I was trying to explain to someone once about what happens when you go too far down the road with alcohol and certain drugs. It’s no different than what happens with the intoxication of power; the pursuit of sexual satisfaction, gold fever and whatever obsession might come to mind. I was telling this fellow that it was similar to the way the water swirls in a toilet bowl. At first you encounter certain events and phenomena and there may be an exception that occurs once or twice. As you continue down, what was an exception becomes commonplace and then a new exception will occur. Then this exception becomes common place. The lower you swirl on the side of the bowl the more the environment changes until it suddenly gets very dark and then stays that way.
You can think about domestic altercations; a bar fight, a DWI, a blackout, divorce, job loss, homelessness, insanity or prison and then… death. The usual descent is gradual. This is how people will come to some point of desperation and wonder how they arrived there.
Surfers and divers experience a particular condition that can be caused by extreme wave action or some other factors where they no longer know which way is up or down. So it is that people climbing up the ladder of personal power and personal influence might actually be climbing downward in a cosmic sense which would, sooner or later, become personal. Sometimes people think that steps they are taking are going to protect them and find that they succeeded only in putting themselves in greater danger. Some people think having a lot of money will make them rich when it winds up making them poor in everything that counts.
Men and women born with great physical beauty often come to rely on it and never develop the other qualities that actually make them attractive in an enduring way. Once their looks are gone, it’s a sad affair. This is the judgment of Nature. However, it is possible that when one kind of beauty would ordinarily fade, it becomes illuminated with another kind of beauty. There are realities about life that it is valuable to become aware of, unfortunately most people never do.
What happened to Berlusconi yesterday is a watershed moment. This won’t be the general impression. In most minds this will come across as an anomaly and one of the things that happen now and then to those who are in the public eye and whose public actions have a certain amount of controversy to them. It could be said that all public figures have a certain amount of controversy attached to them, just from being public figures.
The very rich and powerful have put themselves in a most undesirable position. Instead of making sure that the underclass has enough to get by and then keeping all the usual distractions in operation, they have overstepped themselves. Their greed and lust for power and wealth and their disdain for public opinion, which they demonstrate by their arrogant disregard for what others think; believing themselves to be above the reach and judgment of those they consider beneath them, is going to come back on them with a fury. The King Louis and Marie Antoinette mindset never goes out of style with those driven mad by vanity and self-interest. It comes with the territory.
Most of the time, they can keep this in check and go right on living their privileged lives by recognizing the limits to which they can abuse the ordinary lives. In this age of material darkness they have lost their perspective. They have over reached themselves. They have put themselves in peril by placing themselves too far above their fellows and basically… sucking the oxygen out of the living room of life.
They have continued to steal when they already had more than they could ever need or ever spend. They made public displays of their wealth, while showing a calloused indifference to the plight of the people they stole their money from. They have awakened a beast in the hearts of the populace. This beast has its own intelligence outside of the minds of those in which it has been kindled. They are only the means. The beast is the awareness that drives the means to the end. This is how unruly mobs suddenly coalesce as if they were possessed of intelligent purpose. All of a sudden they have leaders and a structure. It seems to come out of nowhere but it does not. It is the natural response to conditions set into being by people who should have known better and did not.
When you set about repressing people’s freedom of speech and movement, you have created a problem. When you make their jobs and their savings disappear you have created another problem. When you send men and women to fight wars for profit or to serve the interest of a foreign nation that sees them as less than human, you have created another problem. When you fail to see to the aftercare of these soldiers you have created yet another problem. These are only a few of the problems.
Many times, the rich and the powerful have considered themselves above the law and secure behind their walls and under the protection of their guards. Very often this proves to be untrue. Often enough the danger is behind the walls with you already and simmers in the hearts of those charged with your protection.
The rich and the powerful could go on indefinitely were it not for their arrogance and sense of impunity. It’s not rocket surgery to understand that you have to make sure that ‘the people’ have enough to get by on. No sane leader would let the banks take away the homes of the people when they caused the problem in the first place. The worst of times in which to behave this way is during the presence of an apocalypse because it is then- due to a little understood working of the laws of Nature- that we become exposed for what we are. We get seen at what we are doing. We wind up at another level in the swirling bowl and the exception becomes the rule.
Though it may not be apparent at the moment, I believe we will look back on this Berlusconi incident and say, “That’s when it started.” Some might say it started in
The bankers and Wall Street clowns should seriously consider a sea change in their day to day relentless, buggery of the lumpen proles. Once critical mass has been reached, you don’t get any ‘do-overs’ …and you don’t get to rewind the tape. As Omar Khayyam said; “The moving finger, having writ, moves on and not all your piety can lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it". World leaders and international bankers are not calling me on the phone and asking, “visible, what should I do here?” They are not consulting with any of us who might do them some good. They would prefer to pay those who will tell them what they want to hear and how they can get out of this with everything they have and still more. It’s not going to happen.
Those richly deserving it are about to reap the whirlwind and it does not have to happen… yet they insist upon it. Have it your way and welcome to the cosmic Burger King where you are on the menu. There are people closely placed to all of these people, in critical positions, who do not like what they are up to and will betray them without regret when the opportunity comes. I do not envy those who think themselves impervious to the storm. In other time they could simply throw a few of their fellows to the crowd. These are not those other times.
A hard rain is going to fall, as a poet once said. Times of great change are filled with a combustible unpredictability. The degree of severity is still in question and much could be done to militate against the worst case scenario. Will an epiphany fall upon those who need it the most? Will they push their chips to the center of the table and declare that they are all in? Will they actually believe that where a certain amount of force is not working that they only need to apply more force? Will they listen or must they feel? I don’t have the answer to that. One can only hope that somehow they will find one before it really is too late.
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