Prison Sentence for Collecting Rainwater - What is the Logic between Government and Survival?

  I read this article online titled:

Man Gets Prison Sentence For Collecting Rainwater On His Own Property

Pasted from <http://yournewswire.com/man-gets-prison-sentence-for-collecting-rainwater-on-his-own-property/>

And I realized a few interesting things by my reaction to reading the headline alone. Reading the headline first of all triggered a fear inside myself, which was based on a thought  along the lines of 'oh no, the government is trying to take my rainwater!' and with looking into that reaction I realized that it is essentially showing that I have a fear of 'the government' and that I seem to have created 'the government' as the boogieman in my mind. The government is not my friend, it is my enemy. It is made up of corporations and greedy people who are only after my money and who don't care about me as an individual, therefore I must defend myself from the government and be wary of whatever it is that the government is trying to implement.

That is basically the attitude that I have programmed into myself when it comes to the word 'government', and this  through all the articles that I have read over time and stories I have heard from other people about what the government apparently did to them or about how there exists corruption in government, how people are stealing our taxes, how the individual in society is being robbed of their hard-earned money by deceitful  lawmakers who misappropriate that money into their own pockets and how corporations make dirty deals with government officials to privatize public resources like water and forest land and end up polluting the area that we live in, etcetera.

So with that attitude of 'my own government is after me', I feel as though I am all alone in this world having to fend for myself and thus I am in survival mode. So upon reading an article that is about a government jailing a citizen for trying to fend for himself and his survival, I react with fear for my own survival which then results in me getting angry at this government for jailing this guy 'just because he was trying to survive'.

But it is actually fascinating that in this whole story, I don't in any moment stop to question my own reaction or question why it is in the first place  that I have come to accept that my government is 'the bad guy' and why it is that I feel the need to protect myself from my government's decisions. I mean, I immediately trust my initial reaction of fear and anger as protection and defense against the apparent evil that is threatening my livelihood but at the same time it is because of this very reaction that I am not seeing what is going on in reality and I am not seeing for example the absurd way in which things exist.

Things such as the fact that a government is supposed to be a structure of people who organize a society in a way that supports the beings in it, so that no person has to be in survival mode. I mean isn't that the whole purpose of things called 'public property', meaning that these things should go to 'the people' and serve to ease the survival of people in that society? Isn't that the purpose of the things we call 'democracy', 'economy', 'social service', 'public officers', and all things pertaining to 'social' and 'public' industry and activity, in that it should actually serve the 'public' in ways that is best for the public?

Somehow preventing someone from collecting their own water to sustain themselves doesn't fit that definition. However the fact that someone feels the need to collect their own water and to go against the law in doing so doesn't make sense either. So, looking at my own initial reaction to reading this article, it is quite fascinating to notice that we would become angry at the government for not allowing this  man to provide for his own survival but we don't even notice the underlying faults in the design of our government that this  case is actually revealing, which is that we shouldn't feel the need to pull away from the law and adapt a self-interested way of living, according to 'every man to himself', in the first place.

We don't seem to ask ourselves why it is that we have a government at all when it clearly isn't providing a supportive structure for all of us to live within and when for a great part most of us even exist in fear of and conflict with our government to the point where in the back of our mind we are thinking of ways to potentially provide for our own survival 'just in case', through for example collecting our own rain water.

And this is a very valid question to ask ourselves, of what our government is actually doing and why we even have it when it clearly isn't functioning in our best interests. So, since we do have a government that doesn't work in OUR best interest, then in whose best interest is it in fact working? Why is our government not coming up with ways to make sure that no one will ever have to fend for themselves and that each living being is supported in the best way possible? I mean, we give them that power, we place people in office which we believe to be capable of making decisions in our name and hope to have the skills  to organize large groups of individuals in ways that works out best for everyone.

Yet when people are being sentenced to jail for trying to collect resources because they aren't getting those resources from their government who 'owns' those resources, then the decisions that are being made and the ways that our government is operating is definitely not in our best interest. The judge sentencing this individual to jail should have investigated why it was that this man felt like he needed to fend for himself in the first place. He should have investigated what went wrong in the relationship between the system and this individual where a lack was created which caused a person to have to go into survival mode and make self-interested 'unlawful' decisions, which is what a judge who rules according to and based on the actual best interest of society would do. So the fact that judges don't take this approach would be our first sign that somehow the government that we have created and allowed to direct our society and our lives does not exist in the best interest of us all and thus should be changed.

Investigate a Living Income Guarantee, the only logical step any government should take to show its consideration of and care for the existence and survival of its citizens.

