Great, Again: Part 1

One of the greatest Illusions that the Masters have conjured Is the receding future Where, upon a hill, shimmering, the oppressed’ city lives.There it lives forever Unlike a mirage even, for even a mirage Exists in the world, in the only actual there is The dynamic present

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I will attempt to make some of these thoughts more presentable to the present, as I have written about this previously but it was too long and a bit too ‘thick’ I have been told to penetrate. Here is my attempt, though, I must warn, it cannot be read, I think, without some difficulty

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“Why is it that the Master’s are given the past and the present and the poor and marginalized are always given the future? Is it because the future is the only thing that has never been? That it will always be this way, inherently, by the very nature of Nature? Even if we were to reverse time, and the ‘future’ switched places with the ‘past’ as some scientists say we can do, since the Master’s have owned that too, we would not move toward any liberation.”

This is what came to my mind when I sat and meditated on the subject of Time and how it is intertwined and a creation, really, of the ‘modern’ world. The chopping up of a day into small slivers, all in order to ‘be on time’ etc. Agriculture, etc. we can see to a certain extent, accelerated this, with the need for planting etc. Previously, the mode of time was much different and gross.

Perhaps it would be good to explain that I am not saying that one should not use the past, or to plan for the future, these would be of equal folly as attempting to exists or bring about both of these in totality, or near totality-not because of one’s will but because it is implicitly impossible. Any attempt to propagandize this, whether through religion, quasi-religious nationalism, etc. “great again..” is a form willful ignorance or conscious attempts of totalitarian dominance. If the People’s thirst for liberation and/or comfort can be assuaged with propaganda of the past and/or the future their urgency will be quelled, their observations of the present can either be obscured by these visions or blinded.

The past and its heritage as a useful tool enters into the present, the future as a useful tool does the same. The past as a means, for the oppressed, to have precedence to craft the actions of Now, and the future is the examination of that which can be kept in ‘flavor’ rather than ‘objectively’ saved.

What I mean in terms of the Future is that just as Nature is perpetually and interminably dynamic, one cannot ‘keep’ anything from one moment to the next, but what can be kept is the set of ‘codes’, ‘maxims’, ‘ethics and morals’ morals if you will. These are the covenants that one keeps with the society in total but also individually in how we engage our subjective experience into the ‘objective’ experience of the total.

We are, not, I think it is important to note her, annihilated by the total, though, this too is the master’s tool, this apathy of despair that arises when we only examine the ‘smallness’ of our existence which comes from, also, this fundamentalism of individualism. Each system, every single one that exists through imputations of a definition, exists as a total dependent on the variables that define it. As each variable changes so does the system entire, that we have a fuzzy boundary of the paradigm of the system (which is a definition made up of variables to reiterate) which is kept through reification of the definitions (repetition, experimentations) but is susceptible to revolutionary change as the definitions dynamism reaches a tipping point, thus the paradigm changes (Thomas Kuhn explains this second half so much better in the Structure of Scientific Revolution). So lets us remember that the ‘smallness’ of actions of the individual are, in fact, never lost, it changes the system in entire, the variable is both singularly effective in change, and, by nature of Systems, systems’s entire effective. There are no small-nesses in Nature, there is no nihilistic actions in Nature, the uniqueness of existence, your existence, is reaffirmed in each instance of your imposition of ‘self’ upon that fabric of nature, you were not the exact same system that occurred moments ago (different thoughts, heartbeat, etc) now extrapolate that out to the infinitesimal and eternal collections that came together to create You, or this earth, or life itself on this planet. This may be awe inspiring, and it should be, but more important it should be responsibility creating-if this is True (and it is) and this is the nature of existence, what is my responsibility in the face of this Truth? To what am I responsible? This responsibility is the ethics/moralistic, etc. code that we can carry on into the future, it is what can give the taste of benevolence to the future though the materialized variables may change. But it is also what Dominance, Oppression, wickedness can also pass into the future, it is why History is peppered with so many different material expressions of ‘culture’ but they all ‘taste’ the same.

The past was not Great, it just ‘was’, there were aspects of its nature that we may want to keep, the ‘codes’ if you will, the unwavering adherence to the ‘good’ by a few, by particular system’s of credos (the Quakers who practiced what they preached). But in total it was owned and operated by the masters, and a Master’s lead system can only waver between peaks and valleys of oppression. For when I use the term “Lead” I mean it to mean the flavor upon which each of these system’s resided, they were imposed to keep a few in power, to keep them in wealth, and if systems through the diligent fight of the oppressed, became less oppressive, it did not change the underlying Ethos of these systems-these acts were reform in nature (see Activist Checklist Go! Part 2 for a detailed definition of reform and revolution).

But even if the past was ‘Great’ in the sense of it being materially good, it could not be revisited again in a material sense, those times are gone. I would argue that the Materially good that did reach the oppressed was a collateral reason rather than an intentional reason (in the sake of a holistic systemic drive, there were instances of worker lead organizations that did it on a micro scale and were variables for us to build upon and to resist in their Present). If they mean it to get back to the past where the ethos included the overt, legalistic, practices of oppression like Jim Crow, then this is overt tyranny, that the Jim Crow of the modern present will look different than it did previously is true, but the meal will taste the same (Derek Bell argues throughout his career but most explicitly in Faces at the Bottom of the Well, where he argues that Racism, in America, cannot ever end because America is founded on these principles and when we think it ends it just evolves-I do not disagree but America is just a sound, a guttural verbalization of our larynx, if we revolutionize the definition, then it will be something wholly different, and we just attached the same Sound to it).

Through the practices of multitudes of Heroes we are at a time in which we can change the taste of the only time that exists, the present, and that there is such a vociferous blowback, counter-revolution, going on is the evidence of the malleable, systemic time we are in. We can take the resistance of the past and open the door for it to enter into the present.