Frustration, and the Symbiotropic.

Photo by me.

Horns honk along the major streets in the cities of Minnesota. Signs are waved by shouty blonde-bleached women draped in the Stars and Stripes. MAGA white men in blue and red baseball caps, wave their high velocity rifles, like long, skinny phalluses, yelling that Dr Fauci be sacked.

In Denver, the nurses step out into the road, almost naked compared. Their basic PPE greens are like shoots from an ancient woodland floor ~ they appear vulnerable, but are, instead, a sturdy green resilience. They voice the number of deaths over and over again, blocking the Trump-cultists threatening to bulldoze the woods from the safety of inside their shiny 8 cylinder Chevrolet Silverados. It connects across space-time with the beauty of Ieshia Evans smiling in the face of a cirque of armored men in Baton Rouge.

America today; at least, the America that is attracting today’s headlines.

Evidence emerges, the self-righteous have been whipped up by extreme libertarians, gun rights and racism drenched through their fake army fatigues. Thousands have joined Facebook groups in just 24 hours. Flash protests and speeches are organized to undermine any sense of common clinical sense. WHO and China, now Town Hall, blamed for their current lifestyle. Everyone blamed, apart from themselves.

It’s all happened before in 1918, as Tim Mak explains so well on Twitter. The Land of the “me, myself and I” pop up to condemn their fellow Americans yet to be infected. They contend these human sacrifices are acceptable, for the sake of so-called freedom; a gas-guzzling, zero-maternity leave America built on the ethos of harsh frontier work and brutal slavery.

Whatever the outcome (outright civil war or a fade to nothing), time is burnt through like oxygen in a fire, time squandered that otherwise would yield deep changes forquired for the good of all life on Earth. Fear-strings are pulled by a tiny majority that pinch tight around the ill-informed and brainwashed, and time is vaporizing in front of our eyes. Markets crash, oil prices plummet to minus. White people feeling fear, not love. Now they are raging. A selfish and self-righteous zombie mob.

Whether we like it or not, America is both effecting and affecting the global state, a state that is already supremely vulnerable.

The “Extremis” don’t have the heart, nor head. In  COVID-19, burning fossil fuels, particulates or in roads, they blind themselves to the many who will suffer a second wave; disease, droughts, conflicts, migrations, or the multiple, violent hurricanes yet again about to hit the Atlantic basin. They’ve forgotten the real meaning of Liberty.

Neither do they have the imagination for wilder lives other than as trophies, nor for what it must be like to be enslaved or industrially farmed. They have no clue for the microbiotic symbiosis that, with an undisturbed peace, serve so well as to give life not take it.

I feel a seismic frustration that deep-change is pinned against a concrete border wall, threatened by bail-outs of billionaires with you, me and the nations already drowning in criminally enforced debt and capital-austerity. I fear a charge on GDP will be unleashed to make up for lockdowns, the likes of which we have never seen before, with more lives thrown against the wall for the sake of money. I am frustrated that individualism sets all adrift from the reality of interconnected life, pinched tight by those fear-strings, fed my media and corporate oligarchs.

I am saddened that these wild lives so poignantly glimpsed in the metropolis, are simply ghosts of a unified past and nothing more. I want them to be so much more.

I’m going to call this feeling my Frustopianism. Frustropia is a good world possible, but delayed. The Frustration (verb) is that life everywhere could be so very different.

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But, as a Patientist, I need to be ever more watchful and imaginative. The great Joanna Macy’s “Great Turning” cannot end here.

Change is of the utmost importance for the good of all life. It is a prerequisite, a forquisite, for evolutionary adaptation and survival. In biology, tropism is the suffix given to a process of turning, the processes from deep within DNA from generation to generation that effect change. It’s often, though not exclusively, attributed to vegetative processes.

Heliotropism is a process whereby a plant responds to the stimulus of sunlight by turning and growing towards the Sun. Selenotropism is the motion of plants in response to the direction of the moon.

I want to block the zombie mob, the Trump-cults with their 8 cylinders and their phallic guns. I stand with the nurses in green, the carers, the caring and the cared-for, turning  ALL to the symbiotic relationships between all living beings that aid life not destroy it. I call it symbiotropism. 

Symbiotropism ~ a mass turning towards symbiogenesis, like looking at the light of the Sun and the Moon and growing towards them ~ the love, the Baha and our global, diverse and beautiful moral community called Life on Earth.

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