The Children Are The First To Crack

I have lived in this huge apartment/condo complex for around ten years now and this is the first time the management has ever sent out an alert regarding vandalism from the children who live here.  The notice said that children have damaged the plants and beautiful landscaping that was put in last month, and they have been getting into the laundry and damaging the washing machines and dryers.  Also, they have been playing around the cars in the parking garages and in the driveways, which has long been forbidden.  The management has now threated to evict any family whose children damage property.

 

This complex has a large swimming pool, a kiddie wading pool, an indoor basketball court, a gymnasium, a billiards room, a party room, several outdoor grills and picnic tables where people have parties and birthday parties, and lots of grass to play on. In the summers, the management provides a free camp for young children involving games, crafts, sport tournaments, and other activities.

 

But ever since the first lockdown in mid march, due to Coved all these facilities have been closed. The quad is really a ghost town most of the day.  I hardly ever see an adult at all.  I do see children after 3:00 when “home schooling” ends for the day, but it is hard for them to find places to play, thus they are in the garages and I guess in the planters, and so on.  Also, I am certain their parents are under various stresses and that affects children as well.

 

This year there was no summer, no beach, no family summer trip, no birthday parties, no Halloween, no Thanksgiving, and now the biggest of all, the “cancelling of Christmas” to whatever extreme that really means.  I’ve been getting in the mail gift catalogues featuring photos of beaming children on Christmas morning getting the toys that wanted, and adults, too, photos of a happy Dad with his new golf driver or a smiling Mom with something beautiful for the home or to wear.

 

Children thrive on ritual…and adults, too.  When I think over my own childhood, there were dozens of things we had to have each year or something was wrong.  Here are just a few examples.

 

For my birthdays, my mother would take us and my friends to a local amusement park.  It was like our own tiny Disneyland and we never got tired of it.  My two sisters and brother had summer birthdays, so their parties involved diving for pennies in the swimming pool and having barbecues outside by the pool

 

Always every summer the family go out into the woods for a picnic, and weekly our mother would take us to the beach at Santa Cruz to play in the waves.

 

If we took a driving trip across country to visit our relatives in North Carolina, we loved it whenever there was a “bumpy ride” where the highway went way up and down, Dad would drive faster than normal because the thrill ride made us all scream and laugh.  Our parents would stop at every “see the hila monster” or “rattlesnake”, whatever junk attraction there was in some small town off the road.  When it was very hot, there was always that obligatory stop at Dairy Queen.

 

At least once every month, the family would go to the drive-in movie and we would wear our pajamas.

 

On Thanksgiving, each one of us had to have one of those turkey candles at our place setting and loved to see whose turkey would remain burning the longest (you know some of those were fickle birds!).  That was always a heated contest, even our father got in on it, to the extent that one Thanksgiving, my brother’s and or father’s candle was still burning after we finished our meal, so we kept it burning on the dining room table while we went into the family room to watch the annual “Wizard of Oz” on television. When it was time to get dessert, Mom saw that the dining room table was on fire due to those turkey candles that had gone on the loose!  We have no idea who won that contest that year, but the dining room table wore its newly-created tattoo for the rest of its useful life.

 

Speaking of fire hazards, every Fourth of July Mom and Dad would get us a huge “block party” fireworks kit and Dad would put up on the tennis court a complex of ladders for attaching various spinning fireworks to and we had the neighbors and friends come over for the festivities and we all would all have hot cider and hot dogs.  Mom armed us all with numerous sparklers that we loved to toss far up in the air.  Apparently one Fourth of July somebody’s sparker ended up buried in the tanbark that was all over the ground near there and there it continued to smolder for years!  Mom kept a garden hose dripping in the vicinity of that slow burn, which would slowly migrate across the landscape, but never actually burned out.  She said that for sure she was on some fireman’s “bad list”, since the Fourth of July block parties and throwing the sparklers up in the air never abated. 

