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The Middle Way

~ A journey between extremes

The Middle Way

Monthly Archives: July 2016

Just get over it!

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Change, Emotional Intelligence, Human, Middle Way, Politics

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I had a brother die about a year and a half ago. When my father called me to let me know I thought he was leading up to one of his standard bad jokes, the worst one yet. Understand, that there was absolutely no reason he should have died that I knew of. He was younger and healthier than I am, as far as I knew he didn’t engage in any risky behaviors, and I had just seen him a couple of days earlier and everything was absolutely normal. So when I got the call I went so far as to lose my patience with my father and yelled at him to knock the bullshit off and tell me what the hell he really wanted. The shock was so extreme that on some levels it still hasn’t completely sunk in, in fact I’m not sure if it ever will. My brother and I were very close, and the pain is always just under the surface like bruise that still aches sharply to the touch.

A couple of days later I was at a function and I let the people there know what was going on with me. At least I think I let them know, looking back I realize I have very little memory of the days that followed. Everyone was great, there was plenty of compassion and understanding. Then a week later I was with the same group of people when one of them came up to say hello. He asked how I was doing and I numbly replied that I still wasn’t doing very good. When he asked why I told him about my brother’s death (I had no memory of seeing him the week before and didn’t know if he knew), and he looked me straight in the face and said “Yeah, but wasn’t that last week?! I mean sooner or later you’re going to have to get over that shit. You can’t mope about it forever.”

To say I was dumbfounded is an understatement. I literally was taken so off guard that I actually agreed with him and shuffled away, and just went and sat down and stared at my feet. By the time my brain had processed what he had said he was gone and I was left to sit there and stew in my own anger. I mean at that particular point in time we had visited my brother’s house only once just to get a few items for the funeral, which itself had only concluded a day or two earlier. There had not even been a burial yet because of the time it takes for the cremation to occur.

I’m quite sure that more than a few people reading this probably thought “What an insensitive asshole! It had only been a goddamn week. Give the guy some time, his brother just died?!”, am I right?

I understand that the person meant well, but what is clear to me now is that, for whatever reason, he clearly had never had that level of an emotional blow in his life before. He just didn’t understand how it can effect people. Some can heal quickly, some more slowly, for others it can take years, and some never get over things. For those who can never accept or get over the blow, they slowly die a little bit every day until they finally run out of days.

We all process emotional trauma differently. From the John Wayne types who suck it up and stoically go about life, to the trembling pillars of jell-o who might get over it in a few years if they’re lucky… and everything in between. We all do it differently and all of it takes time.

This brings me to politics, specifically the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. It was a different campaign. It was so unique that it will be studied for years. Why? Because he went from barely any name recognition to filling 30,000 seat arenas in a matter of weeks. He was able to fund his campaign and out-raise his opponents by massive amounts, and he did it by doing something everyone thought impossible: by only relying on his donor’s meager support donations, which averaged $27 a piece… no big money were allowed. None. In the age of Citizens United that is nothing short of a modern miracle.

So how did he do all of this? Well for one, he is an New Deal Democrat who has been running as an independent because these days a New Deal Democrat translates to a Democratic Socialist. And so he registers as an Independent. Bernie has a very long and very solid reputation of being a man of his word and a man of integrity. He says what he means, and he follows through. And I mean this in a way that goes beyond normal even for regular people, for a politician that kind of integrity makes him a bonafide freak of nature!

And the people responded. Boy did they respond! The sheer amount of first-time voters who flocked to him was mind blowing. His supporters we so emotionally invested in him that they were willing to go out of their way to educate themselves on the issues and debate anyone on the spot. They were willing to distance themselves from acquaintances once they realized where they stood on issues. They saw Bernie as a once in a lifetime candidate and they were willing to do whatever it took to make him president. In other words, they felt as though there was a chance that someone was actually going to be able to do something that would directly affect their daily lives for the better. For those who saw this about Bernie, they saw him as something bigger and more personal than just some politician. He felt like a friend, a father, and a savior all in one. And the more this happened, the more humble Bernie became. People couldn’t help but love him.

