kobayashi isa

kobayashi isa

Friday, February 9, 2007

snake oil

everything hurts so much that you search for a cure everywhere and try everything.

so many things, and none cause any other thing than grief and pain and failures

i joined an email group, a zen roshi's personal teaching elist. the roshi was a life long counselor/therapist for trauma disabled veterans, of which i too am both a disabled vet and a life long counselor

i hoped against hope that the loss of faith from september 11th might at least find a sympathetic and if not sympathetic at least not accusatory condemning ear there, and found there too nothing but a fire fed by snake oil, the exact same snake oil that took down the WTC and all the world I loved and believed in and all my faith.

so what is it about september 11th that makes it so unique in my history?

the 18 boys and men sent to their deaths as massacres and assassins by their teachers changed the course of history

they believed and they believed that their conviction gave them the right to deny fundamental human decency and fundamental human rights to others.

but it is not belief and it is not faith which is guilty here but their teachers

faith, without it we die

i have complete faith in so many thing I never even think about it it for a nanosecond: when I open a bottle of milk from the supermarket, i pour and drink it down ice cold before I even taste it and before I can consciously mark the taste i have already swallowed it down completely leaving the container empty and useless, and these boys did the same with their lives and the lives of thousand and ultimately millions of people. i cannot imagine the horror they face now knowing what they have wrought. like discovering the milk was milk of another kind.

so we all go around ripping open our cartons of snake oil and swallowing it all down like the good doctor says knowing it will cure the pain we cannot bare and we discover pain we could never have imagined, and the snake oil medicine only serves to give us enough strength to survive the pain without annihilation, keeping the peace of annihilation just out of the reach of the extended tips of extended fingers of extended arms, willing to do anything to escape that pain and only pain is our answer, from pain to pain

faith is not to blame

faith is a necessary tool a sine qua non to existence at any level in any form, and we can choose to believe in anything

we get in a car knowing it has breaks and on a train knowing it will stop at our station and crack open an egg knowing it is not already a chick and put our money into banks knowing the FDIC insures it to 100,000 dollars an unimaginable sum beyong any hope of ever seeing...

who has not ever once been fooled and found the faith we had a lie? before anyone even thinks to ask we know before anyone answers that is was and always will be a lie but there is no other way to live

water is water and apples have worms for protein and girls have babies and there is no other way to go through a day: try it a life of total skepticism.

more later enough for now. tomorrow is another day isn't it?



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