The Momentum Continues Forward

(Scenes From The Protests At The DNC)

The protest starts at home. Quickly gaining momentum on the streets in front of our houses. Gathering community as the sun beats down heavy from above.

Someone writes “the reason we stop traffic is to share the collective experience that every person of color faces in this country. A roadblock at every turn peaking the drivers’ anxiety. Lack of control. Lack of mobility.”

Another spray paints a wall, “These are the fears we must set free.”

Soon the police mobilize and provide a backdrop to what is basically a neighborhood gathering in the streets. The protest has all of the elements of a block party. Music. Festivity. Speakers stand on the back of pickup trucks delivering words of engagement. Piecing together separate experiences into a unified narrative.

As the march begins to move, the surrounding neighborhoods add into the flow. The numbers continue to grow. Diverse faces dominate the scene. Each with their own unique identity. Voices carry the waves of celebration. This is what democracy looks like.

At another intersection, the ranks come to a halt. Helicopters circle above. No news station. Only surveillance. We hold space for the over 600 murders by police that have been committed this year. 600 seconds for each and every human life that was lost. Chants echo up the walls of city projects and university housing. Passionate speeches rise above the general celebration.

Protesters sweat tears in the hot sun. Everyone is anxious to keep moving. 

Three brothers walk among the lines and take quick snapshots of people’s faces. College students, community members, peaceful folk come together to promote a better life. Something the government doesn’t want to allow to walk free. One wears a hat from a local precinct and is constantly on his cell phone reporting back to HQ, taking orders. They all wear earpieces. 

A large group carries the coffin of the DNC. Painted red, white, and blue it signifies an end to ignorance. The scene reminds one of photos from the funerals happening daily in the middle east. Huge processions in towns across Syria, marching with their dead. Out in the open. Risking attack by suicide bombers or drones controlled by pilots in Washington. 

A sister holds a microphone and delivers a vindictive speech to the police. She calls for reorganization and people led watch groups. She calls for justice. She calls for increased accountability.

A brother selling water senses urgency from the growing traffic jam. So far everyone has been patient letting people have their peace. He helps guide these trapped cars down another direction. The order of anarchy taking over the streets.

Further South, another protest is going on. Twenty hate-filled bible thumpers are outside a trans health clinic holding signs that say “God hates fags”. Surrounding them are a group of fifty angels spreading their wings to block their message. Around them are another four hundred protesters shouting and singing and dancing, carrying flags full of sarcasm and parody. Full of jubilance and love. The initial ugliness of the spectacle has been transformed into something of peace and wonder.

Again up north, the march begins to move. A poet is overwhelmed with men with livestreams wanting an interview. What is he protesting? What is his message? He tells them there are better people here for them to question. This is a protest for the welfare of black lives, so perhaps their focus should be giving black voices a right to speak. To be represented. He thinks to himself, people who look like him have already spoken enough throughout history. It’s time new voices get to be heard. It’s time to start listening. 

He directs the interviewers to the brothers and sisters carrying the coffin. He directs them to the sister carrying a cardboard sign with the fist of activism. He points them to the older woman walking behind the group talking to a police sergeant, asking him civil questions directed by the larger community. The poet steps aside and watches them interview an older brother who says he was out here on these same streets as a young man in the 1960s. He says he doesn’t understand why he still has to be out here fighting for the same thing.

The signs read “Black Lives Matter”. “Jail Killer Cops”. “Stop Racism”. They read “End the Prison/Military Industrial Complex”. There’s a sign with the frowning face of Hillary Clinton that reads “White Lies Matter”. There are the faces of Malcolm X and MLK. There’s the faces of Maya Angelou and Muhammed Ali. There’s the words of Claudine Rankine and Michelle Alexander and James Baldwin and Nelson Mandela. The signs read “Free Mumia”. “Free the Move 5”. “Free Hugs”. “Free Water”.