And because there was a lot of suspicion that his campaign was not being treated fairly by the DNC (suspicions that have now been proven true) people felt that not only was their friend under attack, but the possibilities he represented in their lives was also in danger. They were emotionally invested in this, they were paying for it out of their own meager paychecks and realized that if he lost, they lost. It wasn’t about the candidate, it was about them. It actually was a revolution, because it was about the voters themselves.

So when it all unravelled at the Democratic National Convention you saw people protesting, people refusing to change or give in, you saw people walking out during roll call, and you saw people literally crying. Suddenly everyone who was supporting HIllary Clinton, or was genrally supporting The Party, began to berate Bernie’s supporters. They told them it was time to unify against the evil Darth Trump. They told them to get over it, Bernie never had a chance anyway. They stood on stage and pointed directly at them and said “To the ‘Bernie or Bust’ people, you’re being ridiculous.”. And all of this was within minutes of the final nomination, not a week later. In fact, it hasn’t even been a week as I write this.

Now I realize you can’t even compare the sudden death of a brother to a political candidate losing a nomination. But what you can compare, if you are willing to put your opinions aside, is the reactions that happen in situations where people are emotionally bound to something, and then lose it. They lose the hope, they lose the spark, they lose their reason for being there. They lose all of their time and energy, they lose their money, they lose the psycological dependence on the thing they were counting on. Psycological dependence is a real thing, and it is a core part of you and I and every other human. When we lose something suddenly and tragically, we actually experience a withdrawal of sorts, and it takes time and effort before we can heal and move on. And remember, not everyone is capable of that kind of acceptance. But one thing that is key in the emotional healing process is that it requires time. It rarely, very rarely, happens overnight, let alone instantly. So to stand up in front of people and tell them their being ridiculous when they built this thing from the ground up and just had it smashed.. well frankly that doesn’t do anyone any good and it was a dumb move.

Give people time. Give them space. Let them be angry, let them wallow in denial. Allow them to get upset and depressed. Eventually they will come to accept the results. And when that happens maybe they will be ready to join in with you in the defeat of Darth Trump. But if you berate them, belittle them and demean their feelings you’re not going to make any friends, let alone gain voters. There is plenty of time between now and November, so why not back off and give people a break. Goldman Sachs didn’t pay for this campaign, those very upset voters did. So why not let them take the time to accept this on their own terms. When they’re ready to talk, you’ll know.

The Flower Sermon

30 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Middle Way

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Wo-oah, what I want to know, where does the time go?

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Change, Ego, Human, Middle Way, Open mind, Quantum, Spirituality

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deadheadsdancingI am currently listening to a recording of a concert that marks the very last time I “got my freak on”. The phrase means different things to different people, so let me explain what I mean…

I’m a Dead Head. I have been for well over 30 years. I’ve spent my years on the road going from show to show. At any given time I sold shirts, or posters, or beer, or spaghetti, or the ever-present grilled cheese sandwich, all to finance my trip to the next show. Yes, my answering machine was full the day Jerry died. The first message on the tape was my mother calling to see how I was taking the news. For me, the saddest part of that day was not the realization that he had died (his health had been up and down for years, so we always knew it was going to be a relatively short ride), but it was more that an entire chapter of my life had just ended. There was going to be sounds, feelings, and epiphanies I would never get to experience again. There was entire groups of people I would lose touch with because we only saw each other at shows. There was also the huge loss of no longer being part of “the x-factor” again.

There was a synergy that came from being fully immersed in the experience at one of their shows. There was a something that would happen to you that didn’t happen to everyone, it wasn’t guaranteed. Some shows it would happen to lots of us at once. You would look over and suddenly make eye contact with a stranger at just the right time and both of you would grin from ear to ear, knowing that you both just felt it, and then you would go off on your own again… like everyone else. And that thing wouldn’t happen unless you were actually there, and it didn’t happen every night, or only during particular songs. And the band knew it too, they relied on it. And when the conditions were just right there was an electricity in the air that would join band and crowd, sound and emotion, mind and body and spirit, and all would become one, rising above our normal existence for a while. But you had to be there because you too were an important variable in this chaotic experiment. If you wanted to go there you couldn’t hold on too tight, you had to let go.

