From CGI's Morgan.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who has something to be grateful for and appreciates it, even though the times in which we live grow increasingly strange and unpredictable; the shit has yet to hit the fan and possibly, if enough of us can maintain a positive proactive attitude, it might not happen. Maybe this is just my irrepressible Pollyanna persona that somehow got fashioned as a result of a seriously hard knocks existence and the only reason that was the result is that all the alternatives would have been much harder to bear. Regardless of how it might turn out in the end it is still better to go out with a smile on your face even if there seems to be no reason for it (grin). We're guessing that not everyone is going to agree with this but... that puts a smile on our face too. Hey! It's Thanksgiving and I am going to spend the day being grateful and give you all kinds of reasons why; gratitude for what we are and for what might be and especially gratitude for what we are not and hope never to become.
Just in case anyone thought that what got said yesterday in Smoking Mirrors was exaggeration and the state of emergency we live in- as relates to our Constitutional guarantees and those freedoms that you are sure to see if you have ever read the Bill of Rights- please cast your eyes on this lovely message coming out of ground central for the hypothalamus, or would that be the neo-cortex of The European Union? Whatever... it is still right next to the Land of La Marseilles. Hey!!! "Allons enfant de la patrie", dear readers. We used to sing that song as a child when we lived in Paris. We are guessing it no longer means what it did, just as The Star Spangled Banner is an ironic laugh riot now, should you be one of those people who find that sort of thing funny. I don't. Like the guy in Airplane said, “I picked the wrong time to stop sniffing glue.” However... as a paraphrasing take on that let me say in reverse... “I picked the right time to hasta la vista out of the European states.”
I am grateful that I no longer live in Europe because I have said in print similar things to what that courageous French comic said and the saddest reality is that both of what either of us have said happens to be true. When powerful interests have to go to this length to repress freedom of speech, what is being said is very likely true. I am grateful on this Thanksgiving that I do not fear the truth and I am grateful for all those others, no matter how few they may be. I am glad that for whatever the reason, I am lucky enough to be able to see that the Paris attacks were orchestrated by the same people who intend to put this brave man in jail for telling the truth and I am grateful that I am ashamed for the rest of the human race that refuses to see the truth and who do not rise up and protest this injustice.
I am filled with gratitude that I know Israel did 9/11 and once again I am ashamed for all of the people who could easily know this as well but who, due to ignorance or cowardice, self interest or indifference, refuse to see that this is true. I am grateful for every stripe I have suffered under the whiplash of the truth descending on me and for the recognition and realization that followed the pain of whatever it took for whatever is decent in me, to possess enough force of conscience to overcome my fear of whatever the cost of it might be.
I am intensely grateful for the strength to endure the absurdities and outrages of this unfortunate time in which I live. I am awash in gratitude for the sacrifices of everyone who has paid the price for having the stones to stand up to the only terrorists of whom we should be concerned and that is the psychopaths who run the governments and armies that dispense their terrors upon whomever they wish to torment and murder, simply because they love to do evil for the sheer joy of it and whom, despite the fact that there is often a profit motive behind the horrors they inflict, would still do it, even if there were no other motive than the enjoyment they take from it. I am of everlasting gratitude that I am not one of these doomed and damned souls.
I am grateful that I do not live in one of the presently war torn countries that are being besieged by the Zionist predators and their mercenary armies from other nations that they control because they control the presses that print the currencies of the countries where these soldier for hire are taken from.
I am so very, very grateful that I am not so unbelievably ignorant that I would be willing to go and kill innocent sheepherders and subsistence farmers and their wives and children, under the orders of bankers who control the government of the country I come from and set the parameters for whatever sad excuse for a foreign policy it possesses. I am grateful that I know that whatever other terrorists appears in these countries, they are created and financed by the same people who sent the soldiers of other nations to kill the people who were driven to these extremes, due to the violent evils visited upon them by the people responsible for what they became and who were formerly shepherds, or store clerks, or street vendors, or students ...but who could no longer be any of them because their sheep got blown to bits by anti-personnel mines and cluster bombs and Hell-fire missiles, or... automatic weapons, or whose stores were leveled along with the entire surrounding neighborhood including the streets that the vendors used to set up and all the schools and universities they used to attend.
I am grateful that I sit here writing this today and am not consumed with the thought of all the stupid useless xxxx I intend to go out and buy tomorrow. I am drenched in a sense of Thanksgiving that feeling thankful, for me, is far more important than stuffing myself with so much food and drink that I fall asleep on my couch in the middle of watching a football game in a country where material excess has become a religion, even through something like half the world's population often goes to bed hungry. I am so thankful that I am not complicit in causing this.
I am thankful for the readers who come and visit here and whose continuing return makes it possible for me to write these things and without which there would be little point to it and whose solidarity of heart and mind contributes to my being consistently inspired to get up to this sort of thing on most days and who bear as much responsibility for anything good happening as I do. I am grateful that I realize this and grateful to be aware that I am just one among so many of us and that I am not consumed by so many outbreaks of brain fever that manifest in self importance and vanity and far more grateful that I realize one never accomplishes anything of any lasting significance if they so full of themselves that it winds up being exposed in the work that is done and then becomes nothing but an embarrassment and a pedestrian exercise in futility. I am so thankful that I am mostly (grin) aware of this.
I am grateful that despite my failures and shortcomings that I am generally motivated by high ideals even when I am not always able to reflect on or live up to them and I am further grateful that I never stop trying and I am even more grateful for all the people whose lives and beautiful efforts make me want to be a better person, despite the inconsistency in me that has been demonstrated now and again.
I am thankful for those who link my work, regardless of my having disappointed them on occasion. I am grateful they have the generosity of spirit to overlook this. I am grateful for those who have supported my work and without which support I might not have been able to continue.
I am grateful for my faith in ultimate justice, even though I have seldom seen it and I am incredibly grateful for Mr. Apocalypse, whose ceaseless efforts at exposing the liars and murderers and nasty plots of the temporarily privileged and self chosen and without whose presence and determined efforts this world would be far worse than it is and I thank him for upping his intensity and for unmasking the predators and sonsofbitches that seek to bring about Hell on Earth and who will fail, regardless of how hard it might be to see sometimes. I'm grateful and thankful for so much more but I have run out of space, so I will close with a Thanksgiving poem I wrote a few years ago and a link to the remarkable Patrick Willis who gave voice to it in a way that only he is capable of doing. Happy Thanksgiving to you all!!!