5000th post, corporations, iRobot, truth, religion, love, and the future

[Melodybe]

Last night I hit 5000, shame is, I didn't catch it until I was already at like 5067. :( I wanted a party but I've been such a bitch lately that I figured I had pissed off everyone at DU and no one would come anyway. But that's just me.

So in honor of my 5000th post and being here for almost 2 years I wanted to say this:

Thanks DU, I love you, I love everyone that makes DU possible, the mods and the people that bring it to life with their humor, their intelligence, their sorrow, their stories, their activism, their honesty, their desire for truth, and most of all their love and understanding of the true meaning of freedom, democracy, love, and understanding.

Every person here is longing for truth, sure the freepers mainly come here to cause problems, but they come here for truth too. They come here for the same reason we go there, to see the truth about what the other side is thinking, feeling, and talking about.

What I have found is that not all truths are pretty things, while it is beautiful and liberating to know the truth of evil, so that you can reject it. The ruling truth of this world for the moment is that it is systematically being destroyed by greed for power and money. How corporations, our true enemy, could care so little about the lives they ruin is beyond anything that my heart is capable of understanding.

But then again corporations don't have hearts, the people that run them do, but they don't seem to use them they way we do. A group of white men sitting in a room, I say white men cause they are almost all white men, each trying to out do each other in how hard and tough they can be.

We're their victims, and they don't care. They don't care about the billions in poverty, they don't care about the babies they bomb, or the 6 year old that isn't in school but working in an overheated factory just so his family can eat for the week, they don't care about the poison in our air and water, or the cancers that will eat us alive. You see whoever is the toughest, the richest, and the most powerful wins their little game called life.

It's disgusting, it's inhuman, its corporate.

We come here to fight, for the beauty of exposing their wickedness, in the hopes that once their heartlessness is revealed we can end it.

OK here comes a tangent, so I watched iRobot tonight. Wow, I was really not expecting such a good movie. Now I know plenty of folks are gonna complain that the book is better, which if I had read the book, I would probably agree. But the heart of that book was in this movie, all mixed up in the one liners and the action sequences, it's all about the beauty of freedom.

It was all about the beauty of having the freedom to be unique. What you personally can achieve in this world that no one else can do. Be it paint a picture, write software, write a symphony, guard a street, plan a protest, raise a child, love someone or something more than yourself.

We all have our purpose in life, we all have something that we can give to this world that only we can do in our own unique way. It may not be the best way, but it is ours.

Corporations don't agree; to them, we are all cogs, all consumers, all Guinea pigs. They don't want our individuality, that means nothing to them. They just want our money. They just want ours lives to be wasted away making them richer and more powerful. Unfortunately that is an ugly truth we wake up to every morning.

So what do we do about it? Well, we spread the truth, but not just because it is so ugly that it hurts to keep it inside of ourselves. We spread it because fundamentally we understand a more noble truth, an opposite to their ugly truth. That we are connected, that when one of us hurts our lives are all a little worse. We try, to the best of our own unique ability, to do the things that are an essential element of every religion, to put right what we think is wrong with the world.

Every religion on Earth has a concept of good and evil, right and wrong, light and dark. No matter what your religion, in the beginning they all say the same things: to be greedy is wrong, to kill is wrong, to hate is wrong. Every great man that ever walked this earth: Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tsu, Mohammad, Moses, Marx, MLK, Bob Marley, etc they all inspired because they spoke the fundamental truths of being good to one another.

Those men were not perfect, but the ideas that they gave to this world were. Of course for every great man their is an almost equally bad man, be it Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin, Bush, they all rose to power using words of great men and twisting them into their own dark image. The damage that they do changes the world for all of history.

Have we learned from it? Sometimes, some of us, history repeats itself not because we never learn but because it is cycle. It is a yin and a yang, a spinning wheel of goodness and badness. That is why some of us learn and some of us don't. There must be bad for good to exist, but each time we go through the cycle, we as a world community take one step closer to perfection. Not because evil men get more evil, they do, but because good men build on the goodness of those before them and eventually find a way to defeat their evil. They deliver something greater, that all mankind wants to believe, that there can be peace of mind, that there can be peace on Earth, that through the love that is programed into our hearts, universal brotherhood can exist.