Describing the experience is impossible. There’s an old saying that goes something like “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, and describing this experience is several orders of magnitude more abstract. But as far as I am concerned the actual experience itself is at least as many orders of magnitude more important because it helps us learn to open our minds. It also helps us remove the predisposed limitations we’ve been taught and learned throughout our life, so that we can begin to be able to see the possibilities that are only visible when we forget we’re supposed to have limits.

It seems that the closer we stick to our ego/self, the more tied we become to limitations like: time as a linear concept, acceptable and unacceptable or good and bad, as well as all of the basic limitations that keep us from exploring and looking around that one corner we think we shouldn’t look around. The further away we get from our ego/self, the less tethered we are to everything: time, space, limitations, all of the things we normally think of when we think of our experience as humans. Even the concept of time itself becomes irrelevant.

Think about it this way: Why is it that when I’m enjoying music, really getting in to it… eyes closed, head moving, just being transported with an evening of music from my favorite musician, that I can look up at the end of the music and realize that maybe hours have passed, but it literally felt like only a few minutes! It seems like that the more I lose myself in the moment, the more the moment ceases to be marked with a beginning or an end. Yet, if on the other hand, I am stuck listening to some crap while I’m waiting on the phone because Tech Support is experiencing “higher than normal call volume” it can literally seem like an eternity! Even though the support call might only have been 10 minutes, it seems twenty times longer than an entire evening of music that I love and can get lost in. The same idea can be said about daydreaming. I’m sitting in class and the teacher starts to drone on, the next thing I know the class is over, an hour has gone by, and I have no memory of the the experience. My mind was literally in another place and time, sorting through other ideas and projects. It left me, but yet I went with it. Where did I go? And how comes sometimes those trips are so creative or beneficial? Some of us were labelled daydreamers as children, and many times it’s those same people who end up the artists, musicians and philosophers. Or in other words, we’re the ones who naturally don’t think linear.

We know that time is our own experience, our own construct. That is to say, other creature on this earth experience time differently than us. For example, have you ever noticed that if you leave the house and come back 5 minutes, or even 5 hours later, your dog is just as crazy excited to see you either way? It’s as if their concept of time is completely different than ours and instead they are always in the moment (except dinner time… my dog starts pacing at exactly 5:30). For us, the idea of time is part of the basic package that comes with a mind. And just like the other items in that basic package, it can be undone or circumnavigated. That’s what Lamas and Yogis have been doing for centuries. But in their case they’re learning how to control it, slowly and methodically. But yet, without the years of mindfulness training, you and I can enjoy a small part of that experience by losing ourselves in music, and circumnavigating time. Albert Einstein recognized this felixibility of time in relation to the mind when he said “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

So when I “got my freak on” at that show a few years ago it wasn’t a matter of “Where did the time go?”, it was more like “Where did I go without time?!” I truly wonder if isn’t at these instances that we dabble in a form of quantum travel. Especially since sometimes these experiences are so transformative that we literally come back a different person. As if I actually switched places with some other Dave who was also tripping through the quantum foam…

Today is a good day to die

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Middle Way

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Jerry Garcia describes his glimpse in to the chasm. May we all learn to play without a net someday. 

Image

Nonviolence

27 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough | Filed under Change, Ego, Human, Middle Way, Open mind, Spirituality

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Acceptance

27 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Change, Ego, Human, Middle Way, Open mind, Politics, Sameness, Spirituality

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Over the last few days there has been a lot going on, and people are extremely emotional right now. While not everything is political, the tools we handle them with are the same. My head has been spinning with a series of things that have been piled on me over the last couple of years, and each one is a story. Each a teachable moment, if I can only get out of my own way, some may even become posts. They involve things like losing really important people in my life to heroin overdoses, coming face to face with life-altering health problems, getting far enough inside of politics to become nauseated from seeing how the sausage is made, as well as everyday disappointments, annoyances and challenges. They’re all things that can make or break you, but it’s not about the extremes.

When it comes down to it what I am trying to do is write about is life, how I see it and how I try to deal with things. But you can’t always “deal” with everything. In fact, there’s a lot in life you can’t “deal” with at all. Some things just “are” whether we like it or not. We can’t effect them or change their outcome. It doesn’t matter whether we like them or not, they just are. In fact, aside from the fact that they consume our every waking thoughts and feeling, turn our guts to water and eat our lunch without permission, they usually don’t have much to do with us personally, and it can slowly kill us.

