We constantly advise our friends to accept change as positive, empowering – there is a cottage industry with signs, mugs, hats, all extolling this, essentially a Buddhist philosophy, that wasn’t available to the masses, when I was a kid.

And it’s getting all the dirty corners of human existence – cancer, divorce, death, re-location – as it should. It is a wonder that we Westerners didn’t catch on earlier. Well, we did actualy. My parents went through the Great Depression – had to accept that, and the shitty life that it brought for regular humans – and even Wall Street stock brokers. My parents also went to World War II, after their parents returned from World War I. So, if they were still alive, they would chastise these new “generations lost in space,” telling them to get over it.

But that’s all just kind of folk wisdom, used as an alt propaganda (who generates the alt propoaganda? the self help cult?). There is always Reality, within easy grasp. If you have evern lived through cancer, or death, or all the real Horsement of the Personal Apocolypse, you did accept it, because it didn’t offer any choices, any placatory respite from the onslaught. The question is, how did you emerge on the other side? That’s what “self help” really means – can you survive with your soul and mind intact, or, will you be filled with hatred of those great mystical beings who seem to toss us mortals about like playthings?

I don’t believe that the Gods control our lives. That’s just a manifestation of our deep-seated belief in the higher power of Justice and Rectitude, both of which are flavors of Kompliance Kool-Aid, not borne of natural experience. We know that in nature, the domestic dog laps up a full nest of baby bunnies, leaving their tiny heads, as inedible. And that’s not Justice – or, it is Justice. But it’s not the created Justice that we hold dear, even though it is a lie.

Let’s separate the Natural and the Inevitable, from the man-made for a second. Just because Nature will ultimately provide us with a fate, doesn’t mean we have to accept the same from human-made Justice. This is where religious morals come in. “Rage, rage..” says John Milton. I don’t know if he was talking about his going blind – in which case he was another mortal fool – or, human injustice, which he definitely struggled with in his Big Book. To be clear, humans create misery and pain for one another, and that is optional, not inevitable. So there is the fight. Just don’t get confused by “inalienable rights”, or other philosophical shit. You are NOT safe, your rights are NOT protected -by God or your Government. It’s up to you, alone, or, with your community, to change what you can, and accept what you can’t (see the Serenity Prayer)