By Jim Selman | Bio
I was playing a trivia game and had to answer what the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are. I got three out of four, but had to go to go to Wikipedia to get them all: War, Famine, Conquest and Death. These traditional Biblical symbols mark the ‘end of time’, when all things are put right and presumably all karma is erased and this journey will be complete. In researching each of them, I learned that ‘conquest’ is best translated in today’s language as ‘corruption’.
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am no fan of the far right, but can respect an honest difference of opinion. When the difference of opinion turns into crass and cynical lies and propaganda designed to frighten and deepen the already fragmented population, then it is time to cry “STOP!”. During one of the darker moments of the prior administration, I proposed (with tongue in cheek) the idea of creating a new organization called the “National Organization of Pissed-Off Elders” (N.O.P.E.). Its mission: to step up to the plate and declare that enough is enough whenever and wherever necessary. There is an old maxim that the only thing that has to happen for evil to prevail is for good people to do (and say) nothing.Bob Cesca wrote a brilliant piece in the Huffington Post ("Republicans Lying to Old People about Euthanasia, Robots") slamming the current Republican attempt to defeat health care reform. The Republican attempts are not based on the strength of an argument, but on insane mainstream rhetoric charging that the Bills under consideration were designed
By Jim Selman | Bio
Last week was not a good week for the planet and I’ve been taking it personally. Aside from the Iran Crisis and North Korea, we had the usual games being played in Europe, South America and Southeast Asia. At some moment, I realized that I had once again drifted into a spectator role. I was trying to sort out the good insurgents from the bad insurgents, the real terrorists from the "revolutionaries", and I was finding that the conservative/liberal divide seems to be a universal constant everywhere we look.As President Obama is declaring the possibility of mutual respect and tolerance between religions and all people, we see Iran’s "Supreme Leader" declaring ‘death’ to all who oppose the current regime and the North Korean guy promising to drop the big one if anyone screws around with his boatload of nuclear armaments going to the Middle East.
I am of two minds here. On one side, I am tired of playing good guys and bad guys and want to just scream…"STOP!
Since I starting blogging a couple of months ago, I find myself
waking up in the middle of the night with something inside me screaming
to be said. Tonight it is cynical ambition. What I mean by that is the
kind of “Do anything for power — or money, or sex, or fame”. You can
fill in the ‘it’ that people will do anything to have.
I
have spent most of my life trying to be positive, to stand for
something, to leave the world a bit better than I found it. Sometimes I
have