A best friend dies of an overdose and you could have sworn they didn’t use hard drugs. Or maybe you know they do and you’ve been been waiting for, and dreading, that phone call that starts a whole new nightmare. Maybe someone you love gets gunned down in some senseless act of violence, terrorism, or they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A simple doctor’s checkup leads to the discovery of a genetic disease that’s been dormant for decades and it suddenly explodes on to the scene wreaking havoc on your body and your life without any warning. Or maybe you dedicate your life to your work only to have some clown with “connections” step right over you and your dreams and crush them like the empty shell fragments of a robin’s egg on a dry spring day. It can even be as simple as having the world’s most obnoxious coworker that everyday you say you can’t take them anymore, until the next day. The point is, every one of us gets backed in to these corners. We find ourselves pushed beyond our normal ability to deal with things, and we start to fall apart.

So we try things like talking about it with a close friend. We seek out counselors or spiritual advisors. We bitch about it on FaceBook, or go off on the bartender. And some of us just stuff that shit way deep down, put on that happy face and pretend everything is great! …then go home and cry in the bathroom when no one’s looking.

No matter how we try dealing with it, the advice rarely works for very long, and people try to tell us what they think we want to hear. The very best of them know it’s best to just nod in the right places, and ask questions instead of offering answers. But in the end someone finally says it: “Look, I know it’s hard, but sooner or later you’re going to have to learn how to just accept it and live with it.”

“Well why the hell didn’t I think of that?!” Let me just “accept” it. Wait, where’s the magic “accept it” button again? Seriously?! If I could just magically get over shit, do you think I’d be hanging on to these things, letting them kill me a little bit every day?! I mean, didn’t they hear what I said? Don’t they get the repercussions of of all of this? Can’t they see how my life will be forever be different now? Don’t they know how screwed we all are? I can’t accept it because what happened is completely and totally unacceptable! That’s the point!!!

I mean, flat out killing someone for their beliefs just isn’t acceptable. Treating people as less than human because they’re different and they scare you is not acceptable. Losing someone so close to you from a stupid fucking heroin overdose is completely unacceptable. You spend your life eating well, exercising and staying away from smoking, drinking and other crap only to find out you have stage 4 cancer, while the guy next door who lives off pizza, beer and cigarettes just keeps going like the Energizer Bunny, that’s not even a little bit acceptable. Losing out on something you’ve busted your ass for because some douchebag engaged in an unethical practice and you got edged out, is also unacceptable. And even just having some butt-munch steal your lunch from the work refrigerator is just totally fucking unacceptable! 

Why am I listing all these things out? Because while a stolen lunch at work, and losing someone to an overdose don’t seem at all related, the ability to accept them for what they are comes from exactly the same spot. And it also shows that no matter who is reading this, you’ve been through it, big or small, you’ve been through it. Or worse yet, like me, you are going through it right now. 

The answer lies in our judgement of things. The fact is, no matter how we think we don’t judge, we do. It’s sneaky. It just happens. We see some things as good, and some as bad. Some are immoral, some are righteous. And when we put these experiences into categories, we begin to compare them to other situations. Funny enough though, we tend to do this mostly with the stuff that hurts. When we’re happy and feeling fulfilled, we don’t tend to think too much about about the other stuff. And it’s this comparison of good to bad that makes one more unbearable than the other. Don’t take my word for it, check out this verse from the Tao Te Ching written some 2500 years ago:

-•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•-

“When people find one thing beautiful, another consequently becomes ugly.

When one man is held up as good, another is judged deficient.

Similarly, being and non-being balance each other; difficult and easy define each other; long and short illustrate each other;

high and low rest upon each other; voice and song meld into harmony; what is to come follows upon what has been.

The wise person acts without effort and teaches by quiet example.

He accepts things as they come, creates without possessing, nourishes without demanding, accomplishes without taking credit.

Because he constantly forgets himself, he is never forgotten.”

-•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•–•-•-•-•-

It points out the fact that we know bad because we’ve defined good. Ugly is ugly when compared to beauty. We suffer from pain, because we revel in pleasure. Situations happen, they are what they are, we create our own pain out of our judgement of things.

