My neighbor Madame Jane is not only the world’s most accurate fortune-teller, she is also the most completely-ignored fortune-teller since the beginning of time — except perhaps for Cassandra. And there is a good reason for this too. Frankly, Madame Jane is just plain morose. Nobody wants to be told bad news constantly — even if it is true. Even I am getting tired of being haunted by Madame Jane’s sad tales of gloom and doom. And I’ve told her this time and again.
But, suddenly, at 6:00 am this morning, there was Madame Jane again, at my front door, banging fiercely away with her fists and shouting, “You need to wake up, dearie. Wake up! And it’s time for the whole world to wake up too!”
“Well, the whole world is going to have to wait,” I yelled back, “until after I’ve brushed my teeth.” Plus I’d just finished reading a book called “Fun Is Good” — and Madame Jane is definitely not fun.
But M.J. was having none of it. “Things are never going to get better in America,” she yelled through the door. “I have just returned from the future. Things are only going to get worse. And right now the only hope of changing this grim future is to band all Americans together as allies, working together in common cause.”
Read my lips. “I. Don’t. Care.”
“We need to stop anyone who tries to teach Americans to hate each other. We need to turn off all those attack-ads on TV — and then fight desperately like wolves in a pack so that, in the future, things perhaps might possibly remain the same as they are now and not get any worse.”
Madame Jane took a deep breath and adjusted her wig.
“The wealthy 1% are now shamelessly attacking black people, brown people, old people, children, Muslims, Native Americans, progressive white people, students and women. Separately these groups are all minorities. But united together they can all stand tall — like the strong and proud Americans they are. But will they actually even try to unite to protect themselves from these merciless attacks by the oligarchs? Not gonna happen.”
No, Madame Jane definitely does not have a fun outlook on life.
But then I suddenly remembered what Mahatma Gandhi used to say. “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean. If a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the whole ocean does not have to become dirty.”
So I told that to M.J. — and she just humphed. “Mahatma Gandhi’s ocean never had to deal with Fukushima.”
“Okay, so the whole world is going to hell in a hand-basket,” I said. “But so what? Every human being has got to die sometime anyway and there is no escaping that fact — so what does it matter if our time comes sooner rather than later? Plus what the freak can I do about any of this freaking mess at freaking 6:00 am in the morning?”
But Madame Jane was completely undeterred. “You need a wake-up call!” she cried. No I don’t. I need coffee.
“You need to start reading up on what is really happening in the world right now, girly-girl — not just what they tell you on TV. And after that, you need to go get out in the world and start making some waves. And even if you are only one drop in an huge ocean, then you need to start making that one drop count. Because if you and all the other billions of little guys like you don’t do something to stop these dire predictions from happening, then who will? And then everything that I predict will come true.”
If we snooze, we lose. Got it. Now can I go back to bed?
“And America today currently has the most sadistic foreign policy since Genghis Klan — and I can clearly see that America’s foreign policy will be getting even more sadistic in the next 20 years. That is, if there still is any America left 20 years from now! With a foreign policy based on mass murder, who can tell how long America can still stay in business without pissing everyone off — including God, Allah, the Buddha and Jesus!” Yikes! Has Halloween already arrived? To stay forever? Apparently so.
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2014/10/26/510924us-lawlessness-fuels-global-insecurity/
“And don’t even get me started on the Middle East situation.” Too late.
“All that horrible stuff happening in the Middle East today seems to boil down to just this,” Madame Jane said next. “Everyone in the Middle East is getting screwed — plus American and Israeli taxpayers are getting screwed too. And everyone in the Middle East knows who is doing the screwing — American, Saudi and Israeli neo-cons, none of whom even pay taxes.
“However, either no one in the Middle East knows how to stop getting screwed or else they just figure, ‘Since there is such a lot of screwing going on and no one knows how to stop it, I might as well help the ones doing the screwing rather than be a screwee.’” Sucks to be them.
“And then you add a bunch of psychopaths to the mix and also a bunch of eager weapons manufacturers looking for a killing — and what do you get? Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden. Again.”