In the Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin, another of those great men, said this, "The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man - cries for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say: 'Do not despair.' The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."

I believe that. Quick tangent, oddly one of the first books I remember buying was an autobiography of Charlie Chaplin. I bought it for my dad for father's day, I was 5. For no reason at all I looked around a giant bookstore, full of books I couldn't even read the titles on and knew that that was the book I wanted to give him. Funny how Chaplin has inspired so much in my life, funny how that all being connected stuff works. Anyway, I digress, and boy do I...

Back to what I was saying, I believe that the internet is one of the keys to universal brotherhood. BTW thanks AL GORE!!!! In seconds I can talk to anyone in world. Gone is the separation of land, gone is separation of language, eventually gone will be the separation of nations. Universal brotherhood is in out future. Now if it is in our near future, I don't know. I probably won't lie to see it, my children may not live to see it, but eventually it will happen whether I see it or not.

Religion is a crutch until universal truth and brotherhood are found. Science is the tool that will be used to make it happen until finally science and religion merge.

So as I am ending this long and probably contradicting post in honor of DU, everyone on it, and my 5000th post. I can only say rage against the machine, rage against that dying of the light, love yourself, try to love others more than you love yourself, and keep that goodness inside no matter what darkness lies ahead.

So everyone here is my mantra, that thing I say to myself EVERY night before I good to sleep.

Dear lord, may everyone on earth find

LOVE, PEACE, SANITY, TRUTH, UNITY, JUSTICE, AND FREEDOM.

I LOVE YOU GUYS! THANKS FOR PUTTING WITH ME.

:cheers:

[alittlelark]

1. Hubby and I watched 'I Robot' last night.

I understand your space. I have missed every one of my milestones at (I think) 7000 plus. Why bother 'But I wanted to and was pissed that they passed'.

We are in a strange dangling reality.... hold on!!!

[Melodybe]

2. I put a lot of thought into this, thanks for being the one person to read

it.

Well, doesn't matter, I have people in LA and Atlanta that want to help with my millions against the media marches. They are going to happen. I still got a lot of work to do, more people to talk to, more people to convince to volunteer, but that's what I do. And whether y'all respond to this post or not, I'll still be doing it.

Peace out DU, even if you didn't want to read my soul bearing albeit confusing and wishy washy post.

5000! YAY!





:party: :party: :party: :party: :party: :party: :party: :party: :party: :party: :party: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

[EFerrari]

3. Congrats, Melodybe. That's a chunk of change, a lot of work.

And I admire your ambition. I'd settle for widespread sanity. :silly:

Thanks for your post.

Beth

[Melodybe]

4. hey so progress is better than no progress, it took thousand of years

hell, millions of years for society to exist as it does.

Thinking that we can change the enitre world in our life time, is pretty arrogant but if we keep at it, eventually things will be right.

[extropianDreams]

5. remember the Rodham/Clinton era?

we actually had a balanced budget for the first time in the history of the US. even tho' their is debate about Affirmative Action at least they made a huge leap in leveling the playing field for certain groups who had been excluded in the past.
now that the liberals (well, anyone of common sense is liberal compared to the current regime) have been awakened from a deep sleep. imagine what can be done if we realize what is possible and not get so lost in monitoring the dark side!

[chknltl]

12. welcome to the DU extropianDreams nt

[bananas]

6. Kudos and accolades on your 5000th post!

I wuv you too!
hug hug hug
Now go to sleep!

[passy]

7. Congratulations!

Lovely post too.
Being inspired by Chaplin is a good thing too.
Personally I'm a Marxist, the Groucho kind that is.
It's often vital to be able to laugh at this absurd world we live in.