A medic bikes through the lines handing out water bottles. Another bikes through with homemade sandwiches and bags of trail mix. A third bikes through with a trash bag, collecting people’s bottles and other throwaways. A medic treats a protester with a skinned knee. Another makes sure no one is feeling light headed or other symptoms of heat stroke.

A sister who is legally blind is marching with us. She’s got a beautiful smile and she says she doesn’t need her eyes to see through the bullshit. Blind since her youth, her family is still here with her now supporting her through her fifties. She says her family is everyone in this parade, giving her a helping hand, and fighting for salvation.

Things reach a peak around route 76. Hundreds of police in riot gear hidden a block or two over in each direction, just in case the protesters try to take their march onto a highway. On Broad Street there suddenly forms lines of uniformed police to provide force without too much of the militarized image of fear present a few blocks away. Or maybe Philly just ran out of money to buy more riot suits.

Some of them read back out loud the signs in front of them. “Justice for Sandra Bland”. “Stop killing us”. “Poets for Peace”.

The line swells around the convention center where delegates and public officials meet to decide future policy that will affect all the folks out on the streets. They’re so afraid of the people they represent they have to hire hundreds of armed guards to form a barrier around them. Faces in the windows stare down in momentary silence.

A brother drags the American flag behind him. It is withered and burned. Defaced by years of oppression. The toll of oppressing those that everyone who is not white, straight, male, or rich. New flags are being carried to replace it.

The march hits City Hall and combines with other parades. There are Bernie or Busters and folks with huge green flags fighting to save the environment. There are rainbow flags and signs supporting equal rights to everyone. The backdrop of the city echoes with the growing group’s chants. All of these issues coming together under one unified voice. 

Words of peace and community are delivered from the pick up trucks. Words of anger and disgust. They come from sisters who have lost brothers and fathers. Gunned down in the streets for merely walking. 

A twelve year old brother climbs a street light and waves his banner. “Resistance is Justified”. A photo of Trayvon Martin. A photo of a young man not much older than himself. This is his first protest. It won’t be his last. 

Brothers and sisters towards the back take a break from the sun. They sit in circles discussing their futures, shaded by skyscrapers. They hold space for all of the unnecessary life that has been lost around the world in the name of the country they call their home.

Above a sun dog appears in the clouds. The sun is reaching its westerly horizon. Rainbows in the clouds. It seems to be heaven’s blessing for the peace that is being reached by all the colors of the rainbow represented in the faces below.

The march has already walked five miles over four hours. The march continues the next five walking towards the DNC where decisions are being made without the ratification of the people who actually live out here in the real world. 

A son gets a text from his mother, “Give them hell! Keep them honest!”

A daughter gets a text that says, “Stay true to your heart. Love is all around!”

A sister with crystals boldly talks to the various bike officers patrolling and barricading the march onto the street. She reminds them to keep things peaceful as the crowd chants behind her, “Fuck the Police!”

They don’t need reminding. They’re greatly outnumbered and perhaps somewhat intentionally. They’re sweating and have no foreseeable relief coming their way. Their only choice is to not antagonize the crowd. To de-escalate by not being. Perhaps returning to an ideal form of policing called peacekeeping.

Some members from the march ask them questions. “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” Some ask them questions that can actually be answered. There is the beginning of what seems like a communal dialogue amidst all of this tension. Police recognizing the folks they are supposed to protect. Recognizing the family out here today in solidarity. Brothers and sisters addressing them and trying to get them to evolve. 

One officer says to the brother behind him, “I just like talking to people”. His calm smile has been attracting all sorts of conversations. Community policing as opposed to militarized riot patrol.

The sun begins to dip. Pink skies take over. Everyone is battered and tired. Fire hydrants have been set off by the city to keep folks cool as the heat starts to get to them. Jazz bands play in parking lots and other outdoor spaces with tents and amplification providing cultural ambiance to the situation. 

A brother that looks like Allen Ginsberg carries a huge bag of anti-war pins. A sister asks if he needs help carrying it. No, he’s too set on making it all the way to the end, but they strike up a conversation about an end to war. A call for world peace. 

