Get Real - Really.

Every once in a while you stumble on a bit of video or writing that just says, "oh hell, yeah," to you. You wish you had written it or said it. You wish you could put it on a billboard. You wish you could put it on a major cable channel on a continuous loop, so everyone would have to see it sooner or later.

This little bit of wonderfulness, about things being done in the name or guise of extreme positive thinking, which I found on YouTube today, is one of those rare gems. It is ten little minutes of so much wisdom, so much common sense, resolving or addressing so much of the crap that has gone on in the past ten or fifteen years and sadly continues to goes on, not to mention the endless mind-fuckery that we all  play endlessly in our own heads and put ourselves through. It gets to politics, the self-help movement, the economy, and a little about just life in general, in just a little over ten minutes, with nothing more fancy than simply a woman's voice, and a very talented guy with some magic markers. So much for the magic of high tech.

It speaks to an aspect of the self-help movement that has been a pet peeve of mine ever since Elaine Hay hit the scene back in the '80's and started telling all the gay men dying of AIDS they could heal their besieged immune systems if they just believed hard enough - leaving them to feel like failures and moral weaklings as they died because, of course, it didn't work. While I won't argue that a positive outlook is certainly helpful and far better than a moribund one, the HIV virus doesn't give a rat's ass how cheerful you are as it ravages your body without benefit of any medications to check its effects on your immune system. Offering solace is one thing, but mindless, baseless cheer-leading and offering hollow false hopes is something else altogether, and can all-too-easily become exploitative.

In recent years one of many ways that same kind of thinking has reared its ugly head again is in the form of James Arthur Ray, of the Killer Sweatlodge notoriety. James Ray was also featured in the film "The Secret," which is mentioned prominently in this little YouTube piece.  Mr. Ray's followers  - who paid more than ten grand for five days of sketchy food and lodging, neglect, bullying, and bastardized and/or stolen rituals - were told repeatedly in the sweatlodge if they complained of the extreme heat that they were "better than that," and they simply had to "play full on" as he called it, while he proceeded to cook them to death in a lodge that was several times larger, hotter, more crowded, and longer than any Indian sweatlodge ever is. (I know, I have Native friends who run  traditional sweatlodges.) Meanwhile, he sat by the door and enjoyed cool air and water he denied his followers as they sickened and died, and fled the scene back to his air-conditioned cabin as soon as the sweat ended and the true nature of the chaos he had wreaked became fully-apparent. What a sport.  

I could go on and on... the video touches on so many things that I can and have ranted about - but it does it so much more succinctly, and with better humor and much more reason than I can usually summon when dealing with such loaded issues. Just watch it.  It's well worth the ten minutes.

ok..... what now?

Still deciding if I even want to do this, much less what to do with it.

Stay tuned.