From Tasers to the Terrible Times...

We note the occasional use of tasers which are both abusive and unusual enough (i.e. sensational) to grab the attention of the national press in the US.

For example, the young fellow who fell off a motor way overpass and broke his back -- when the police, called by alert citizens, arrived, they ordered him to stand up and when he wouldn't (couldn't) comply, they tasered him, uh, 19 times before they realized the was screaming not only because of portable electric torture devices they were using on him (tasers), but because of his (broken) back

But what about the fellow who was going around banging on doors in the neighborhood shouting that someone was going to shoot him. The police were called and his shouting was, in a sense, prophetic. He was tasered and, down on the sidewalk with his hands handcuffed behind his back, he was stomped, kicked, hit in the head.

When he puked into the gutter and went motionless, after a few minutes an ambulance was called to the scene. The medics worked on him for a while, but it was End of Story for the fellow.

I hope I will be forgiven for going off on a tangent which has little to do with the tragedy his death must be to his parents.

The fellow was shouting that "somebody was going to shoot him" -- i.e. he feared he was going to be killed -- and that's pretty much what happened. True, he was "only" shot with tasers, but the end result was the same.

My brains being in their normal state, that is addled, it occurred to me that this individual was perhaps suffering from not being able to cope with a proleptic, that is prophetic, experience of a future event.

I know a couple of people who have had this sort of experience, that is, they had to live with knowledge of an experience which occurs in what we think of as the future. Heck, I've been there myself!

Carl Jung claimed that he presaged the terrors and upheavals of the coming W.W.II in the dreams related to him by his patients. He also related more personal incidences of a related phenomenon he called "synchronicity" -- that is, when events would seem to have a causal connection, but with no possible logical explanation.

(There used to be a word for more dramatic experiences of synchronisity -- miracle.)

As for fellow who puked into the gutter and expired, I would like to compare his situation and fate to that of what seems to be a broad swath of opinion or intuition in our poor world today that "someone is going to shoot us".

My deep feeling is that there is no certain fate; it does not matter how "real" or traumatic the experience of the "shooting" is -- the important thing is the approach we take in living with the knowledge of the coming experience. If the fellow on the sidewalk had in the years before he was "shot" had changed his approach to life and stopped doing alcohol and other drugs, he may have never been "shot" or at least survived it. (The police have been implying this, with a couple of DUI convictions to back it up.)

There are those in our poor world today who maintain that if we but "Accept the Holy Idaho as our Personal Savior", then it doesn't "matter" if we take part in the Terrible times, using all the obscene weapons at our disposal, condemning millions to incineration and billions more to slow and agonizing deaths. When our poor world has been burned to polluted ashes, the Holy Idaho will come in a Cloud of Glory and take his chosen spuds up to live with the Great Potato in the Great Colander in the Sky!

Such Wondrous Bullshit of this grade or worse is, unfortunately, not all that hard to find...

However, it should be obvious that anyone who, by their words and deeds help to usher in the Terrible Times -- however sincere their protestations may seem -- have no relation to or understanding of the Holy Idaho and, consequently, their chances of being allotted a place in the Great Colander is exceedingly slim.

In sum, we may well feel or even know as a certainty that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and that may indeed be the case. But that doesn't mean you need to climb into the hand basket or encourage others to do so.

In the final analysis, all that really matters is our relationship to our common humanity.