 

Christmas of course had its own long list of must-does.  For example, we had to have an advent calendar, the Christmas count-down had to begin.  Naturally we all were involved in decorating the Christmas tree (some years we had more than one in the house) and Mom had to decorate everything in a Christmas theme—pillows on the couches that she had made and towels in the bathrooms and Christmas themed plates and drinking glasses and things hanging on every doorknob and Christmas lights all around outside.  Christmas music played all day throughout the house and also outside. Of course we had to get in the car and go all over everywhere (Atherton where we lived, and Menlo Park, and Palo Alto) to see the Christmas lights.  We read all the dozens of Christmas cards that our parents would get from friends from all around the country; we children new who all those people were.  When Christmas was over, we read all the Christmas cards again and then had the ritual of burning them in the fire place one at a time (sending all those good wishes up into the ethers).  We had fire burning in all the fire places in the house, which means in the living room, the bar, the kitchen, the family room, our parents’ room, and outside by the pool.  What’s Christmas without a fire in a fireplace in almost every room?

 

We children would spend hours lying on the floor by the Christmas tree and would look at the gorgeously wrapped presents that were there and if it had our name on it, we tried to guess what it was.  These were presents from Mom and Dad and each other, as well as gifts from our friends and friends of our parents and certain relatives.  

 

Christmas Eve, we kids were just too wound up to stand it, so Mom dropped us off at a movie theater and every year we would marvel how it was light when we went into the theater and dark when we came back out after the movie.  Then the family ate dinner at a restaurant called “Gale’s” in Menlo Park, which, sadly, no longer exists.  It always had to be Gales for Christmas eve dinner, just because.

 

We children were allowed to open just ONE present before going to bed that night, and it had to be from one of the siblings. Obviously the presents from Santa Clause would arrive sometime in the night.  Dad would get up on the roof and stomp around and say “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas!” (we figured out who it had been years later).  That was magical for me even when I was old enough to learn the “truth” about Santa Clause, because I believed and still do.

 

We made a big deal of leaving cookies and milk for Santa.  When Mom got into health food, Santa got “Tiger’s milk”, because he needed to have strength for his mission of giving toys to all the boys and girls. (P.S. In our family, it wasn’t “good children” and “bad children”—all Children deserved love from Santa Clause.) And every Christmas morning we made sure that Santa had left us a thank-note for the delicious cookies and the empowering Tiger’s Milk.

 

I think back on these things, and so much more, and appreciate how glorious and powerful our childhood was, and how our rituals wove together the whole family and actually the whole culture.  And Christmas was especially powerful, so that its power lasted within far into my adulthood. I think it remained in our mother’s heart all her life.  Fortunately, we all were mostly able to get together every year, even though there had been a lot of moving about so that no longer were we children living near each other, or near our parents.  But we would drive, fly, or take a train to be together whenever possible, which was most of the time.

 

Ritual keeps you whole, moral, caring, and always getting wiser.  Messing with this is destructive.  And I think when cherished rituals are messed with, it is the children who are the first to crack.  It is like the rug is pulled out from under them, quickly or slowly, and they no longer feel secure about where they are anymore.  And absolutely they need to play.  That is really their main job and requirement, playing, and what I say about toys is that toys are a child’s tools.  They need those in order to accomplish and to grow up.

 

Everybody must be aware of not letting precious rituals slip away.  And when the children crack, you will be next, and somewhere before that is the time to say “enough”.  Do not let whom you were get taken over, but proudly grab onto it will all your might.  You are the sovereign.

THE WORLD NEEDS PEOPLE

In what I think of as in the "good news" category, I happened to get a travel e-mail entitled "The Most Beautiful Small Towns In The World".   (There happen to be other variations of that, as well, such as "The Most Beautiful Small Towns In The United States", but it was the global one that grabbed by attention).

 

Ever since Coved, I had been immediately deleting all travel e-mails coming my way, because I can't go to any of those places anyway, so what is the point, but this one interested me and I was blown away by the beauty of each town shown.  Every one of them was a place that I could completely see going to, maybe that would be possible someday.  

 

As I looked at the pictures, I suddenly had an important thought:  those Most Beautiful Small Towns in the World require people.  I don't mean visitors, or a small corps of demonic "elites" who will remain after all their yearning population diminishment is completed, but normal, real, organic human beings, living their free and individual lives.  What makes a Most Beautiful Small Town worth going to is not buildings and quaint streets and views of mountains or oceans, but normal people living there to have hotels and restaurants and cooks and bartenders and stores and entertainment venues, and not existing for the benefit of tourists, but because of their having their own lives that they live for themselves and only incidentally happen to also maintain for the benefit of those who come through there for a visit. Visitors need to have there a sense of hospitality and discovery and creation of delicious food, and charming cultural events, and unique arts and crafts, and maybe even intriguing languages that express different points of view or help us to understand the meanings behind our own words.  