Several clowns, faces painted with smiles join the parade. They march on stilts ten or twelve feet tall. Their signs elevated above everything else, so even the helicopters can see what this is all about.

Behind him Vermin Supreme carries a boot on his head and says absolute absurdities over his handheld loudspeaker. Brothers and sisters laugh and take photos with him. He’s a little national icon of how we can choose to rise above some of the very real injustices our country serves us. He inspires so many smiles with simple gestures. A break from the heartbreak.

Almost there, the parade collides with another marching north. There are ten thousand people on the streets. The sound of it is empowering. People holding hands. People shouting cheers of self awareness. Power is in the hands of the people. Someone says, “it only takes seventeen people to flip a barricade”. Someone else lights an American flag on fire. Several other bonfires begin. Large groups forming prayer circles around all of this havoc. Songs of a return to humanity. 

The burning flags wave above it, casting away a system that does not work for anyone, but the rich and privileged. The people finding each other now in the dark. Together they give birth to a new, truer democracy.

The march nears another highway. Here there are garbage trucks blocking the on-ramps. Enough disruption so again the parade can’t shut down anything but what’s intended. The highway is shut down anyway by the police. 

Underneath the overpass the march reaches new volumes. Everyone looks around realizing how many are out on the streets with them. Their own voices echoing back to them. A choir of animal sounds, bird calls, hoots and hollers. “These are the voices of the disenfranchised”, they say. It sounds like people finding their woods and celebrating their humanity. “We ain’t taking anymore of this bullshit. People are dying and time is running out.”

Provocateurs run rampant. Red-black flags carried by faces hidden behind bandanas and Guy Fawkes masks. The march starts to break up into smaller factions, each holding round circles around fires and chants for peace.

Awaiting the march are several buses full of riot police, almost inconspicuous in the shadows, except this same tactic has been seen at other large gatherings. The initial gang of bike police that have marched all this way are relieved and form a barricade that flanks the parade. Legal observers, in yellow shirts, line the sidewalk, chattering anxiously, waiting for all hell to break lose. It seems like this is the end of the line. The police are preparing to cage the protestors in and beat the shit out of them.

But somehow everyone remains civil on both sides. The fifteen foot tall fences around the Wells Fargo center are rattled by masked protesters jeering at the the riot cops that stand in full kevlar behind them. But behind those provocateurs are circles of hippies humming, playing guitar and holding hands chanting magic just like what’s been seen during the day. 

A new offshoot mobilizes and marches through Roosevelt park to rally all the people camping in their tents and sharing Food Not Bombs. A kind of symbolic sentiment, with this Obamaville growing revelrous in a park commemorating the father of the New Deal policies that over the last 70 years have rapidly been stripped away piece by piece, leaving the poor poorer than they’ve ever been. 

That same group fighting for Bernie Sanders, a candidate who promised to do nothing more than reinstate and expand those policies that were so normal over, half a century ago. And seemingly with no repeat of internment camps for refugees or other forms of racist othering like what was found during FDR’s presidency.

The People shout, “This is what Democracy looks like!” They shout, “Another world is possible!”

Things begin to subside. Both police and protesters begin to go home. News spreads that the roll call has been called. Hillary reeps victory. Bernie symbolically bows out, right before the final delegates place their votes. There’s rumors that the roll call was staged for TV, as it probably always is. Delegates already cast their votes in the morning at breakfast. Twice. Enough time to bully people around. Enough time to guilt trip them into changing their votes.

At the convention, hundreds of Bernie delegates walk out as a form of protest. Some of them join us waiting outside. The TV fails to show any of this, except for later they show the empty seats. The commentators talk of the Bernie or Bust folks, as childish. They expect everyone to bow down and accept this corporate bought reality. They call for unity. 

They forget that not too long ago in this country’s history, conventions were a scene of strong-armed brawls between the separate opposing factions within the larger two political parties. They forget this country began with revolution.

