament to prove a point, to break down old structures so that new ones may be born out of the rubble.

this evolutionary stage we're on has grown stagnant. we cannot allow ourselves to live in fear. we must switch to a system of power-from-within, of acknowledging everything as sacred--sacred being whatever we value for being itself. our bodies are sacred, and what comes out of our bodies--here i speak of shit--is sacred, because it composts, and out of compost comes new life. life is a cycle. water-based sewage systems are probably one of the stupidest ideas we've had as humans. they disrupt that cycle.

so do the burial systems of our dead. cremation is more sensible than being put in your best clothing into a wooden box that will take longer to decompose than you will to be lowered into the ground where you will take up space that can be used by the living, but it's still pretty useless. my father wants to be composted when he dies. he can't, because it's illegal. the law says that instead of being useful when dead, he must rot where he will feed worms who will make the cemetary dirt very rich in nutrients, but it's being used as a cemetary so that's a moot point.

these systems we have in place prevent us from being the best we can be, as humans, and as mammals. we forget this alot, but we are mammals, so far as we can tell. we are apes, so far as we know. we must accept our place in the animal kingdom outside of biology class and work on making our place more of a niche than a gouged-out hold in the ecosystem's wall. we obviously have some purpose on this planet. let's develop it.

maybe it's art, of all kinds. music, words, paintings, textiles, the list goes on. maybe it's our mental capacities. we are capable of great things. but while we are officially secular, we are still ruled by fear-based, monotheistic, patriarchal thought-forms that teach us different is bad, rule by many is heretical, and female is dark and dirty.

newsflash: we are all dark and dirty. women bleed. men poop. humans eat, piss, fuck, shit, sleep, fart, and burp our way thru our lives, and try to hide it all because it's so 'shameful'. the ones who embrace all these natural bodily functions and the natural state of nudity are 'deviants' who must be 'locked-up'.

if we're so fucking secular, then why are we so illogical about the simplest things?

these beliefs are based on fear. fear from a triad of patriarchal abrahamic religions that still rule the world, like it or not. we claim to be secularized, but the truth is that men are valued over women, white over black/other colors, and the One over the Many.

i hate the terms white or black magick used so frequently by new followers of the craft. it emphasizes the belief that white = pure good righteous virtuous pure perfect ruling class and black = dirty bad immoral lewd impure slave class. the very usage in a power-from-within religion of hierarchial terms comes from the fact that almost all of us are raised in the culture of estrangement, and must come to the culture of connectivity, of immanence, from that place, and so must shed those old ideas. it's easier to fall back into old systems than to actively work at creating new ones.

this world is full of horrible things.

this world is full of precious and wonderful things.

what do you want to be humanity's last legacy?

my resolution to publish only newsworthy things in this blog is ridiculous. to assume that my life does not hold seeds of rants that change minds was silly of me. which is not to say that i will be posting highly personal and frivolous things anytime soon, but i will no longer be ignoring this blog.

i've been doing some soul-searching the past...few hours. well, weeks, really. i haven't been at an inspired place for a while now; i feel like i've lost my connection to all that is real--energy, the earth, the goddess. i can't feel those things like the thrumming in my blood like they once were. that is either an indication of my getting stronger and needing surges of the energy to note it, or that i've been cut off.

i think it's the latter. i feel empty inside, and devoid of any energy. i keep on telling myself i need to get energized and start to change my life, but in reality i just don't care right now.

so i need to redeem my callousness. here i will speak. i doubt i'll be read. but at least i'll make the attempt.

i have recently discovered i am an indigo-crystal child (now adult). i think my powers were muted by the fucked-up-edness of my childhood. i'm going to be meditating to recover those lost powers. well, not lost. just....smothered.

i have also learned that maui is a point on earth that holds the essence of lemuria, the first continent (or pangaea for you scientist types out there). so if i could just get over the stress of 8 years of living there, then when i return i can do some earth/healing work. but it explains the attraction new agey/pagany people feel for the place. i used to down talk that attraction, saying they wouldn't feel it for alaska cause it's so cold up there and isn't "paradise". they probably wouldn't. i wonder how many people (like me) moved to powell river because they prefer the cold? not many, but that's cause pr is the warmest place in bc.

so, on to the title of this entry and how it relates. fire the grid is a website that explains it all. the long and short of it is this: on july 17, THIS year, at 11:11 GMT (3:11 am PST; 1:11 am HST), is when we need to 'fire the grid'. the grid of the planet. we need to send our loving energies into it for an hour at that time.  we will "reset mother earth with a bioelectric surge of love from humanity". i know i'll be up at 3 am to do it. so will my mom.

you may not believe it, you may think it's a bunch of baloney, which is fine--i'm not trying to convince anyone. but if it's true? can you imagine the change? we could heal the earth. we could fix the problems we started. is an hour really too much time to try that? is it not worth your time?

it's been proven that humanity working together can accomplish miracles. covens probably get more magick done than solitaries. if every person on earth just stopped for this one hour on this one day and focused their love into the earth, i can't even imagine the good we'd accomplish. hell, if every person in one hemisphere did it it would make a difference.

whether or not you believe me or this or anything relating to this 'airy-fairy bullshit', give it some thought. what have you got to lose? an hour, that could be spent playing video games, or stuck in meetings, or rush-hour traffic, or being reprimanded by someone, or playing computer games instead of working. i think you get my point.