A short summary of geopolitics

Just My Opinion Department: Geopolitical history may be viewed as a payback cycle where social groups compete for power, wealth, and privilege. Those who gain power, regardless of their specific ideology, consider it to be an entitlement and assume it's in order to suppress and exploit other individuals and groups to maintain and extend their position. Group leaders assume the rules they establish to maintain social order don't apply to them and their allies. Persons who advocate for ethics and social justice (e.g., spiritual teachers) are ridiculed, locked up, and/or killed. The inevitable check on the leaders and groups in power is the resentment of those being exploited by them. Very seldom do leaders have the wisdom to realize it's in their and their group's best interests to consider the concerns of those who are being used to maintain their own system. Wise leaders who realize and act on this insight put themselves at increased risk of being taken out by others who see their power, wealth, and privilege being threatened. When, as always happens sooner or later, a group or individual using power as outlined above is overthrown, the new boss tends to be the same as the old boss.

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico City, and Teotihuacan

Mary Lou and I were in Mexico from April 30 through May 9 for Maureen and Cody's wedding along with additional touring and I've written nothing about the remarkable events of the trip. Much of it, however, is documented on my Facebook and Ibstagram pages. That will have to do for now. I'm performing tonight at the Baton Rouge Soulfood Festival Pre-Party and I need to rehearse!

The Dream Report for May 23, 2019

This morning Mary Lou had an alarm set for 7:00 a.m. She got up before that and forgot to turn it off. The alarm went off waking me from a dead sleep. I was not happy as I'm playing at Hollywood Casino tonight with Henry Turner Jr's All Stars.

I was dreaming I was walking around in downtown Athens Georgia looking for a place to eat. The downtown was hilly unlike the real town. I passed several promising restaurant entrances feeling somewhat self conscious about going into them alone. It seems finally I was climbing up some steps or a ladder and I encountered some people coming the other way who were blocking me. They were politely  allowing me to pass and then they ended up somehow giving me a ride home to an apartment that I had with Mary Lou. It seems we were much younger than we are currently and didn't have children. I approached the door of the apartment which had some kind of a rubber covering on it. Looking at that made me apprehensive and when I opened the door, I could see that the apartment had been stripped completely bare by thieves. Everything inside, walls, cabinets, was painted white rather crudely. It was the sort of apartment one might have as an undergraduate or graduate student. Not very expensive but adequate. I walked around looking for the phone to call the police. It seemed for awhile perhaps they had stolen the phone, too, but finally I did find the phone. I called the police and ended up speaking to a dispatcher. It seems that the mayor of Athens had called all the police units to be downtown as part of an event there that was being put on. The police dispatcher on the phone was talking to a colleague complaining about the mayor's action not leaving any police available for their normal business such as checking out the theft at my apartment. I was thinking how annoying it was going to be filling out insurance forms listing all the stolen property.
The dream transitioned and I found myself going down a highway with some other people. i heard a beeping sound that gradually became louder. "Is that my watch beeping?" I asked. No, it was the alarm Mary Lou set waking me up.

The recurring dream of my aged parents

I went back to sleep a little before 7am after getting up to ease my hunger with a bowl of cereal, as I do fairly often. I awoke not long after from a dream with a familiar storyline I've posted about previously on this blog. I've probably had variations on this dream with similar or identical core elements ten or more times over a period of years.

This time I was in the basement of the family home at 275 Milledge Terrace. My father was sitting in a chair or perhaps on the piano bench that for many years sat in front of the piano at the end of the big room outside the door of my last bedroom in the northeast corner of the house, the one I took over after Anne moved out from which I used to climb out the window to slip away for adolescent adventures without my parents' knowing. (I don't think they ever caught me doing this.) As always in this series of dreams, one of my parents or grandparents, in this case, Dad, appeared very old and frail (the word decrepit comes into my mind to describe his broken-down appearance). My reaction is also consistent- I think he is surely not going to live much longer but as long as he's hanging on to life, he needs me to take care of him and it's my loving duty to do so.

Dad was holding something in his hands and examining it- my impression was Dad was going through the remaining items in the house to decide on their disposition. Looking at me in a fatherly manner as if I had just arrived on the scene, Dad said, "I'm still a student, too.' I smiled with surprise and either thought or commented on my long-time motto "Always a student." I turned and saw my Mom sitting at the other end of the long playroom toward the Pepitone's house in a rather undignified position with her legs stretched out openly. I think she was wearing something like workout clothes. She also looked extremely aged but comfortable and cheerful. I felt a little embarrassed for her as Mom seemed completely unselfconscious about being a little immodest. She spoke to me but I don't remember now what she said. I had a vague realization that both of them shouldn't be alive at this point along with conscious anxiety about my responsibility to take care of them due to their physical vulnerability.

Some thoughts about this latest rendition of the dream:

-My Dad sorting through the remains of the junk he and Mom accumulated in roughly 60 years of occupying our home reflects my process of doing the same both mentally and objectively in the present. This came up when I looked for my grandparents' pocket watches in the storage unit recently (to my great relief, I found where I had hidden my grandfather's) and again when I sorted through family photos to bring to Mexico for the family Day of the Dead shrine at Maureen's wedding two weeks ago. This reflects the process of finding closure on the phase of my life that ended with my parents' deaths.

-My Dad's assertion of my personal motto is a reminder I still have things to learn. Do I have any idea of what sort of things?

-What do I feel shame about? My parents both seem to lack shame, to be at peace, in acceptance. What have I not accepted? The recurring theme of parents who are alive when they should be dead suggests I'm hanging onto something from the past that should be laid to rest but hasn't been. What is it?

Just my opinion

The current political reality reveals more clearly than ever that the solutions to all our fundamental problems are blocked by one factor-the pervasive, shallow, self-defeating narcissism of people with wealth and power, irrespective of their particular ideological assertions. Put another way, the majority of our leaders and influencers of all kinds worldwide lack the wisdom that has been readily available for thousands of years and/or the courage to live by it.