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November 3, 2012

First Aid Kit, America, Election Healing. {Video}

Photo: Aldenjewell

God, I love you elephant readers.

It’s 2 a.m., and I cannot stop myself from wanting to talk to you. You’ve got to taste this candy I brought you today. Health food candy! But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll need a context.

Here’s an article to heal you not from election results, but from this arduous task of weathering the emotional storm that elections now are. We will need to open the wound a little, don’t simper, this is for your own good.

New York is hurting. Art has been dealt a huge soaking wet blow. But who has time for it?

“Vote for me” is the cry of the hour, louder than your uncle Nate at the dinner table. (Will be ever learn that a small room is also a cage?) We are down to two parties. Poor Jill can barely even get arrested, never mind a Daily Show appearance, and her very funny “Puppet In Chief” line has been lost in the two-man storm. It is 11 kinds of ugly out there.

Poor Green Party! In a world where Rivers are being granted the rights of “personhood”, the USA chooses to personify corporations.  It’s hard. I am not going there, don’t worry, but one quote from the poor soul, for our collective good, okay? From the periphery, just left of the oblique, Jill is pointing to it. Our constant inappropriate bowing. To cash, of course. It is so present, it become invisible.

“I’m here to connect the dots between climate devastation and pipeline politicians—both Obama and Romney—who are competing, as we saw in the debates, for the role of Puppet In Chief for the fossil fuel industry. Both deserve that title. Obama’s record of “drill baby drill” has gone beyond the harm done by George Bush. Mitt Romney promises more of the same.”

~ Jill Stein, Green Party Candidate For President

 So I’m here at the notebook.

The candidates are yelling, the bilefire is blazing, peace is out the window.

But peace flew off a long time ago. Peace hasn’t even made a public appearance this decade. Peace got shot outside the Dakota, and she was terminally wounded before the trigger was pulled.

We let peace die when we stop courting her.

We are left peaceless, and it shows up everywhere. Graceless, we sleepwalk constantly. Godless, we’ve come to develop a reverence for frog skins that goes way past cynical.

“Everything before is nothing compared to the exacting detail and sheer power and invulnerability of today’s web of capitalism.”

~ Murakami, “Dance, Dance,Dance.”

Huraki is right as rain. America has been bought and sold so many times she wears an iPod nano wristwatch as a price tag, the better to switch the numbers, my dear. This has led to an epidemic, and more people than you know have become chronically grace intolerant. Tell someone you found joy. They will distract you. In a sensible response to the crushing jaws of a money culture, folks are deliberately sleeping.

“Kathy I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why. Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike they’ve all come, to look for America.” ~ Paul Simon

 Why are we lost, anyway? Could it have anything to do with our nation’s unabated reverence for money? It shows up in our leaders. Remember Obama talking about being a congressman in The Audacity of Hope? He said that from day one, it was fundraise, or pack your things. That is our president. And he is the uncreepy candidate.
Photo: Youtube

It shows up in our daily lives. More than 85 percent of Americans would leave their jobs in a New York Second if money were not an issue. And I made that figure up simply from an afternoon’s observation. Yoga pants are a 130 bucks. Pants, for yoga. 130 bucks. Some of you will not see the absurdity in that.

It shows up in our kids’ school lunches, where the by-products of unspeakable cruelty are enshrined between slices of bleached white bread and downed between smartphone interactions. Because it costs less money to make meat in a cruel environment.

So I am awake offering you some lifesaving love, and perfect harmony. This event, this healing thing, I wrote about it on Truth Barrier yesterday in some detail. I want all of us to see it. To look. It can bring us back from our confusion. Because we have seriously lost it.

Voters became consumers in 1968. Just ask Joe McGinniss.

But complete healing happens in a single moment of love, right? If that isn’t true, we are dead. And grace is on the table here, folks. These ladies prepared it special. They are offering behavioral menu options.

Instead of hiding from the monster America often embodies, we could cultivate curiosity. Seeking, asking, where is America? Where did I put the map? Is there one? Maybe it will start with reading Hunter S, in New York this month. A Kerouac re-do? Ginsberg? Doesn’t matter where we begin, in this piece, these two women give us the gift, today, of searching again.

We are good and lost, good and lost.

However.

We can be momentarily re-found in four minutes. Remember when you cared? (Hint: pre-Enron.) Before all this fear? Yes you do. And here is a good dose. A solid refresher. A shot in the arm from hell, with a double cappuccino chaser. Redemption, no charge, from the well-named duo “First Aid Kit.” Stop everything and watch this. If it isn’t completely worth twice your time, lunch is on me.

We need to see performances like this. Need to hear the heart these two have. We have. Our silenced, muted heart.

Because we’ve stopped. We quit. We gave up. We bow to demons in godclothes. And every action defines us.

“Financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values.Worshiping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It’s the only stuff of myth that’s left in the world.” ~ Murakami, “Dance, Dance, Dance”

Can we wake from this spell, ever? Watch this video. Then read this and watch it again, with headphones. It will wake you.

Do you know the term “Varsel?” Swedish. Means a feeling: look out, danger coming. I have that feeling about our hidden romance with cash. So watch this, and search.

There has to be myth remaining for us.

I love you guys.

~

Editor: Kate Bartolotta

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