Does this mean that if you live in the Holy Land and Fertile Crescent, then knowledge of good and evil comes with the real estate deal? And just exactly how much evil can these poor Arab schmucks know before there is no one left to know it? http://journal-neo.org/2014/10/21/is-the-us-ready-to-trigger-wwiii/
Then Madame Jane muttered something under her breath about 9-11. Not being fully awake, I asked her to speak up. Which of course she did.
“9-11 was a very small terrorist attack. It only involved twenty Saudis with box cutters and a little help from some NORAD screw-ups. Only 2,996 Americans were killed.” Only? Hey, that’s a lot!
“But every single day of every single year, year in and year out since then, many more than 2,996 Americans are killed every day by the real terrorist attacks that we suffer, right here on our own American soil — attacks on our lives, our liberty and our pursuit of happiness. Terrorist attacks! Terrorist attacks!”
Hey, M.J., calm down. Blood pressure, remember?
“But sadly, nobody seems to notice about them like they did about 9-11.” What terrorist attacks?
“Terrorist attacks on our infrastructure, our food supply, our water supply, our agriculture, our veterans, our hospitals, our children, our Constitution, our economy, our…”
Oh. I get it. You’re referring to the Koch brothers, Congressional lobbyists, the military-industrial complex, Monsanto, Citibank, Morgan Stanley and those guys. Like what that French guy Piketty said, that the richest one percent are currently in possession of half the world’s assets — and the top 10% now own 87% of the world’s assets. And boy are the rest of us 99% gonna be pissed off when there is nothing left for us. Or, to quote Lynn Stuart Parramore, “In that case, fasten your seatbelts. This ride could get very rough.” http://stopmakingsense.org/2014/10/23/pikettys-prophecy-comes-true-the-planets-middle-class-is-rapidly-going-extinct/
“Getting pissed off is gonna do the 99% no good at this late date. They missed their chance to save themselves from serfdom way back in 2000, when they let G.W. Bush steal the presidential election. And now all they have to save themselves is, er, nothing. The oligarchs now have all the power — not to mention all the weapons. Sorry about that.” That’s harsh.
“And here’s another example for you,” said Madame Jane. “I just went to buy gas at the pump today.” Madame Jane drives a car? Now that’s scary. “And gas was up 50 cents more from the last time. Why? Because of all this ISIS craziness in the Middle East after Congress authorized spending billions of dollars on hiring ISIS pirates and thugs to slaughter women and children in Syria and Iraq in the first place. And all we Americans get out of it is this stinkin’ gasoline price-gouge T-shirt!” Madame Jane is an American? That’s scary too. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=799887010073804&fref=nf
“Not to mention climate change that will put your grandchildren in the hospital with lung cancer and emphysema! If we even still have any hospitals left 30 years from now. And it would be so laughingly easy to put solar panels on top of all our homes and then run our electric cars off of that. But no. American neo-cons still force us to pollute and spend trillions on wars for oil.”
Good grief. So that is why we taxpayers are financing ISIS’s scorched-earth policy in Syria and Iraq — to drive up the price of oil. Now can I pleeeze have some coffee?
“These anti-American oligarch Wall Street terrorists need to leave America the freak alone and go back to where they came from — the Cayman Islands and Swiss bank vaults where they belong”
Then Madame Jane started to glare at me again — with those fierce and ancient dark gypsy eyes of hers. “And what exactly are you going to do to stop all this?” she snarled.
“Er, uh, sign a petition on the internet to save the dolphins?”
PS: I’m currently reading a book called “Social,” and the author claims that when our brains aren’t doing anything else, their default setting is to think about our interactions with others. That’s amazing. “After Christianity and Islam,” says the author, “Facebook is the third largest organization in the world,” because people just wanna be friends.
Hey, maybe Madame Jane can get on FB and then convince all our friendly brains to help save the world. Why not — if being BFFs with seven billion other people would give our brains something creative to do. After all, blowing people up and hoarding money are social activities that suck eggs.
If social interaction actually is the most important thing in the world for our brains, then the Pentagon and banksters are going about things all wrong.
http://news.yahoo.com/assads-warnings-start-ring-true-turkey-144516592.html
And this could also explain the behavior of ISIS. Because its members never really learned the niceties of genuine social interaction because they weren’t raised around women, the queens of social interaction and hot gossip, they never learned any real social skills. So apparently they think that beheading people is the best way to win friends and influence people? You guys are just gross!
