“If You Don’t Learn To Love Each Other, Things are Going To Get Much Worse!”

Valiant Thor and his gorgeous entourage

Russia is killing the Ukraine, and the spirits of the rest of us. 

How often do you find the Pope quoting you? Random remarks you spout off in the kitchen or bathroom while listening to “the horror and gore report,” otherwise known as “the news?” One of my personal rants at the news that only my family gets to hear - “I thought we were done with war.” All this business of soldiers and guns and bombs and weeping and bleeding. Then, I heard the Pope say so, recently, at the beginning of Lent, the time of purification before Easter, the resurrection of Jesus Christ - “I thought we were done with war.”

But, I’m paraphrasing - here is what the Pope actually said in his own, more eloquent, words -

“The truth is that ‘never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely.’ We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’ Never again war!”

 

“We are called to love everyone, without exception; at the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable.” 

“On the contrary,” the pope said, “true love for an oppressor means seeking ways to make him cease his oppression; it means stripping him of a power that he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others. Forgiveness does not entail allowing oppressors to keep trampling on their own dignity and that of others, or letting criminals continue their wrongdoing.”

From Pope Francis to aliens - Yes, aliens have a stake in our survival as a planet and a species. 

First, aliens cannot write music. For music, they come to Earth. (That’s a joke. However, it could be true. We clearly have something they don’t; they have a vested interest in keeping earthlings well and functional.) Next, aliens harvest Earth’s force, usually leaving a crop circle behind as evidence. If humans were to disrupt the ki flow of Earth’s energy by nuclear annihilation, aliens might not be able to use the force. That’s a pretty simple breakdown of a process which most people have never heard of; even alien watchers have not figured out why aliens leave crop circles for us to decipher or why aliens come here at all, or if aliens are actually humans from the future. We do know that UFOs appear near nuclear power plants and nuclear weaponry. Warnings? What it all means is - Earth’s force must remain the same! We cannot destroy ourselves!

An over-simplification of Absolute Death. We are flirting with Absolute Death. I do not think our souls can survive nuclear war. If they are matter at all, physical in any way, then our souls will explode and dissipate.  

Elliot on the Red Phone

Mr. Robot, Season 2, Episode 1, final scene: An episode that was crammed full of hacker delights: bar codes to scan, Easter egg doors to open, and some choice low-tech hints that no one noticed. I was watching. This is what I saw: Eliot is in the front hallway of an old rooming house. There is a red phone on the wall. In these old rooming houses, a community phone was in the front hallway; no one had their own phone in their room. The red phone, any child of the Cold War will tell you, sat on the President’s desk and was a direct line to the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, i.e. somewhere important in the world leader vein. The phone rings. Elliot picks it up and says, “Hello?” The voice asks, “Is it really you?” (Now we know Elliot is of extreme importance.) Elliot asks, “Who’s this?” The answer: “Thor. Valiant.” 

Fade to black. I’m shaking on the sofa. Who is getting this? No one. Obviously, someone in the writing department knows their shit. (I tried to comment and tell a writer of an Easter egg article about the low-tech stuff I knew, including the meaning of “red wheelbarrow” on Elliot’s composition notebook - from a poem by William Carlos Williams, about getting back to a simple life, but she fucking hacked the shit out of me to show her appreciation of my efforts. Lucky, I know a few things and I deleted her traps. As well as my comment on her article. Taking my ball and going home, fuck you very much.)

The Red Wheelbarrow

by

William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Who was Valiant Thor?

Here is the unofficial story: 

A Visitor at the Pentagon

On March 16, 1957, a strange craft landed in a farmer’s field in Alexandria, Virginia. Local police arrived on the scene with guns drawn, expecting the worst. They were surprised to find what appeared to be an unarmed man stepping out of the craft. They were even more surprised when the man asked to speak with the President telepathically. It must have convinced them, so they immediately took him to the Pentagon. Over the next few days, the visitor would receive his meeting with the President and a fully furnished apartment deep within the Pentagon.

The Mission of Valiant Thor

According to Valiant Thor, he was sent here by a galactic council upholding the tenants of Jesus who was considered by Thor to be an intergalactic God, Savior of All Life Forms, to convince humanity to shy away from their use of nuclear weapons. Thor, and his group of alien assistants, all in the form of gorgeous human beings, hailed from the nearby planet of Venus. Thor convinced President Eisenhower to create a council against the use of nuclear weapons. However, the committee was repeatedly blocked by members of the CIA and DOD. 

Thor had to leave Earth defeated. His conclusion: Earth is more interested in making money than living in peace.

War and Reparation are BIG BUSINESS! Bigger than any other business. First, government contracts to kill, then government contracts to re-build. Until we break it, humanity is trapped by its leaders in this destructive and meaningless pattern. 

Remember, we always become friends again with our enemies - think Japan. The stupidest exchange ever had to be Hiroshima for Pearl Harbor. Isn’t it so much better to exchange sushi, sake, and technology instead of bombs, death and destruction?

Makes war obsolete.

I haven’t even touched on the constant African wars - the Congo, Nigeria - where men use more low tech weaponry, not any less deadly, to destroy. 

The Pope says we should not allow the oppressor to oppress us, but rather share some other options for him to achieve his goals. Negotiation. Talk. Friendship. There is no need to kill. No need to destroy. 

Or is it simply the desire to show the world one’s POWER? Who will be left to read history? Who will witness your power when the world is gone? Is there any power without a witness?

Virgin Mary

wearing her blue mantel of Peace

One more warning:

Came from Jesus's Mother, the Virgin Mary. Fatima, Portugal, 1917. Three young shepherds, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary that spoke to them and gave them predictions of our fate. She showed the children a terrifying vision of hell.

“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out...When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine... (World War II) and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” 

On 25 January 1938, The New York Times reported "Aurora Borealis Startles Europe; People Flee in Fear, Call Firemen." The celestial display was seen from Canada to Bermuda to Austria to Scotland, and short-wave radio transmissions were shut down for almost 12 hours in Canada.

As a result of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis announced he would consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It didn’t make the news. God has become a dirty word on network TV.

Jesus’s mother warned us: “If you don’t learn to love each other, things are going to get much worse!”

The blue of Mary’s mantel has always represented Peace. 

Let us take up that blue mantel for purely practical reasons.

Peace is Life.

Yes, they killed John Lennon, but they did not kill his message.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2022

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her latest novel is Low Flying, about two women suffering psychologically abusive marriages who find and nurture each other. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

Windows: Those Who Help Us See

Princess Diana

I screamed when I heard of her death. It was a hot summer night, August 31, 1997, and all the windows were open. We’d been watching a movie, a VHS tape, and when the movie ended, I saw a crawl across the screen, “Princess Diana dead.” 

      I screamed.

      In 2006, I published Atlantis, a poetry book about the United States possibly being another Atlantis, that is, an advanced civilization busy creating its own demise. In it is a poem called "Windows," about the people who help us see. Whenever I read "Windows" to a group, I always dedicate it to someone. Usually to John Mack, that Harvard psychiatrist who insisted on believing in aliens AND alien abductions, who was run down by a car after getting off a train in London; Michael Hastings, the American journalist who was working on “something big” when his car crashed into a tree in LA; Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist, shot returning home to her apartment, for her work exposing the Putin regime (Michael Hastings and Anna Politkovskaya also represent the many journalists who are killed each year for doing their jobs); Karen Silkwood, a nuclear energy employee, who died in 1974 in a single car accident under mysterious circumstances after revealing the truth about the hazards of plutonium; and John Lennon, for his genius - what would he have had to say about all this, eh? There's more - like the hundreds of scientists and alternative doctors who are mysteriously murdered or disappeared. All silenced, that is the penalty for trying to get us to see something.

     At this posting, I want to dedicate "Windows" to Princess Diana, (the 20th anniversary of her death is just days away), who rocked our world and that of the British Monarchy by her love of and devotion to all people, and later, to her beloved children, who tormented the Crown by her many acts of love from kissing AIDS patients to walking on land mines, because, as she said, “children do.” The Crown had demanded a Virgin and by God, they got one! I even heard that she roller bladed through the Palace corridors. Love her forever.

      By the way, the last line of the poem is the dictionary definition of the word, windows.

Windows

Women die in car accidents

men jump out of windows

or are shot

elephants

once walked

across Atlantis

in 27 days

a woman can direct

an award-winning film

that does not win an award

on her vacation

she can uncover plots

to destroy the world

a man will study aliens

and ask questions

based on the premise

that abductees are telling the truth

it is best

for a woman

to not look too intelligent

and to always follow protocol

she should wear white gloves

and not touch anything!

especially the spindle of a spinning wheel

If a man says what he saw

they will take away his tongue

However,

she will walk

in mine fields

because children do

legless herself

she will bring legs

to the legless

at peril of death

she will read to the illiterate

she will teach them to read

a man will sing of love

he will sing of brothers and of sisters

she will lash herself

to trees, libraries, towers

in order to save them

she will kiss the diseased

Watch,

she will change her headdress

she will wear a sun

she will wrap a river

about her head

Look,

he does not get out of bed for a week

in order to get our attention!

Still,

better she should not smoke

or put her drink down

for too long a time

she should not go to the restroom

without a friend

she should not have sex without plastic

she should not have sex

unless she intends to kill

in that instant of vulnerability

when all men

return to God

if a man knows

better he should not know

it’s sad

when fidelity

is so sexy

when berries are for the picking

fish jump into your lap

air and water bathe us

clean

when robins

hop past the windows

the portals where

the wind blows down the house

©Patricia Goodwin, 2017

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest book is Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author. Her poetry book, Atlantis was published in 2006 and is currently out-of-print. Anyone interested in obtaining a copy, please contact the author via email. 

The Invasion of The Body Snatchers

            I recently saw the 1978 version of the film, The Invasion of The Body Snatchers, starring Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, in which earth is invaded by cute little pink flowers that change into pods that devour real people and their emotions and passions and all the good people stuff and leave empty shells of people walking around like zombies.

            So? What’s new? That’s the point. I Netflixed the movie because I liked the actors. Brooke Adams is a fave, though she doesn’t work enough for my taste. And, Donald Sutherland, well, ‘nuff said. They were both brilliant, as usual, but I didn’t expect to hear what I did. It was the character of Nancy Bellicec, played by Veronica Cartwright, actress of the eyes too big for her face, giving her the most expression-filled demeanor of all, found to be awesome for horror films by many directors since.

            Nancy had all the best lines. She was the one who told her husband, played by Jeff Goldblum, “Don’t touch that! It could be toxic!” To which her hippy husband replied, “It’s a pink flower, honey.” Nancy – the sweet masseuse who insisted her plants have feelings - exploded with one amazing line after another, to which I responded with a gaping mouth. After Nancy was done, I realized I was watching something a lot deeper than a movie about an alien invasion. Not that an alien invasion isn’t deep or scary enough. The original book, The Body Snatchers was written in 1956! I know the accepted idea is that the author, Jack Finney, was referring to the McCarthy trials. But, as I listened to Nancy, I couldn’t help thinking and feeling (since I’m not a pod, yet) –  A lot has happened since this was written and it’s still happening now!

Here’s what Nancy and Elizabeth, a health official (Brooke Adams), and Jack, Nancy’s husband (Jeff Goldblum) said:

Jack: This smells lovely.

Nancy:  I want you to listen to me.

Jack: I am listening to you, Nancy.

Elizabeth: That flower. Where did you get that?

Jack: In the vase with the others.

Nancy: Put it down, Jack.

Elizabeth: It's a pod with a flower on it. I could not find that flower in any book.

Nancy:  Jack, put it down.

Jack: It's a pink flower, honey.

Nancy: It could be toxic.

Elizabeth: I have seen these flowers all over. They grow like parasites on other plants. Where are they coming from?

Nancy:  Outer space.

Jack: They're not from outer space.

Nancy: Why not?

Jack: They're not. Why? What are you talking about? A space flower?

Nancy: Why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?

Jack: I've never expected metal ships.

Nancy: There must be other ways they get in our systems.

Elizabeth: Right. They could be getting into us through touch or fragrance.

Jack: We would never even notice it, not from the impurities we have. I mean, we eat junk and we breathe junk.

Elizabeth:  I don't know where they're coming from, but I feel as though I've been poisoned. We've gotta take those flowers in and have them analyzed. There's something here.

Nancy: They could get into us and screw up our genes like DNA, recombine us, change us.

 Jack: Oh, of course!

Nancy: This is the same way those rockets landed years ago, so those spacemen could mate with monkeys and create the human race. It's happening now!

            Let’s put the alien take-over thing aside. It’s a moot point.

WARNING LABEL: The sensitive ones should leave the room. Or, if you are the kind of person who says, “Who are you to tell me what I can or can’t put in my body?” then don’t read any further. Go to McDonalds or Taco Bell.

The Real Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been going on for about 70 years now, since the end of World War II, when two things took over – one, mass production of our food and two, mass transportation of our food. Our food used to be grown and prepared in small batches of whole, fresh ingredients. It was placed in cloth sacks or wooden crates. Liquids were in glass bottles, crocks, cans or kegs. Our food was still natural and close to homemade. Bread was brown. Cows were not given artificial hormones. However, when farms got larger and more specialized, our food needed to be transported longer distances. No longer could you make a product naturally. Mix together the ingredients and those ingredients usually separated or looked terrible in a jar. You couldn’t transport it like that anyway. You needed preservatives. You needed stabilizers like guar gum, which is not thickening enough on its own without adding borax occasionally, or stabilizers like dehydrogenated animal fat, which is akin to plastic and could be already lumped in different corners of your body. You would need artificial coloring.  Then, since you stripped the natural nutrients, perhaps to create the more attractive white bread, you would need to add artificial vitamins. You needed to add salt to keep food from spoiling. You needed to add sugar to make it taste better after you’d added salt. You needed flavor enhancers like monosodium glutamate in order to compete with companies using flavor enhancers in their products. You might have to heat the food to a carcinogenic-causing temperature. Packaging itself became artificial, a risky business that is just now becoming a suspected source of poisoning. Refrigeration became common. Food was transported from tropical areas to colder areas. People no longer ate seasonal food. They could get oranges in winter. Nice, right? Tropical fruit lowers the body temperature. Not as nice in the north as it is in the south. Tropical fruit, as a matter of fact, any locally grown food, has a purpose. Winter squashes, burdock, onions, all these grow naturally in colder climates and are good for circulation, i.e., keeping warm in winter.

Also, around the end of World War II came our love affair with science. We’re just now discovering that some of the wonders of science may be poisoning us – polyester (carpets, drapes, sofas, etc.), air-conditioning, plastic – toxins decomposing and entering our lungs - even as we sit in the evenings and watch our televisions - which poison our minds as well as our bodies. Microwaves were invented to rearrange the molecules of our food. Most of us, including this writer, sit at computer screens radiating God-knows what into our brains, all day long. We keep cell phones tucked in our pockets next to our gut or attached directly to our ears. We wash our hair with suspicious unctions, and blindly slather possible cancer-causing creams over ourselves to prevent possible cancer causing UV rays from reaching our skin. Scientists began creating GeneticallyModified Organisms by infiltrating plant DNA with pesticides and DNA from foreign plants and animals, such as bacteria into corn or soy. GMOs are now thought to cause ulcerations in the stomach and intestine. Bees are dying by the millions. Even our pets are getting sicker. Celiac disease, a troubling sensitivity to wheat, seemed to come out of nowhere and is increasing. Animals have been cloned and we are eating the meat of clones, deemed “safe” by our FDA. Milk is full of hormones and antibiotics. Also deemed to be safe.

Got milk? No need for an alien take-over. We are lining up.

We are now four generations of degeneration. The last generation grew up entirely on artificial foods. I call them “the Froot Loops (notice the word froot is not the word fruit) for breakfast, microwaved pizza for lunch, microwaved mac and cheese for dinner” generation. What happens to a generation that never ate any real food?

Here’s the bottom line:

Cancer was rare before World War II. You had to be seriously out of balance to get cancer. Now, everyone expects to get cancer or some other serious degenerative disease, like diabetes or heart disease. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the U.S. Diabetes is increasing worldwide.

In the ‘50s, only the “bad” kid had ADD or ADHD. Allergies were rare. Autism, also rare. Asthma, rare. Now, asthma, allergies, autism, behavioral problems, all seem to be epidemic. In her book Louder Than Words, actress Jenny McCarthy tells how she relieved many of her son’s autism symptoms, including not speaking, by eliminating dairy and sugar from his diet. In the book Crime & Diet by Michio Kushi, you can read about the experiment at the Tidewater Virginia Detention Home for Boys, which under the direction of Frank Kern and Stephen J. Schoenthaler, in 1981, took sugar out of the diet of the boys in the home for three months. The boys, ages 12-18, were in detention for crimes including alcohol and narcotic violations, disorderly conduct, larceny and burglary. During the time sugar was not in their diets, the boys’ incidents of violence decreased by 45%.

Right now, drugs are being used to treat allergies, asthma, autism, ADD and ADHD and other physical and behavioral conditions. Plus, drugs for the side effects caused by those drugs - many of which are now being suspected of causing cancer.

You can try to get cancer rates from the American Cancer Society. But, you have to dig through individual types of cancer, regions, sex, etc. and a whole spectrum of specifics designed to discourage you. Here’s some plain talk from preventcancer.com:

What then is driving the modern cancer epidemic? Study after study points to the role of runaway industrial technologies, particularly those based on petrochemicals. The explosive growth of the petrochemical industry since the 1940s has far outpaced legislative and regulatory controls, producing a dizzying array of synthetic chemicals that have never been screened for human health effects: of the roughly 75,000 chemicals in use today, only some 3 percent have been tested for safety. For over fifty years, in other words, the American public has been unknowingly exposed to avoidable carcinogens from the moment of conception until death.

If you think you can handle the truth, I recommend liking Dr. Helen Caldicott on Facebook. Dr. Caldicott has been an anti-nuclear champion for decades. She’ll keep you informed of the daily radioactive seepage in the world - it’s not just from nuclear accidents any more.

One of the most compelling reasons I am writing this particular post is the recent death of one of my macrobiotic teachers from liver cancer. How does a macro create cancer? I have asked myself, over and over. The answer is simple. We are all susceptible. We are all vulnerable. I could be riddled with cancer even as I write. Usually, it’s your favorite binge food that gets you in the end. Yet, each day, as a macro, I observe changes in myself and when those changes are undesirable, I think, what have I done to cause this? And I change that. For instance, I have gotten rid of horns growing on my head and sometimes my arms, since my genetic code doesn’t know what to do with the information it’s receiving, i.e., I am not a baby goat, by giving up goat cheese. With goat cheese went a horrible, persistent pain in my right knee that was keeping me from walking without a limp. I still have an occasional twinge in that knee from arthritis I inherited from my beautiful Italian grandmother and mother, and I’m working on that too with exercise and other dietary adjustments, but the arthritis is nothing like the stabbing agony of the arterial blockage caused by excess dairy. I also got rid of a horrible, nagging ache in my neck that was causing me to lose sleep and wrap my neck with a scarf indoors– by stopping the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I drank occasionally when I went out with a certain friend. I noticed the pain always came after drinking the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Gone, and gone! Also, by stopping Maxwell House coffee at home, I got rid of intestinal bleeding. Gone. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had been ingesting something other than coffee with both those brands. (Note: Every one of us is different and different products may be affecting you in different ways. Be honest with yourself when self-reflecting.)

That’s what macrobiotics can do for you.

However, macrobiotics is no match for the invisible toxins we consume every day. If I had to say how my teacher got liver cancer, I would say from self-sacrificing overwork, eating too strictly and toxins.

Some of those toxins are in the food we sometimes eat, maybe out of convenience or downright desperation when we are outside the home, starving and have to eat something fast and get back to work. Other toxins are ingested from the cars that pass by, cigarette smoke, the strong perfume of the woman next to us on the train or when we sink down into the sofa at night exhausted, little spores drift up on the air and enter our nostrils.

The reason I said that alien invasion was moot is because we are the aliens and we are invading ourselves. Aliens have already been here and gone. That ship, if you will, has flown. If they want to return and take over, we will be powerless. However, we are not powerless against ourselves.

We can change. One of the things we learned when we began macrobiotics in the ‘70s was to get rid of all artificial products in our lives, for instance, to wear loose cotton clothing that breathed and kept human energy flow even and natural. It’s not always easy to do so, but the closer you can get to clean air, clean home, clean food, the better off you will be. You might have to put in the extra time and work of making your own lunch at home, making a pot of beans on the weekend - lentils or chick peas - great convenience foods that can be stored in the refrigerator – or a pot of brown rice to always have ready. You might have to avoid fast foods. Or, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

The problem, as it was in the film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is going to sleep. That’s when the pods started to take over our human bodies, our passions and our caring.

Don’t go to sleep. Stay vigilant. Keep watch over yourself and your loved ones. Take good care. Body Snatchers are everywhere.

©PatriciaGoodwin, 2013

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.