 

It is people who care about where they live who keep it going, have safety in the streets and keep their houses and gardens filled with color and in repair, who smile and are happy with each other, are proud of their town for its own sake, and are places where a visitor may feel like jumping up and join into a crowd of people dancing to the music of local musicians.  These are places where you can joyfully meld in among the people whose home this is.

 

NONE of this can exist if there are no free and independent people living lives that have meaning for themselves.  All the buildings would fade and crumble and the streets would shift and crack and the gardens would dry up.  Wild animals and the jungle would take over.  In short, if those who are demonic get what they want, there would be nothing beautiful left. Certainly not in their own quickly sagging ancient fleshy bodies overwrought with plastic surgery and all the heart transplants in the world (presumably done by medical robots).  We have already seen some of this.  Their future would just be filthy depressing concrete skyscrapers (until the next big earthquake) populated by countless semi-asleep human bodies connected to computer systems and surrounded by robots that few people would know how to fix or to correct the inevitable devastating screw-ups in the programs that had not been foreseen.

 

There would be no more innovations or art or music or any creativity at all, as it is only free and sovereign people who create such things.  Like how unemployed people given a minimum living wage would stop working, so would an "elite" who expect everyone else to be their slaves would stop doing things for themselves, and would stop learning and creating until they knew how to do anything for themselves.  In short, it all would be a hell of the greatest proportions for them and they would have no ability to extricate themselves from what they had committed by structurally damaging those who could fix the situation, or could have prevented it in the first place.

 

They think that with all their trillions or whatever measure of wealth, and their several mansions and their yachts and their private airplanes and corps of machines at their disposal that they would have it all, the entire empty planet would be theirs (the United Nations Agenda of whatever number they want), all theirs, to explore and to inhabit with no more "stupid sheeple" to disgust them and to clutter up the world and for them to steal from like taking candy from a baby because their victims did not spend all their time figuring out schemes by which they could take from others who were busy living their lives and caring for their families.  Finally they would feel that they had it made!

 

But then the time would come when what they had originally seen as a private paradise only for them, had inevitably degenerated into (metaphorically visually) looking more like the Highway of Death from Desert Storm or the jungle take-over of Cambodian ancient cities and temples.

 

Why is all this revelation a good thing?  Because what I have been thinking this whole time without understanding it concretely is that while they seem to have all the money and the power, and they have several decades of planning and laying down the ground work, and have utilized countless human data to determine how best to control a population by fear, I kept thinking but we have the people!  How is that a plus--scared, impoverished, separated, surprised, and indoctrinated people, of what use is that?  Clearly all these people can be easily steam-rolled all over; the people have "lost" before they even knew that there was a war.

 

Well, I finally saw the whole structure, the entire system, and how all this would impact the people who think they are in a separate and superior camp versus everybody else.  But they may as well feel the same separation from and superiority over the planet itself, and nature, and the sun and the stars.  They did not create this Universe and they are not even all that special as people versus all the others.  Somewhere along in their greed and in their narcissism they thought they were a species above and that they deserved to own it all and to control it all. Stop and think of what has happened to others throughout history who thought this way.   The current versions of those people think that it is high technology that makes the difference... now they can be as "gods" because never before had the world had this level of technology before.  Some even feel that they can become immortal.  (The Greeks have a story about that.)  Beyond the thought that only now do we have such a high level of technology might not be true (there is some evidence of there having been very highly technologically advanced people before us who managed to destroy themselves), we don't even have to go there.  Just a simple imagining a little bit forward to what it would be like for those who think they are superior if they got what they think they want, they will realize that they really don't want that.  Obviously, in every way, instead of being a great victory for them, it would be worse than their worst nightmare.

 

Let us all grasp that ourselves, and keep our minds on it not happening, not being trapped by fear, but instead filling that space with thoughts of all the great things we now will be able to do.  Let us realize that we are successfully coming out of a major transformative period that gives us a chance to enliven our deeper dreams with an expanded power.   Our continued existence is what will save them, as well as our selves.  Let them realize that in their own thoughts or dreams.  Ironically, they are the one who need to wake up.  Let's manifest a good future for all of us and fully understand, no matter who we are, we need other people, and every kind and type of people, fully creative and sovereign beings as we all were created to be.  All across the Earth.  That's what the world naturally has, we can see it clearly, and it is a sure bet that that is the way it should be.

 

The World Needs People.