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Cat punching and our bipolar relationship with reality

Word about a new internet phenomenon named 'cat punching' has been going around social media lately. It started with a Facebook Page set up to publicize a Valentine's day "cat punching event", which apparently (I say apparently cause I haven't actually seen it with my own eyes as the page was taken down by Facebook already) showed pictures of a guy holding a cat and looking like he was going to punch it in the face, pictures of dead animals and comments like

"I prefer the full grown cats, honestly, the little ones can't take a punch to save their lives. It's pathetic."

Here's what the news website Mirror had to say about it:

The page was set up to advertise a cat-punching event on Valentines Day and appears to have been opened by Jamie Card, which is the name of a well-known troll known for launching online pranks.

Although the event might be little more than a sick joke, cat lovers took it very seriously.

At one point today, more than 1,000 people signed the petition against cat-punching in just one hour.

Pasted from <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/sick-cat-punching-facebook-page-pulled-5133475>

While many arguments on cat punching might be about:

1. Whether or not this 'cat punching event' is a serious proposal
2. If the cat punching implied in the pictures did in fact happen (as opposed to it being an intended 'joke' and the guy just pretending to hit the cat)
3. How sick and cruel it is to joke about and suggest harming animals and post dead pictures of cats on Facebook

...I would more like to draw the attention to the polarity play out that is hiding behind what is essentially people expressing their intense hatred for cats, also on this webpage titled 'things I want to punch in the face: cats' where someone has listed all their reasons for why they hate cats.

So this polarity play-out that I am talking about involves all the hundreds if not thousands of cat videos showing how cute cats are and websites about why cats are absolutely awesome, created by 'cat-lovers'.

 Because on the one hand there is this adoration for cats which shouldn't actually surprise us that on the other hand there are people who are going to 'hate' that which others 'love'.

 After all, isn't that how love and hate work - meaning, hand in hand? Where ever there is love, there is also hate, which actually seem to be the two major experiences that we humans get to choose from when it comes to how we will experience ourselves in this world. 

 It is easy for us to point fingers at the ones who express hate towards things in this world, but we don't seem to be willing to see where the hate originates from in the first place or consider that we might be contributing to the very existence of it by our very participation in its polar opposite, being love. This point of people hating cats, creatures whom are loved by many others, is but one example of this hate-love polarity play-out that exists within each and every one of us.

I am sure that we can all find examples of things that we 'absolutely hate' just because of how other people 'absolutely love' those very things. And the fascinating aspect about this hate experience, is that its very starting point is to in a way function as 'counter-weight' for the 'love' expressed by other people. It's as though we are all in this constant dance with each other trying to balance out the love and hate in this world.

And this is forming quite the problem as you can see exemplified by the cat punching phenomenon, be it real or not - the point is that hate in relation to cats or any other creature in this world shouldn't exist within us in the first place. And, this may come as a shock to many, but neither should love. This because the love and hate polarity that we have been participating in as though it is the very essence of who we are as human beings or the purpose of life is in actuality the very thing that is sabotaging our ability to see things for what they are.

We will either 'love' something or we will 'hate' it, or we're simply indifferent about it because it doesn't fall into these categories, but we never notice or see things as what they are. We rather have this strange tendency to want to categorize everything in our reality into how we prefer to experience ourselves, which is within feelings and emotions, positive and negative internal sensations and reactions and so we fail to recognize that reality in itself is never siding within any of those categories. Reality is just here. A cat is just a cat, it doesn't need us to love or hate it.

 If anything what this world needs is for us to just let it be what it is. We'd still need to take care of it, sure, but taking care of something or someone requires things like attention, consistency, trustworthiness and stability - not love. Love, and consequently hate along with all of our other feelings and emotions which we may want to use to define and label the world that we see around us, is something that is entirely about ourselves and our own want to experience things, to feel things about ourselves, this world, cats, … and basically our reluctance to simply do the things that need to be done to create a world that isn't as dysfunctional as it is currently.

A solution here would be to redefine the word love so that it doesn't end up creating hate. Redefining love can be done  by making sure that our 'love' for cats or any other creature or manifestation in this world isn't just a feeling and a statement anymore. Loving something should imply that you stand as custodian and care-taker and that you take responsibility, which should be an inherent trait of our existence as humans on earth anyways. As long as our 'love' is a feeling, then that 'love' is bipolar and we are in fact causing hate to emerge. So, it's time to stop pointing fingers and to start taking responsibility for what we create.

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Living Income - Cause there's No such Thing as A Free Market

There are people who would oppose a governmental implementation of a structure that will provide each citizen with a basic living income, which would be funded through for instance the nationalization of specific companies that are deemed the 'property of the public' - being for instance companies that deal with the nations resources and public services.  The argument that they would use is that government regulation and intervention in business and companies is impeding on the freedom of individuals in society to develop, expand and explore their abilities to become wealthy and pursue and achieve their personal happiness.