And that’s when it hit me. I suddenly realized why I was having so much trouble accepting these people, situations and things. It’s because I wasn’t trying to “accept them” I had been trying to “approve” of them!

You see, I keep looking at these things I can’t accept and they all have one thing in common, I don’t like them. Obviously I have no problem accepting things I like. I mean if I suddenly get a $10,000 a year raise just for doing a good job, it’s not going to take much effort for me to accept that one! But screw with my life in some of the ways were talking about earlier, and it’s not okay. In fact I’d say any of those things are downright wrong, unjust, and evil.

But that’s because I don’t “approve” of them. I don’t agree with them. I can not appreciate them in any way. In other words, I had been confusing “acceptance” with “approval” the whole time, and they’re just not the same thing.

I don’t have to like something in order to accept it, in fact as pointed out earlier, those things I like kind of get accepted automatically. But these huge hurdles we’re talking about, those take work. They take huge amounts of effort on my part to begin to back away from my judgement of the outside world, and realize my inability to effect even the smallest parts of it. 

The problem with our ego is that it helps us feel separate and unique, and with that uniqueness comes baggage. Some of that baggage is our ability to feel as though we must judge the world in order to live in it. Once I realized how I had been looking at and judging things it became just a little bit easier for me to see that I don’t have to approve of how things happened, I just have to realize that they were always beyond my control. I’m never going to like them. And I’m just experiencing pain.

Liking something is not a requirement of being able to accept it. Acceptance only comes from being right-sized with the world. And acceptance should never be confused with approval. When it does, it leads to misery. As the saying goes: Pain is necessary, suffering is optional.

I can accept that.

Blame Russia!

26 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Conspiracies, Human, Middle Way, Politics, Sameness

≈ 1 Comment

I used to teach DUI classes, you know those classes that people have to take after they get pulled over for being drunk or high. They end up losing their license, and in order to get it back they have to jump through a few hoops. While I was teaching this class one of the more common complaints I used to hear was “Cops have a quota! Why don’t they find something better to do than setting up sobriety check points, or hiding down the street from the bar at last call?! I felt FINE to drive!” The rant would go on for a while, but the essential point was that they were upset that they lost their license. They had felt fine at the time that they got pulled over, but now they had lost their license and it was the police’s fault, and I had to listen to it.

I didn’t mind listening to it, but one thing I always made sure to add to the conversation was that whether or not the cops did or didn’t have quotas was irrelevant, the fact that you had blown a .21 on the breathalyzer was far more relevant. The point being, you can be mad at the police all you want, but ultimately you still did something illegal and got caught. Whether you got caught up in a sobriety check point, were a victim of circumstance, or because you plowed in to a tree… you were still DUI and and since that is against the law, the police’s job is try to protect everyone from impaired drivers. Why you felt okay to drive after drinking as much as you did is another whole can of worms.

I say all of this because I don’t really see much difference between this situation and the one the DNC is currently going through with the WikiLeaks release of hacked DNC emails. Yes it sucks that the DNC’s emails were hacked. It’s not exactly unprecedented, and honestly in these situations I’m always dubious of the source of the hack since a good hacker can lay a false trail like nobody’s business. It could be Russia, it could be North Korea, it could be 725 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10022. While the source of the hack is certainly of interest, news stories of the hacking are rapidly replacing stories of the content in the emails. And people are ready to accept the idea that Putin is trying to influence our election by leaking these incriminating emails at just the right time.

But let me ask these question: Even if Putin is trying to influence our election, does that change the content of the emails themselves? Does it change the bias that was displayed by an organization that was supposed to support all of its candidates equally? Even if Russia is trying to tilt our election, aren’t they doing so with the DNC’s own emails, albeit illegally obtained?

I’m not saying what the hackers did was right. But just like the drunk driver caught up in sobriety checkpoint who felt okay to drive, does any of that change the DNC’s misdeeds?

After the last post Dear DNC I got a wide sampling of opinions on my how I view this whole thing. It’s amazing to see how people read things based on their personal position. Flatly asking someone to look at things in a way that they’re not comfortable with can cause some friction, unless you enjoy questioning yourself.. which I do.

