Thanksgiving is Over

Thanksgiving is over.  The landscape that is looming around me seems like a minefield laced with altercation.  We have from now until the evening of December 25th to assemble all of our Christmas decorations and presents.  It has been programmed for decades fueling retail in America.  Does the Christmas season, the celebration of Jesus' birth, still have relevance to the economy in America?  Its impact greatly has waned in recent years.  I wish I could remember the exact date in history the Christmas season was rendered moot because of economic stress and inequality.  For years wages have not kept up with inflation.  Corporate America vivaciously out sourced our jobs and thus our incomes to the Indians and the Chinese.  They would work for a small percentage of our wages which at one time were a part of the "American Dream."  We in America unlike third world countries once were afforded civil liberties, economic opportunities, and a social security that long have been left by the wayside.  The turmoil of Viet Nam in America has returned.  The glamour of war has worn thin, and the reality of war starkly has presented itself.  The Veteran's Administration like most governmental social program grossly was unprepared.  Like FEMA floundered at the onset of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the VA like our entire Congress has abandoned the citizens they are supposed to represent.  With indignation white supremacists fully have empowered themselves over the rest of the country inviting a coup.  How else will the corruption stop?  It if humorous to me that these staid, robotic, antagonists feel they are immune from such a thing.  How long will a comfortable nest in Washington's congressional buildings shield them from reality?  Certainly an angry looting mob will have no success intimidating Washington.  Such an entity only will reinforce their legislative power over us.  Republicans only defeat Democrats with their encyclopedic knowledge of the law.  They manipulate language to create dissent in legislation meant actually to aid the citizens of America.  They do not want to aid the citizens of America.  They want to continue to empower themselves at all cost.  How long can this continue?  How long will this continue?  The contingency capable of electing democrats to Congress failed to show up at the polls.  After witnessing an angry mob in Ferguson Missouri burn their own town, my opinion about some minorities in America has been sealed.  I have been witnessing it first hand for several years where I live.  I have tried my best to believe that all men are created equal.  Living in America today it is evident to me that while we may have been created equal, many have been left behind in terms of what must be education.  I can't believe the ignorance I see daily.  I feel very isolated and also persecuted.  If I wear the wrong thing to the grocery store, I am a sitting duck for grifters.  They see someone not dressed like a ghetto rat or a construction worker, and they assume you have money to spare.  I consciously have to remind myself not to wear any of my clothing purchased while working on cruise ships.  It is too happy.  It is not ostentatious.  It is not flamboyant.  It represents something other than the dire straights facing most Americans today.  I enjoy fitting into the masses.  I like living in a trench.  Today I like consciously to discard most of the things that are important to me, because it makes my emotional life more tolerable.  When I try to be creative like I once was, it creates a drowning wrinkle in the local status quo.  I feel it wrap around me like the angle of death.  If I am sleeping, unguarded, and subconscious often I feel physical pain on my body.  I awake to this most days with an intimidating nightmare fresh in my mind.  Imagine two (or rather one) distinct source that has the ability to bully my creative being and stalk me in my sleep.  This is why I choose to avoid at all cost the musical practices that have sustained my mind and soul for fifty-two years.  I do not want any longer my creative impetus and emotional output to become entertainment for the man.  This is not what music used to be.  A perfect metaphor for this sacrilege was a gig I played recently at a local country club.  Unbeknownst to me one member of the quartet gravely had been ill the three weeks prior to the job.  Evidently he still was reeling from this strain of flu.  The scotch didn't help.  When we finished our first tune of the night, after we had stopped playing he continued for almost two minutes with his eyes closed oblivious.  The entire evening he phased in and out turning the beat around, dropping out, and playing on his on.  I performed in spite of this intrusive stimuli.  Suddenly in a few minutes my job of playing quality jazz music on the piano to the best of my ability changed to trying to play quality jazz music against almost insurmountable odds.  My thoughts were distracted from my primary responsibility of remembering and playing tunes.  Instead they at a second to second level became desperate trying to hold together a song being performed in two different meters.  Constantly I had to listen to this debacle and second by second choose with whom I was going to play.  It was extremely unpleasant.  It was not so unpleasant to me as a player.  It was embarrassing to the audience who were sitting so close to us.  Interestingly at the end of the evening the ultimate irony took place.  Like the man does to us each and every day, these people enjoyed the set like it was being performed normally.  The drama that was ensuing was entertaining and gratifying to them.  With no thought of the strife and difficulty that was being placed upon me, I was put into my place once again.  No need to preach to the choir.  Suck it up and take your money home.  I believe that in modern American entertainment this has become the chosen vehicle.  No longer is art important, because that means that we must acknowledge an artist as being empowered and thus monetarily valuable.  The man does not want this anymore.  They made a conscious decision to kill the honest and creative force of American music and replace it with blasphemy.  It seems our entire nation is operating at this level low.  Simply turn on a reality show on the tube.