Outside the people haven’t forgotten. But they all question why there aren’t more of them. They each expected the millions that voted for Bernie to be out here with them fighting for the right to exist. They forget that the system we all participate in has been working to weigh down all of our lives over the centuries. People stuck at jobs. Struggling to raise their families. Fighting every single day in their normal lives. Stuck in the machinery. No time or energy left to fight back at the end of the day. 

At the end of the day there are all kinds of protest and this is only one form of it. Walking from one end of a city to another is no different from raising garden beds on abandoned lots or becoming a teacher in the inner city. It’s no different from making time in the day to celebrate living or organizing alternative communities. At the end of the day, a whole generation is emerging that opposes the last one, and the dregs left over from the one before it. 

With the momentum of the front lines. With people engaging in their civil liberties. With folks from similar and separate backgrounds finding common stories in the streets. The momentum continues forward.

(photos are of artworks and installations at the Truth To Power exhibition on display in Philadelphia, as well as scenes from the protests against the Democratic National Committee.)

Advertisement

A James Joyce Odyssey

​The train ride from downtown Dublin out to the round tower James Joyce stayed in before leaving Ireland for good, is somewhat of an odyssey. The train rolls through patches of green, village rowhomes, and several industrial outposts before arriving alongside the ocean. 

Out the window I watch as fair maidens walk on the blue shimmer of the ocean like sacred saints performing miracles atop low tide sandbars collecting shells to braid into their bangs. These sirens, as it were, wave from the magical waters beckoning for us to join them.

The sun high and hot. This heat baking the tan rocks as they crash down onto broken waves.

There are castles and church steeples on the horizon. A multi-colored ripple of grafitti painted on stone walls as ancient runes casting a diverse range of spells. The ocean manic in its glittering sheen, spitting a cyclonic ozone into the air. Tiny rainbows catching the mist.

Eventually the train lands in a quiet sleepy village still in Dublin county, overwhelmed with city folk and tourists seeking a break from the heat. At this point, Ulysses’  Odyssey takes a turn towards Don Quixote’s dual-realism. 

No giants with arms swinging like windmills, but as I pass through crowds of school children climbing rocks to the sea, my ears hear the chatter of young seagulls chasing schools of fish back into the harbor. The tower stands at the top of a hill like a large castle. Once a military outpost to keep a lookout for an invasion from Napoleon, and one hundred years later the home of King Joyce, himself. Then not too long later the launching pad for the fictional quest of Stephen Daedelus.

Howth peninsula sits across the way. This gigantic arm of earth reaching out to take hold of the rippling sun-filled reflection of the sky. Hundreds of mermaids and mermen swim in between coves coveting each other’s fins to stay afloat. The wind howls and whispers, the sour stink of a one-legged pirate’s yarn spinning an epic voyage around the continent.

This is the last place James Joyce lived before he became an expat from Ireland. It’s a wonder he ever wanted to leave, I think. 

I think this until I walk into the museum lobby and the clerk at the info desk asks me about myself. “I’m a writer,” I tell him thinking this will start a good conversation. But he asks instead in a musical Irish tone, “Oh, do you make a living doing that?” I hear Joyce laughing in Switzerland. Oh well, not much has changed. I have a look around the old place. There’s art from peers and fans on the walls. There’s two different death masks. There’s Joyce’s cane and his favorite vest. All that’s missing is his thick-rimmed eyeglasses. 

Upstairs the bedroom is still barely liveable. A cave with arrow slits for light. But the roof has a view of the city. I could see waking and meditating up there. Doing a daily sun salutation. What’s needed in a bedroom when you have a view of the world? Joyce was here for only 6 days before getting kicked out in some nightmarish fashion that the museum boasts about. It’s too bad he didn’t get a few years. But then maybe the Irish wouldn’t know what they had missed in letting him leave. 

Soon the museum is overwhelmed with bees and locusts. I fight my way out down the narrow stairs pushing past the tour guides. At the bottom, I sign my name on the guest list, but more for that nosey welcomer. 

