Going for a trail run today, and as I have on many days lately, I found myself enjoying music that was, for me as a preschooler anyway, an introduction to music that celebrated genuine creativity. All I have to do is hear a bar or two of the introduction to Time After Time and it is as if I am a preschooler in Plymouth again. While I realize I was little, I remember that wonderful time and place so clearly it still informs my response every time I hear practically everything about America dismissed as valueless, and, even though I understand it is not exactly popular today, it still feels like my responsibility to say so.

Sometimes I wonder whether the punk movement, which I realize predated Cyndi Lauper’s big debut (and my own) but which it at least echoed was one of the western world’s last gasps of real creativity before an enthusiastic reorientation around stock market forces seemed to homogenize and warp everything. But evidence of creativity is, of course, everywhere.

Even the forest is full of seeming misfits, and I find this comforting. Particularly striking today were the shocks of color with which the butterfly in particular punctuates so much more understated greens, whites, pinks, and purples with more vivid and bold hues. Each glimpse feels almost like like a view beyond this world into a confidence that’s made possible only by reliance solely on God. When I see a Great Blue Heron flap extend its wings very close to me – curving up, then down, and then, miraculously, up again at the tips – I find myself feeling you’re too beautiful to be real. But, of course, that is the opposite of the truth, really, if the more beautiful something is, the more real it must be.

Lately I’ve been feeling so embraced and comforted by a seemingly endless shower of dogwood petals that form carpet-like coverings in the forest and have even felt reminded of the gorgeous lesson verse in Course in Miracles assuring the seeker that “the trees extend their arms to shield you from the heat, and lay their leaves before you on the ground that you may walk in softness.” And, today, I even found myself repeatedly struck not only by the uniqueness of vultures but their rebel-like qualities, including an adaptableness that seems to enable them to hardly ever need to flap their wings. A couple of years ago I was so enamored of a French documentary (Return of the Vultures) I watched it multiple times and loved the idea it illustrated that there is room for the celebration of every creature’s eternal qualities.

Of course, doing so leads inevitably to recognition of behaviors worth evolving beyond, and not only in nature but in politics.

Especially given today’s news about new war funding, it is hard for me to take seriously outrage feigned by the corporate media military industrial complex over the (certainly wrong and even horrifying) January 6 riot. This is a $60 billion dollar package intended to blow up human beings and infrastructure in an arguably totally avoidable, if not purposely engineered, conflict abroad. (Why, despite an abundance of voices of reason, did media corporations seem to push the Biden administration to withdraw from Afghanistan so precipitously and leaving no residual peacekeeping forces behind? Given this week’s other news, incidentally, why does David Zalslov receive close to $50 million dollars per year from Warner Bros. Discovery? Why was Hello Sunshine able to sell for close to $1 billion dollars to the BlackRock-affiliated investment firm Blackstone after being approached to help raise the question of women’s rights at CNN?) The corporate media military industrial complex is arguably trying to take over a nation; of course it is going to face push-back. And it’s felt relevant, recently, to remember how much violence, tragically, accompanied the American Revolutionary War as, to read or watch documentaries about this time is sometimes to feel like practically all those guys did for periods of time was crack skulls.

I increasingly appreciate the admonition in Course in Miracles that the first obstacle to peace is the desire to get rid of it as it so often seems to me that this is precisely what the corporate media military industrial complex, too often, aims to do.

I personally question whether there is any such thing as a salary totaling hundreds, or even tens, of millions of dollars, particularly over such a short period. I believe payments offered to individuals by the corporate media military industrial complex are bribes and that it may be important today to remember so many warning issued by America’s founding fathers that, while the nation’s structural underpinnings are flame retardant, they are not fireproof. Every time the corporate media military industrial complex offers to pay off a citizen to collude with or cover up its operations it is setting a match to the country’s foundations, and this is arguably why we must all remain vigilant: the corporate media military industrial complex will continue hunting for what are seen as so-called “useful idiots” until it is dismantled.

But I believe that the achievableness of this vigilance is proof that the country can emerge stronger. The corporate media military industrial complex is not conscious, after all. It is a machine that has, I believe, emerged from the alchemy of the merger of the journalism and stock market sectors and the subsequent, automated amplification of each apparatus’s built-in incentives. The only cards it has to play are our own weak spots: cowardice, greed, vanity, etc., but not everyone need be weak in all of these areas. I’ve found it relevant how, in Common Sense, Thomas Paine writes that “the rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.”