The above post does the same thing. It’s not asking if you want Hillary, Bernie, Trump, Putin or Elvis. It’s asking if you can look beyond your beliefs to see the entrenched ethical problems that we are now faced with. 

We are seeing unprecedented political events right now. Taken together with other changes in the world the repercussions of our choices could be catastrophic, and will most definitely be historic. Much of what we are dealing with has built up over generations, but these are not choices to be made out of knee-jerk emotionally visceral actions. We owe it to ourselves to look deep. Ask questions. And aim toward the light.

Then if you want to bash me, go for it. But I will come back with questions for you. I try not to engage in flame wars. I prefer to challenge you to look at yourself. And I invite you to do the same to me. 

Peace

Dear DNC

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Middle Way

≈ 3 Comments

So, here we are…

We know you thought Bernie’s supporters were just a bunch of crazy zealots looking for a conspiracy. We also know you ignored O’Malley when he claimed that you were fixing the Primary run for your favorite girl. You said it was all a bunch of hooey (I’m paraphrasing, of course)

We also know that you’ve been lining up your ducks for Hillary’s next Presidential run since Obama stole the show eight years ago. There’s no way you were going to let that happens again. And at first you saw Bernie as some message candidate, a fringe wackjob with hair like Christopher Lloyd on Back To The Future. But then all of a sudden he was getting 30,000 people at his events it was too late, and it wasn’t a joke. 

But a funny thing happened, the fact that he was getting YUGE numbers at his events didn’t really make it to the mainstream news. For that matter neither did the fact that massive amounts of young and first time voters were flocking to his events. Sanders supporters started claiming that somehow the fact that many of Hillary’s biggest donors also were huge media outlets might have something do with this funny little omission. 

This is when things started to get messy. Bernie’s supporters got labeled as tin foil hat wearering paranoids, and then the whole Bernie Bros label emerged. Calls of voter suppression were thrown out left and right, and it looked like the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were colluding with the Clinton Campaign to marginalize the other Democratic candidates. Crazy talk!  Soon the Sanders supporters were saying they wouldn’t vote for someone who stole the nomination from the inside of a rigged system. They were just being poor losers, raving their tinfoil hat talk, right?

So began the calls to heal the party, and unify the voters against a possible Trump presidency. How crazy can those Bernie Bros be?! Don’t they understand how stupid it would be to hold their imaginary grudge to the point of letting Donald Trump win the White House?! And so the trick was to get Bernie himself to support Hillary. Once that was over with, the slow work would be regaining the trust of the voters. 

Except now we see they weren’t crazy. The DNC and Wasserman Schultz did manipulate the party for one candidate, disregarding its own charter, let cronyism reign and destroyed the trust of a huge swath of voters in the process. 

As the fallout begins and the pending convention looms like a specter just around the corner, damage control is kicking in to high gear. As I write this the news is leaking that Debbie Wasserman Schultz will step down as the party chair only days before the convention. But is it too late? Is the damage done?

The party will likely still nominate Hillary, but like Barry Bonds steroid tainted record home run ball, will the nomination carry a scarlet asterisk with it forever more?

And what about the supporters of Bernie Sanders who swore that the Bernie or Bust movement was not about being sore losers, but was instead about the loss of integrity in the system and the missed opportunity to have a president of real character. They were refusing to vote for Hillary because they thought they had been cheated. Now that we know that they really have been, what now?

Even threatening them with a Trump presidency doesn’t answer the questions that remain. If the party doesn’t unify around a candidate where can we lay all that blame? The statement that Hillary just plain got more votes, fair and square, is proven not to be true now. Can you blame someone who refuses to vote for, and by doing so, support a party, and a system that purposely sabotaged the process? 

And if Donald Trump wins now, can you really blame the people who were voting for honesty and integrity all along, only to find out that there really isn’t a Santa Claus, and now might choose to sit this one out?

I really do believe that a Trump presidency would be a disaster, but I also know that there are millions of people out there right now who honestly don’t know what to do because they feel that even voting against Trump is still somehow saying that the methods the DNC used were justified, if a little misguided. For a lot of people it’s just not going to happen. 

There’s an opportunity here for you DNC. You can use this for good, or you can try to mitigate the damage, but you can’t do both. 