I return to Dublin and perform at a gig with singing poets who speak more with their ears. Each word a pun or a rhyme off the last one. These folks take real pride in their wit. In the sounds of words rather than their meaning. One man has the greatest punchline: “I told my wife I’m at a poetry reading…the trouble is that I really am.”

A part of me can’t wait till the next time I return to Ireland. I can see it now as a place that would work out for me. I could tour the whole countryside, much like I’ve done the northeast, hopping through small towns and scattering across the cities. The rest of me can’t wait to get back home. Though, at this point, home is so many places, I feel lost for a time that I’ll finally settle and continue writing the novel of all of these adventures.

Every 4 years, I have these cycles of death and rebirth. I’ve done everything in the last 4 years to free myself from this cycle. Usually these deaths manifest in the form of tumultuous break ups, but I, a single man, imagine myself free. In Ireland, I realize there is no escape. A great death of self still awaits. 

Two days back into Dublin, I had a breakthrough. I may not be able to escape death, but I can choose its manifestation. I muse on the full moon: There is no greater death than writing a novel. I think it’s time I write one that I actually finish. Let the blarney carry me through.

The American Dream Is Trending…

“The American Dream is trending…”
Hunter S. is rolling out of his grave
“We almost found it,” he says
“The American Dream. It’s not dead.”

But look at all those 
who have died to claim it.
Alton Sterling. Philando Castille.
Sandra Bland. 
The people of Nice. 
The people of Orlando.
The people of Beirut.
The people of Manbij.
and for more than two decades
the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The American Dream is not peaceful
it is not something you bring home
to your wife and kids
the American Dream is all the hate
and greed we read in a RNC speech
it’s the leader that gives our children guns
it’s the media that turns us against ourselves.

The American Dream is an abusive relationship
it’s rape, 
it’s pillage, 
it’s psychic vampirism for the cash-strapped and homeless,
it’s shoot a man and leave him for dead
then give itself a paid vacation.

The American Dream says, “All lives matter!” then fears and kills those that don’t look like himself.
The American Dream says, “I love the Blacks. I love the Gays. The Hispanics love me.” then throws them and everyone under a bus, or behind bars, or deports them to drown in the ocean.

The American Dream does not know how to love.
The American Dream does not know how to live.
The American Dream is one of the worst episodes of reality TV on television.
We shouldn’t allow it to be our waking reality.

The American Dream is trending…
The American Dream is dead
and we can kill it
if we stop feeding it,
if we don’t let it consume us,
if we hear it shout those last desperate cries as it hangs onto the edge of a cliff, 
and we let it go free and fall.

The American Dream is dead.
It’s time we wake up from this nightmare
and dream of something else.

A Fool Kisses The Blarney Stone

I follow the Blarney witch to the top of Blarney castle. I can’t help but be arrested by that coy smile beneath soft silver-pink curls. A smiled flash of freckles, with stories recounted of travels abroad: The Great Pyramids, Mayan ruins, Vietnam. I follow those long golden legs shouting kicks of bliss at eye level in front of me as they climb ever higher up narrow staircases, forcing my pursuit into even steeper passageways. 

I feel adrift. Perhaps from the height and elevated heart. But intuition tells me this witch has cast a spell. Perhaps not consciously. Perhaps it is the magnetism of inner lights. Or maybe I’m just crazy for some girl again. 

I run through the paralells of each of our realities. Different travels bringing us to the same place at the same time. A magnetism, where though she caught my eye much earlier in the gardens below, I soon forgot her until ending up in line behind her, as if it was perhaps a requisite test to earn Blarney’s gift of eloquence. Well, do I talk to her and if so, what do I say? 

Before the Blarney stone, we stand. The beautiful witch and a bumbling fool. And I wonder what the clown poet could ever receive from the gift of gab. Perhaps an award winning novel. Or the royalties from a subsequent film. Or maybe just the delight of a kiss with this gorgeous lass. 

But alas, she passes just out of reach. Up and over and under the brick wall to kiss the stone, and then back on her nimble feet rushing towards the exit. I lay down and do the same, and disoriented with my eyes closed, I start to kiss the wall.

