Can we balance the karma?
An interesting position as this balances the karmic force for the greatest good. The problem remains a difficult one to reconcile with compassion and mindfulness. People often have trouble, in my experience, in the sequencing of mindfulness and compassion. The simple answer that compassion demands that a reason be found to allow everyone to their path while mindfulness is used to justify that “extenuating” circumstances. In my opinion mindfulness should come first as compassion is inherently an emotional response. Full awareness of the situation (as objective a view of reality as possible) needs to precede compassion. Whether you consider karma as the measurable force or simply logic to maximize happiness and minimize pain we need to make some very hard choices at times. And this whole discussion is about that.
Dealing with the Son of Baldwin’s position that started this conversation is justified in this time and place. Each time you evaluate someone else’s actions you are immediately at karmic risk. But the greater good, utilitarian or not, must be the basis of any action or non-action taken. My personal protection is to avoid any universal position on this kind of thing hence forcing these into a case by case analysis before we act.
We are now very close to accepting responsibility for changing course for a large number of people who, acting on false and misleading information, are facilitating pain, suffering, and death on an even larger population. Can we accept that responsibility and what does that mean?
It is increasingly acknowledged that the last national election was probably invalid. It is also generally acknowledged that one of the two national parties has abandoned almost all pretense of policy and has, for years, focused exclusively on gaining control of state governments in order to distort the representative process. This has been justified by saying everyone does it. To my knowledge gerrymandering has previously been primarily local in focus and not done as the primary activity of a national party. When the concentrated focus has also included blatant voter suppression it becomes very hard to write this off as just the foibles of a moderately corrupt political system. Combine long term actions with illegal intent (what else do we call this?), the installation of an obviously incompetent puppet as president, and then mix in the apparent use of foreign governmental support to achieve the take over, and we have an illegitimate government committed to nothing except the removal of basic rights and exploitation of the vast majority in order to funnel money to a tiny, ruling elite and, perhaps, acting or failing to act in certain situations to the benefit of a foreign power.
This clearly signals the need for regime change if the nation state is to survive. That Georgia special election, the most expensive in history for a Congressional House seat, was lost to the oligarchy. Only 58% of the registered voters were involved possibly indicating voter suppression but, more importantly, as we have seen in all elections over the last thirty year, roughly half the voting population considers it useless to vote.
I can only assume that the political system and federal government are no longer viable. In the interest of social order and to prevent more damage being done it seems we are drifting steadily to a devolution of the United States. This will be hard enough and is outside the current structure of the federal government with no mechanism to exit the US. At some point regions of states, e.g. Pacific Coast based on California, will need to associate together and reduce revenue to the illegitimate federal government while setting up new replacement services for the region.
At some point soon this will have to begin to happen. My fear is that if the focus is kept on 2018 and a national election without correcting the corruption the election will be a farce. What do we do then? At this point there is some chance for a Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering in Wisconsin could be used to federally mandate complete redistricting on a one person one vote basis. The corruption of the Supreme Court, however, suggests that will be blocked.
