Views from Raven's Nest: Daily Reminder # 496

Alas, there is not much color in the trees this year, but there is some here and there. These pictures make it look like there's more than there is, but that's the fun of being able to be selective. I was going to use a Neale Donald Walsh tonight but I don't quite feel like it. When I wrote that sentence about the fun of being selective, it set me to thinking about how selective we are in what we choose to see in others... and what our media chooses to tell us. We hear over and over and over from idiots and lunatics because they are allegedly "entertaining," but people who truly have something to say, who can inform and enlighten us seldom get acknowledged by our print or TV media. Instead we get mega doses of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Hank Williams, Jr. spouting the stupid or the insane. We get the loonies on the left too instead of the thinkers. It's sad and it's destructive to our individual psyches and our national psyche. If what we ingest and glorify is the mean-spirited and the divisive, that's what we are putting into our emotional and spiritual systems. You are what you eat. You are also what you read and listen to, something I should think about before I spend so much time at Huffington Post. That said, they sometimes have things worth reading.

I watched a video this afternoon about the Occupy Wall Street folks. The media is covering them mostly from the Republican perspective - wild-eyed socialists and anarchists out to destroy America - or as disorganized , aimless radicals. They don't seem to be either. Certainly their social organization seems pretty astonishing. And I think they have a lot to say. I recommend this excellent article on the topic by Naomi Klein. I think Occupy Wall Street is - or has the potential to be - something wonderful. It's peaceful, intelligent and motivated not by greed, but by a desire to inspire a fairer and kinder society. It is trying to make it impossible to ignore the moral and social imbalance in how our society is working. People saying out loud en masse, "We know that there are corporate interests trying (and maybe they have already succeeded) to buy our nation and our government and disenfranchise the 99% of us who are "the people." I don't know where the movement will go, but I'm glad that it has started.

Some things I'm grateful for today: (Items in red are pre-gratitude, an attempt to get the Creative Forces of the Universe to hear my gratitude and give me things to be grateful for.)