“You’ve got the wrong stone,” the man holding my legs calls down. “No, not that one either. A little lower now. Yes, there you go. That’s the Blarney stone.”

So what does it mean, when a clown kisses the wrong Blarney stone and with his eyes closed. I start to wonder. I taste a mixture of earth and salt lick in my mouth. I’m still pondering this when I end up in line again behind the witch and her stepfather, this time heading down. 

“They should bring David Mitchell up here,” the step father says, making conversation.

“Oh, I think I read some of him. Not writing, so well lately?” I respond, still daft from my head upside down and letting the gab sink in.

“He’s a great writer. I got to see him speak in Houston once. I found his first few books a real treat. But the last two, he kind of lost it.”

Slowly, I recognize the subtle gift of the conversation. Minutes after kissing the Blarney stone, some one is telling me to read David Mitchell. A book by him with “Dreams” in the title. I have the foresight to write it down. But the girl is pulling him onwards, with that usual embarassment children hold for their parents striking up unusual conversations.

It takes me the whole flight down the stairs, still lost in a revelry, to realize that by being in line behind her and kissing the stone after her, I indirectly had my first kiss with the Blarney witch.

I go seeking her in the Druid ruins somewhere west in the castle gardens. There’s rock circles, rock piles, and all sorts of places to make wishes. I climb through a cave and out a hedge maze. Eventually, I find the Witch’s Stone. Here she’s represented more in her faery tale form. A stone formed to look like a much older witch with a long nose and severe eyes. The pink-silver hair has turned completely white. Upon her head is a pile of change, so there is where I leave my tithe. 

The blarney is still rushing through me, so there’s no wish I find to recite. I merely think “abundance” and go walking on into a garden labelled “The Faery Realm”. Through twists and turns I wander. Past golden flowers and fluttering streams. Eventually the maze has surrounded me. 

I come to a bend in the path and there lies upon a rock, the full wing of a magpie. The rest of the bird nowhere to be found. The blue, black, and white of the wing shining up under the sun. In my fingertips the feathers fall away naturally and I gather them up for a future dream catcher or some other craft. The witch sure has blessed me.

A kiss and some feathers. The gold in these Irish castles has my type of charm. I look back on my day of wonderment and laugh at the eloquence.

The Ruins of Ireland

​

As I walk in the ruins of Vikings, Druids, Celts, and early Christians, my mind is in bits at how frequent this green land was attacked and often conquered. Yet all of this history still remains perfectly intact. A little worn by the weather, but otherwise mostly untouched. 

It seems surreal that so many folks came after this emerald jewel in the sea. A country with no physical borders, no unfriendly neighbors except for the clans within. No real resources beyond rocks, potatoes, rain, and abundance of green grass. And far away from all the action going on back in Europe. It’s hard to see what the practical attraction must’ve been all the way back then.

And yet, there’s a special magic that floats free in the rolling green hills of Ireland. Maybe that’s what those ancient conquerors were after all along. A spell cast by the goddess or the kiss of some ancient fairy maiden. And the new that came and replaced the old, often carried with them even more radical superstitions than those that had preceded them.

We can thank this type of superstition for the preservation of ancient ring forts from 3000 or 5000 BC and the old Druid faerie rings teaming with the human sacrifices of prehistoric times and the early celtic burial mounds complete with the head stone still standing where a shaman once stood and conducted the sun to rise and even the thousand year old Celtic crosses and earlier Celtic grave markers spread all across the land with no special distinction, sometimes penned in with a farmer’s sheep, or other times left at the center of an expansive castle garden, or other times in a well-cared for grove of Willow trees just on the edge of town, or perhaps the whole town just laid out later to surround these ruins in an effort to leave them undisturbed.

Even at the medieval cathedrals you’ll often find the ruins of the early Christian church that preceded it, and sometimes, you’ll even find a beehive monastery built by early Celtic monks that preceded that. All of them the most insane rock balances you’ve ever even imagined.
It’s interesting to think what the US would look like today if its first settlers had paid heed to a similar kind of special attention deserved by an indigineous burial ground or the ancient monuments and natural formations that must’ve dominated the landscape before we were there. If only those early invaders had actually paid attention to the curses cast by disruption suggested by the tribes who spent millenia cultivating these sacred places. 

