Sunday, July 31, 2016

Earth Lives Matter

Music travels through water.

After the Civil War, music travelled northwards up the waters of the Mississippi from New Orleans to Kansas City, Chicago, and Motown ended up in Detroit.  Or it went up the eastern seaboard and mixed with all genres until John Coltrane arrived in New York City with his Bebop Jazz.

Music travels on the waters.

Western America was colonized relatively lately in American history, largely because there were no waterways crossing from east to west.  Culture itself travels via water, for water is itself life.  Ancient Egypt had the Nile, ancient Mesopotamia the Tigris and Euphrates, ancient India the Ganges and the Saraswati, ancient China the Yellow and the Yangtze... civilization itself is built upon the waters.

By bottlenecking the flow of the waters, we starve and commodify music, and art, and culture, diversity, and ultimately life itself.

The western era is an era created by monotheistic, patriarchal religions which arose from a desert, where water was scarce and distributed according to male-dominated hierarchy.  And now, thousands of years later,  we live in a world where both water, women, and life itself are all treated as unsacred commodities.

Water is the feminine, flowing without defined limits, fluid, intuitive, natural, without edge or delineation.  And man's patriarchal world religions have worked tirelessly to bottle this feminine, cage it, dam it, sell it, stifle it, vilify it, and subordinate the waters of life to the rigid heirarchy of man's authority.

This is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:
"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.  We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society.  When machines and computers, profit motive and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

We cannot conquer racism while still remaining materialistic.  The philosophical underpinning of consumer capitalism is that materialism is the spiritual goal of life.  Consumption is posited as that which makes life fulfilling.  This is absurd.  For us to make our shift away from a 'thing-oriented' society we must abandon consumer capitalism as our economic model.  This process is inevitable, yet the for-profit banking industry will never permit it.

The banking monopoly, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical cartel, the propaganda machine, the rational-thinking ego... the institutions in place which perpetuate the enslavement of life, water, and the feminine must be overthrown if our planet is to remain habitable.  If sharing is caring, then caring is bad for corporate profits.  We are called to care, and the economy is required to adapt to our human needs to love and be loved.

Live with love.

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