And, at first glance, this argument might seem somehow valid, because we have all grown up to value words and concepts like 'freedom' and 'the pursuit of happiness' and 'personal wealth' - so, if we hear someone say that government intervention in the economic landscape is a direct attack on our personal freedom and ability to design our own happiness, we will react in fear of losing our so highly valued 'freedom' and 'personal happiness' and agree with this individual without even being aware that we may not fully understand what it is that we are agreeing with. Meaning that we have been taught to value concepts like 'freedom' and 'the pursuit of happiness' but we have not been taught to understand how these concepts actually practically function in this physical reality that is shared by many beings equally as ourselves. So, when someone makes a statement that implies that our 'freedom' and 'happiness' is in danger due to for instance the government trying to impose itself on our economic structures, we will not understand how or why exactly it is that the government is posing a threat to our 'freedom' and 'happiness', because we don't even understand what this apparent 'freedom' really is or what the 'pursuit of happiness' is in real physical practical terms, but we will however react in fear because that is the primary instinctual reaction of a mind that is conditioned to value something and now believes that that something might be taken away, even if that something is in fact only an idea.

Having said this, I want to point out and show how it is that there exist many misconceptions about how our world and reality actually exist because there have been spread many ideas through means of media in the form of propaganda to deliberately have people believe in things that are not actually real. Take the word 'freedom' for instance, and lets place this word in the context of the concept of 'free market', wherein it is believed that our current economic system, which from a global perspective is the neo-liberal capitalistic system, provides the ultimate 'freedom' for the human being to express itself within its 'pursuit of happiness'. The apparent evidence of this 'freedom'  to 'pursue personal happiness' is within how our system expresses itself within and as the phenomenon of 'consumerism'.

If you'd have a look standing on the outside at our society, you would say that it is 'flourishing' because we have so many shops selling so many different things, at a wide variety of prices - with most people being able to at least make it seem as though they are 'well off' because for instance clothes and gadgets have become so cheap. And, because we so easily fall for the picture that we see and tend to never question the actual reality of it, most of us don't see that all this apparent 'freedom' that we have to 'make our own choices' and to 'choose our own way of living' as displayed in and represented by the many products available to us, actually comes at a very high price in terms of the amount of human and natural resources that it requires to produce such high quantities of goods at such low prices. There are many consequences to this image of 'freedom' that we have learned to place value in - and even though it should have been obvious to us, we have to this day never seen or realized that the concept of 'freedom' as we currently understand it is just an image and is causing and creating the downfall and decay of our real physical world.

And It is our collectively accepted gullibility to believe in this illusion of freedom that is justifying the continuation of the harmful consequential reality of our apparent 'free market' economic system. I say 'apparent', because even though many economists would claim that our current market system is 'free', they are actually just doing so because they know that words like 'free' have been given a special place in human being's minds and that we will immediately accept without question things that apparently honour 'freedom'. As specialist in economics Ha-Joon Chang eloquently explains in his book '23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism', our society would never have evolved past child and slave labor (in theory)if it wasn't for government intervention - because, if our market system was truly 'free', things like human trafficking, child pornography, child labor and slave labor would all be 'legal'.

I suppose at some point we must have seen, realized and understood that the human's desire to 'pursue personal happiness' cannot and must not be allowed to truly be 'free' - and that we need something like 'laws' and 'rules', enforced and enacted by a governmental structure to guide our economic endeavours so that no one gets hurt at the expense of another person's 'freedom of choice'.

This point thus shows and implies that any economic or other person who comes up with the argument that to implement a Living Income Guaranteed for instance and change and reform our economic structures in such a way that ensures that no being has to suffer again due to a lack of money and means to survive, would somehow be an attack  on the 'freedom' that we apparently have in our current system, is either simply uneducated or deliberately playing dumb and in both cases basically just making random statements because they have personal fears that they are trying to protect.

At the Equal Life Foundation, we understand that it is programmed into the human condition to fear change however, and that this will be the primary reason for why most people would initially resist the concept of implementing a Living Income Guaranteed and applying the necessary changes in our economic structure that would enable for such a concept to become reality - even when our reality is showing in every way how this change would be best for each and every being. It is fascinating in a way how we will resist making decisions and choices that are best for all and rather chose ways of existing just because they are 'familiar' to us - because we have learned to trust only that which feels familiar rather than trusting our own ability to stand up for what is best and to create a world and reality that is worth living in for all living things.

Join us at the Equal Life Foundation and stand for a Living Income Guaranteed if you see, realize and understand that just because we fear change, doesn't mean that we should give away our power to it - and that we can still face our fear and stand up for what we see and realize is Best. This is where true Honour and Integrity exist - in standing up for what is Best for All despite of the Fears that may come up in our own Mind.

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