Instead of fearing faeries or a witch’s spell as the Irish often did, these first Puritans used whatever was in their capacity to bulldoze through history. The same has stayed true in the country as it has planned its cities and engaged in suburban development, for the better part of the last four centuries.

The US is a young country, as a result, and the idea of preservation there is less than a hundred years old. “Historical societies” have only started gaining a buzz in the last half century. Sure, we hold onto a bell that’s got a crack in it from 1812 and a yellowed piece of paper that supposedly signed our freedom from a little while longer, but otherwise for some reason we’ve decided it’s smarter to tear things down before building new ones. That lack of respect for time and growth ripples on down through the rest of our society.

I mean, what’s the oldest thing you’ve ever seen in the states? I’ve been to cave dwellings that were built sometime around 1000 AD. The only reason they’re still there is they’re in the middle of the desert and hard to get to. Meanwhile since they’ve become more accessible, folks started right away with the graffiti and defacement of a child with a crayon and a clean white wall. 

I don’t understand the type of mind that would carve their name directly into a thousands year old petroglyph of a bear chased by a hunter, but I’ve seen it. Didn’t that idiot think about how by carving directly into an ancient image, their stupidity is on display for all to see for the rest of time, and with their name, no less! Thanks Mark of 1996.

I’ve been to the mountains and rivers and forests and plains that surround these sacred places and they face no greater a fate. Places that have taken eons to form are completely deforested and strip-mined for the sake of a quick “profit”. Things going to hell, thanks to the bastards in a matter of years long before I lived. All of these hills and mountains and southwestern deserts and temperate rain forests are scarred with a ghost town industry. 

As soon as coal, oil, precious metals, or lumber is found, whatever corporation steps right in with no regard for the land or the people that have lived there almost as long as the land, leaving toxic sludge and other refuse in their wake. And what’s not taken by the corporate interests is nicked later by random visitors. Folks who like pretty stones or petrified wood or artifacts from prehistoric times. I can only guess how shortly lived a ring fort discovered in the suburbs of New Jersey would be. Folks would be showing up at all hours of the night removing each and every stone for their private collection.

All of this is clearly obvious to everyone, and yet it continues. A nation of useless waste and self involvement.

Based on this I wouldn’t say it’s a long shot, that we got the current political predicament. The current social strife. We’re a nation that can’t even keep track of what short history we have. We bulldoze right over it every time. Of course, it’s going to repeat itself. We don’t have anything concrete to use to teach our youth about which paths have already been tried and been proven not beneficial to anyone. Racism, financial collapse, and Donald Trump are still a thing because no one alive seems to remember the civil rights movement, the Great Depression, or World War 2. Most folks don’t even understand that we’re all immigrants there. They forget that we all sailed in on a boat not long ago.

The Celts and Native Americans were able to remember their entire origins to this day through an oral tradition and ritualization of their ancestors, and yet we can’t even remember that racists, bankers, and Nazis are not only bastards, but they were already defeated, only a few decades ago.

All of it is just really full of perspective out here in this land of revelry. 10,000 years or more of invaders and yet the things from then that have disappeared went away mostly on their own accord. 
Rock does eventually erode. Wood disintegrates.

There’s a big difference there compared to a corporation bulldozing it all to make way for a parking lot or mini mall or a highway. Here in Ireland, they mostly just build around it or add to it. Or if it’s a ring fort they might just build a castle garden on top of it, where the rock circles become the foundation for flower beds.

The old Celts buried below must be rolling in their graves tickled with floral jubilee.

I’m not going to say it’s better here (though the grass IS greener). It’s still the Western world. There’s war. There’s poverty. There’s even a stronger Christian right wing here than in the US, successfully stripping away a woman’s right to choose. But shite, at least they have their roots.