DNC, please take a moment to think about this. There’s really only one good response. It’ll be a big bite of humble pie, but if you do it right you still have a chance. If not, you’ve lost the right to blame the Bernie or Bust folks or the Bernie Bros, so don’t even try. 

How We Make America Great Again!

23 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Middle Way

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1. First we have stop people from coming over our borders. It doesn’t matter where they’re coming from at this point, let’s just stop them all! I mean you never know what kind of gravy-laden cheese covered french fry death trap those damn Canadiens might try to slowly kill us with! You know it’s true! They hate our freedom! Get rid of all damn illegals! (of course, every couple of generations the blacklist changes. So at this point we’re probably stuck with Irish cops in Boston, the Amish are still speaking their own little German code through their mustachless beards, and don’t even get me started on those lutefisk sucking Swedes that have taken over Minnesota. But, one thing at a time.)

2. Next we need to get rid of those budget killing social programs! Look, if someone was dumb enough to believe the tobacco companies back when doctors where endorsing them, why should we pay for their treatment now? You know that once the free market gets in there, everything will be better. Why? Because the sick, the needy and the weak will get weeded out by virtue of being denied healthcare due to pre-existing conditions which should obviously include skin color and English language fluency! We can do it! We just need the right guy running this country who isn’t afraid to tell these legal scholars where to stick their Constitution. Thin the herd, right?! Let’s face it, even though Charles Darwin was a filthy apostate, secretly we’ve been adhering to his theory for centuries. Every time we marginalize another ethnic group, make judgements about their intelligence, or even whether or not they are a worthy race to bother keeping in the gene pool… it’s all about natural selection because you know they’re naturally unworthy! It’s just that you can’t write that stuff into the science curriculum without running it by the Texas Board of Education’s, so shhhhhhhh... Instead what we need to do is denounce Darwin, and then promote white superiority and deny there’s connection. I mean how the hell else are we supposed to make America great again?! We know that God would want it that way. It’s clear that it has nothing to do with why Jesus was feeding the hungry and clothing the poor. It’s not like he was dealing with some damn illegals looking for a free ride!

3. Once we get rid of the freeloaders, then they’ll be so many jobs that people will be able to choose whatever they want from them. It’ll be like picking apples from an overloaded tree in the fall! Then we can begin to make the biggest deals, the best deals, with places like China and Mexico. Because we have something everybody else wants, stuff made by Americans!  (Of course, eventually we’re going to have to talk about how most of you still buy cheap plastic crap made in China instead of the quality stuff from that company your grandfather used to work for. And that we can still see your big ol’ Ford pickup with the “Don’t Tread On Me” stickers parked in the lot at Walmart instead of that local department store where your aunt used to work… eventually we’re gonna have to talk about that shit… but not yet.) We’re going to start winning again because we’re America! And they can’t take that away from us!!!

4. Jobs! It’s time to take back our jobs too! No more will we allow cheap workers to come over the border and just take our jobs! They just walk right up and take them!! We have to make it so that the job creators aren’t looking the other way when these illegals come in and take away some American’s job, and when the job creators look up suddenly they have some new worker that snuck in and stole the job right out from under some honest, hard working American! And then these illegals have the cojones to start demanding less money so that the job creators are forced to pay them less in order keep their prices low for the Americans who just had their job stolen. It’s a mess that we have fix, and it’s obvious that the only way we can do it is to get rid of the illegals who steal these jobs, and we need to do so in order to protect the honest, hard working Americans. 

5. We need to get America back to a more wholesome time! A time where children weren’t afraid to play in the streets! They weren’t afraid to drink water from a hose! And they weren’t carrying around disinfectant all the time because they are scared of getting cooties!!! Back to a time when, if an American got sick, they just toughed it out! And we need to get back to point where we can call someone any damn name we want to, because we’re Americans and we don’t have time for that politically correct bullshit! Remember, it’s not racism if everyone is doing it! So get out there and egg your neighbors house! Tweet nasty stories about your enemies! And above all, do what you know is good for you! You can, because you’re an American!!! That used to stand for something, and it will again!!!

This is from a Kubrick film, right?

22 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by themiddlewaythrough in Middle Way

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