Still, it is questionable, in my view, whether it should be as impossible to profit from war as it should be to incent it in the first place; and I believe a public dialogue is needed on whether either journalism or war-grade weapons manufacturing should ever be for-profit endeavors as, sometimes, it feels like the country is being transformed into little more than a self-driving car headed right off a cliff.

Think about it: why do we not pay the President of the United States $50 million per year? Because doing so would be a preposterous affront on logic, given human nature and the amount of power already bestowed on the presidency. But the heads of media corporations, arguably free from any form of accountability at present, arguably wield more.

No perfect person is ever going to come forward to hold such public office, we all understand; but, in solidarity, we seek the best for the time. I have never been a Trump voter and I am not currently planning to be one in the future, but one quality I’ve appreciated as expressed by RFK, Jr. is his willingness to, at least at times, take a more measured approach to Mr. Trump’s record than the corporate media military industrial complex seems to have.

I have found it worth pondering in recent years the additional idea in Course in Miracles that “equality does not imply equality now.” This is so helpful when pondering the importance of, at this time, acknowledging that some individuals do seem to be better at music, for example, better at basketball, better at mathematics, etc., and why boundaries and supports surrounding such gifts – in addition to fair and universally accessible means of discovering them – are needed. And I feel this relates to the original concept with which I was working when first writing “Paper Parks” as it seemed to me that men and boys were, too often, permitted to co-opt and take credit for women’s and girls’ intellectual contributions and in what seemed to be such aggressively hidden ways, it began to feel more essential than ever to advocate for the protection of such boundaries, beginning with the strengthening of gifted and talented programs.

I love what Mary Baker Eddy says in her seminal work Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures that seekers should “emerge gently from matter into Spirit” and “think not to thwart the spiritual ultimate of all things, but come naturally into Spirit through better health and morals and as the result of spiritual growth.” (485:14-19) Just as we all want cars to go forward, the idea that the means by which this function is to be ensured is by eliminating brakes is nonsense. To attempt to force change too quickly or out of order is arguably counterproductive and seems to catalyze steps backward as I believe we are seeing today, particularly in what appear to be so many steps backward for womankind, not only in the sports controversies receiving so much attention but in movements like the “trad wife” trend. Even while fully equal opportunity has not yet been achieved, it is so important that we make continual progress on both the individual and collective levels.

No person, of course, has reached this point without making mistakes, and I feel there is a danger, sometimes, of thoughtlessly reasoning under every circumstance that just because an event or series of events unfolded in a particular way, that way is necessarily the way they were supposed to go. But I’m still confident that, no matter what, God can always work with where we are and work it out for good.

Even where people may have been working from wrong motives (I personally believe so many male leaders in corporate media in recent years focused on taking down boundaries not only in the workplace, but in sport and academia was much less about a selfless desire to uplift African American or transgender people, but a continued desire to be able to get away with copying off of girls’ term papers, so to speak.) But, even so, African American and transgender people did need to be uplifted, and because this is the case, I feel strongly that advances made can and should be both maintained and built upon.

I found it interesting hearing it pointed out this week that an outspoken film critic once wrote a screenplay of his own to little critical fanfare and felt this relevant to the ways in which prominent social critics today – be they the New York Times or the University of Austin – seem to be attempting to write histories supportive of their organizations’ advancement by erasing journalism. If life does imitate art, it is almost as if many of the today’s new faux journalists are trying to write scripts on behalf of these orgs not just for the rest of the world to read, but to actually live. The recklessness of this practice would arguably be hard to overstate, and I love how, in Common Sense, Paine goes on to say about his time that “we [had] it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.” Regardless of whether one agrees with the severity of this view, one could make a case, I believe, that nations with the potential of America do not come around every day (or century).

For this and other reasons, I believe greater distinctions are needed between those in the world today making earnest attempts to effect change and those making earnest attempts to make money by appearing to effect change, especially with regard to public figures. And, while I am sure they are not perfect people, I think my dream presidential ticket at this moment would probably be RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard if such a pairing could even be possible at this point.

In any case, I’m reveling in the opportunity to remember how much authenticity there remains to be found everywhere one looks. And how all the woodpeckers around here make Cyndi Lauper’s hair look tame.

Particularly if I am right in assessing that the only people who may be able to get us out of the arguably artificial acrimony being instigated by the corporate media military industrial complex today will have to be two punks, I hope more people consider the possibilities.