[Kenneth ken]

8. congratulations on 5000

:toast:

nice post!

"...try to love others more than you love yourself..." - thanks for that. A meme to hold on to. The hardest lesson I ever had to learn, but I'm starting to learn it over the last couple years.

In a way, it was always easy to do, since I didn't have a lot of love for myself; in a way it was very difficult, because I didn't think I had much to give, so didn't give much; but I am finding the more I give, the more I have to give, which makes it easier to love myself, and so easier to love others.

:loveya: :hug:

:hi:

[sweetheart]

9. The emptyness is your friend

I've noticed a trend in online writing. Saying "DU" is disingenuous, as
many of us cut our teeth on other boards, and joined DU with thousands
of posts lost in the bits elsewhere. But there seems to be something
common from the POV of the writer.

There is early period. It is when the writer is expressing views online
that they've never expressed, proving points, establishing their online
ego and revelling in being unknown. On DU, this can take a few
thousand posts.

Then a later period comes, where you've said all the things you "think"
politically in one way or another several times over. This is the
"repeating" years, and the challenge is eloquence. It has already been
said, You've already written it, but can you say it more finely, with
more subtle references, giving your reader more satisfaction with the
sex? In this sense, the ideals are more fixed, more mature, and the
writer is writing less to get something off their chest, and more to
inspire others.

Then there comes a period, where even the need to repeat, to be noticed
at all wanes, and one writes to acknowledge others. Then the posts
get short, new members get lots of kisses and members going through
their expression and repetition phases are generally ignored.

So if you're experiencing the emptiness, shouting out for attention,
given that you already have that attention by the very nature of
a thread, any time you want it... what are you using that attention
for? Orwell wrote a short book, "why i write" and in it he said
writers have 4 motivations for expressing themselves:

1. Sheer egotism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in children, etc. etc.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose - using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jorwell.htm

How many posts does it take to become self aware?

[Melodybe]

11. All of the above, and I am aware of it.

I write it to get it out of my damn head cause I have enough going on up there, and the less litter the better.

But I want the world to be a better place, I want people to believe that the world can be a better place, I am constantly inspired by the wonderful things I read here, i want to try in my own way to give back to that.

I'm not the greatest writer, i have spelling errors, grammer errors, sentence structure problems, logical flaws, and a slight case of dyslexia to boot, but at the bottom of it all if someone reads my stuff and likes it and feels good after reading it, I'm happy.

Whether I know they read it on not, whether they post accolades or not, i feel better and i take it with me away from this board into the real world. It influences the way I look at things and the way I treat people. Thanks to DU being an outlet for the majority of my rage and negitive feelings, I am kinder, more patient, more open minded, and over all a better and more informed arguer. Which is a skill that is valuable while trying to convince folks of the evil.

But if you hadn't guessed I like attention, that may be the sage in me, or the former theatre major (I was into casting not acting and I eventually ended up with a degree in Anthropology) in me.

Thanks for posting, i love Orwell, and damn did he ever nail it.

[EFerrari]

14. sweetheart! This is so true! I've never seen it formalized before.

As usual, lol, George and I disagree. 'Zeems to me that 3 & 4 should be flipped, because "moving the world" requires a great deal of egotism, whereas "storing things up for posterity" requires more of a surrender of one's desire. George will just have to forgive me. :)

[Ravy]

10. Nice post!

Hope my 5000th post will be as well-written, but at my posting rate, that will be in another 45 years and I will be 95, so don't expect much.

[chknltl]

13. Not speaking for the rest of the "under 1000 post crowd" but...

...you are forgiven. ;) Happy 5000th, :toast: may we will all be in happier times for your 10,000th post.
I:patriot:U. chknltl ps: I have not seen the movie but "I Robot" was a most excellent book, highly recommended.

[Cleita]

15. Aw com'on, you haven't been a bitch. You have to be

a Katherine Harris to join that club. :hug: May you celebrate your ten thousandth post in an America making a turn for the truth.

:toast: