It is not in my nature to judge or assign blame for mistakes made by others. I’m far from perfect myself, so being one who dislikes hypocrisy, I afford others forgiveness easily.
That said, one of the tenets of my beliefs about what it takes to be a man is to own your mistakes. It was something taught to me in the Army, but I still adhere to it today. When asked by a senior officer or NCO why you messed up, the proper response is “there is no excuse, sir.”
While I still believe this is the responsible way to handle your transgressions, the forgiveness I offer freely to others eludes me when reflecting on myself. This above all has been the major kink in my think over the past year which has led to writers block and depression as I rolled myself into a ball of self-loathing and shame.
I have to offer my apologies to the brilliant writers who contributed their work to the Kitchen Cinco and to the readers who were enjoying it as much as I was.
The explanation I’ve given you thus far is an over-simplification of what I’ve been going through and I don’t want to bore you with all the details, but I feel obligated to give some explanation for what happened to the Cinco.
Before I go any further, I do want to say The Kitchen Cinco will be back very soon with more great writing and an accompanying podcast, so don’t take this explanation as closure or as an epithet on the Cinco’s headstone.
I don’t really know what a middle-aged crisis is. I think for most people it defines reaching a point in your life where you realize it’s half over, which forces you to reflect on all the things not accomplished. That’s not really what happened to me. I’ve been doing that for years.
My collapse had more to do with achieving a broader perspective on the world around me…the bigger picture, if you will.
At this stage in my life I understand things in a way I couldn’t when I was younger. For instance, I understand the illusions we all have and feed and live within on a day to day basis, either fed to us from an external source, or created within our own minds.
The illusion of nationalism for instance, which makes us feel good about who we are, where we live and gives us a sense of superiority over the rest of the world. An inflated sense of “pride” for having been born in a country, when being born is no achievement in itself and no baby chooses the country of his/her birth.
But we buy into this notion because it makes us feel good. Also, the ruling class wants us to buy into it because it’s how we can justify in our own minds the atrocities committed by our government in foreign lands (those of us who are even aware of such things).
The illusion of security is another construct of the mind, as no one can provide you with security or safety, but when the government tells you about things you need to be scared of and offers to provide security from that threat, it can feel comforting. Security is a feeling, and it’s relative. You can feel more secure or less secure, but chaos cannot be contained or controlled and for one simple reason: It is chaos. There are many dangers inherent in living life on this planet and there always will be. Anyone who offers you protection from danger is a fraud and should never be trusted.
The illusion of macroeconomics is one we’ve been beaten up with a lot recently. The wealthy ruling class intent on maintaining a separation of the classes raped us by stealing trillions of dollars from tax paying Americans under the guise of an economic crisis in which their institutions were “too big to fail.” In doing so they created more strife for the working class and a huge deficit that they won’t be responsible for paying back because their politician friends refuse to impose taxes on the wealthy.
The whole thing is a farce. None of this money actually exists. It’s all an abstract concept owned and controlled by the very banks who cried crisis. Who got screwed? Goldman Sachs? No, all of us did. But if you buy into the illusion, the only way out of this financial crisis is to keep pumping billions of dollars into these ultra-rich bastards’ pockets…suckers.
The illusion of government manifests in a belief that your government is hard at work trying to make things better for you and your family and your community. The truth is, the government is there to provide the illusion that someone is hard at work trying to make things better. They pretend to care about all of us and it’s their job to break the bad news to us about what the ruling class has decided to do next.
The only job requirement for a politician is to be an eloquent speaker (unless you’re a Bush) who can put anything in the context of telling the people what they want to hear; be it war, tax hikes, bail outs, etc. In other words, they have to be bullshitters.
If that’s true, how can you trust any of them? The two-party system provides an alternative to whoever is in office and taking heat for unpopular decisions. We become outraged, vote them out of office, and we get the bullshitter from the other party who does exactly the same thing. It’s a sham.
The illusion of religion is one that brings many people comfort, and I understand that. All of these illusions are designed to do that, but it’s still an illusion. No matter what religion you choose, it was created by man and is therefore flawed. The greatest danger with this illusion is when people start lying to themselves in order to accept some of the absurd concepts religions require, they can become fanatical and even militant. I don’t have to remind anyone about the dangers of militant fundamentalists.
Lastly, the biggest scourge on humanity has got to be the illusion of fear. There is a never-ending stream of things to be scared of in this culture: Swine flu, war, 2012, socialism, terrorism, illegal immigration, nuclear weapons, climate change, gun control, lack of gun control, earthquakes, shifting of the magnetic poles, China, Iran, Sarah Palin, mass animal kills, vapor trails, loss of constitutional rights (which are another illusion), and the list goes on and on…
How many of these things are solved by fearing them? None. When people are scared they make bad decisions and are easier to manipulate. All of the aforementioned illusions exist because of fear. Fear rules our lives in America. Everything we concede, everything we submit to, everything we tolerate, we do so out of fear.
If there are things out of your control, they are out of the government’s control also. They are out of the church’s control. And if you can’t control it, there is no reason to fear it just as there is no reason to fear death. Death is a natural and necessary part of life. It’s going to happen whether you fear it or not, but the fear will only serve to lessen the quality of your life while you’re here and will cause you to make poor decisions.
These are only some of the things that made me snap last summer, but I’m ready to come back now and write with a new level of honesty and without fear.
