“Karmic.”
So in case you haven’t read my last blog that touched on the radioactive topic of why people hate people who work in the oil patch, go ahead and read this asshole’s tweet, which he later deleted, and you’ll see why:
“Karma” as defined by the Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy published in 1989 by Shambala has a lengthy description but can be nailed down to“1. A mental or physical action; 2. The consequence of a mental or physical action; 3. The sum of all consequences of the actions of an individual in this or some previous life; 4. The chain of cause and effect in the world of morality.”
I am sure that most of us are familiar with karma as a term or use it loosely to define as good and bad things that happen to you but like most things in religion or in this case a philosophy of religion there is a HUGE FUCKING ASTERISK on ‘Karma’ that you should all know….especially this jackass. Karma is not some magical bullshit that happens to you because you listened to a snappy John Lennon song. It’s not the accumulation of your deeds and actions so simplified, it is not a convenient way to cosmically get back at that bitch you fucked you over last Saturday night. Karma, as defined above is a created potential that INCLUDES THOUGHTS such as “I’m glad that he totaled his truck after he cut me off. That’s fucking Karma, asshole.” This thought…even if your deeds are good, WEIGHS AGAINST YOU. This negative morality is just as bad as any physical decision you make such as cutting someone off on the freeway, kicking the dog in the ass or not asking your girlfriend for anal before attempting the Dolphin.
SO NOW WE MOVE ONTO THE ASTERISK, you wonderful people seeking knowledge as well as you assholes you think you can accomplish something by sneering when you see someone pass you on the street in a turban: Karma is also defined as your LIMITATIONS as in the collective physical and metaphysical decisions. Your thoughts outline what you can and cannot do because you formed these tendencies to behave or THINK a certain way. One might read the previous sentence and be confused “Limitations,” so an asshole can’t break out of the cycle of being an asshole? Great!” NO! NO! NO! NO! NO, you asshole! Karma does not let you off the hook by saying because you make negative potential you forever get to be negative. An asterisk to the asterisk is…wait for it…FREE WILL. You have the option of behaving and thinking like Jesus Christ or Charles Manson or to choose an unexciting middle-man, Donald Trump…or you CAN CHOOSE NOT TO. As the Shambala gloriously explains:
“This freedom of will and possibility of free choice are a reflection in each person of the freedom of the atman, the consciousness within.”
This allows you to, for lack of a better explanation, replace your ‘bad’ karma with ‘good’ karma (though Hindus do not really define Karma in such ways) and in doing so you release the limitations of one for the freedom of the other. SO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THIS other than to say to yourself “I’m not going to be that asshole who beats his wife or neglects his kids or that whore across the street putting herself through college by stripping.” The Hindu here would huff and say “isn’t being a good person enough of a reward for working on your positive potential?” The Buddhist here would say the destruction of limitations is one of the ways in which you can reach enlightenment. Be a good person…and you can free yourself of karma…forever.
And now that you’ve got that rant from a philosophy major that studied under Dr. Ray Wright of the University of Houston – by far the wisest soul with the greatest potential of Christian Karma I have ever met – now you can see why I am over the board pissed off at a man who looks at 80,000 people fleeing a burning metropolis that was their home through a cauldron of hell around them and says to the world through the non-filter that is Twitter and says:
“THEY DESERVED IT.”
Tom Moffatt, a one time candidate for the New Democratic Party, the closest thing to a Communist Party in Canada other than, well, the Communist Party, lost an election in 2008, 2012 and then a nomination in 2015 in which the Communists, I mean, the NDP, nominated someone else. I can’t believe I’m saying this…but the NDP was right in that decision.
Tom Moffat is just a man. And he is a man with a megaphone that everybody has. This means nothing in the long run but like so many other assholes in this universe he is the only one that we see or hear. Assholes are like icebergs. When you see one, you know there’s more behind them. And behind Moffat is a legion of assholes that actually think that people who work in the oil patch are people who deserve to have their homes destroyed, their belongings burned to ashes and their lives in danger because they labor to create a product that 99.99999% of people on this planet need in order to survive.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, 700,000 people fled with whatever they could carry – namely their children – to Houston where they found insufficient shelter, insufficient funds and insufficient government structure to help them for years. I saw people suffering in numbers that would claim a town seven times the size of Fort MacMurray. Against this suffering was a pile of bullshit that included a number of Americans saying: “well, that’s what you get for living in a shithole like New Orleans.” People on TV, not just talking heads, but real people looked at their suffering citizens and said: “That’s what you get for voting Democrat.” People who live in cities that have crime rates like Chicago and New York, people who live in States that have Earthquakes that leveled cities in recent memory looked at New Orleans and later, Houston during Rita and Ike, and shook their heads at the idiocy of it, proclaiming “well, that’s what you get living on the Gulf Coast.” I won’t go into the contradiction of everyone freaking out when a hurricane flies off and hits New Jersey or New York…let’s stay on topic. This attitude, this metaphysical moral thinking, is very American…and not very Canadian. As an American who lives in Canada, I can tell you that on this one thing I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
The very least this asshole should get is fired. He should, at the very least, lose one thing that 80,000 people in Fort Mac have lost: their jobs. Their way to earn a living. Their way to take care of their families. Their route to replacing everything that was destroyed. He sees ‘karma’ because of global warming? He, like many people, misunderstand karma. It is inherent. It is intrinsic. It is collective over lifetimes. To Tom Moffat’s logic, the happiest man in Fort Mac whom everyone in town would describe as a ‘good man’ or a ‘pious Christian’ or place your positive description here, deserves to have his life destroyed because he drives a truck full of clean sand back from restoration plant to the reclamation land to be sculpted over the stripped-mined face of the earth. This figurative man, who makes a living turning the earth back into a beautiful landscape that all Canadians desire and appreciate, is guilty as charged for committing global murder: the paramount crime of contributing to climate change.
I’m not going to go into the climate change argument. Instead, let’s look at Moffat’s Twitter feed. For a guy who wants so badly to be a Canadian public servant, he sure spends a lot of time pushing Bernie Sanders in a doomed bid for the Presidency. This is not about Sanders, but about Moffat. Where does he live? Whom does he serve? Canada? Alberta? Or the States? He should be more concerned with helping the people of Fort Mac in his albeit late position as a public servant than rooting for socialist in a foreign country who would, no doubt, agree that refugees from Fort Mac need our help and sympathy. Where did Moffat learn this detestable victim-blaming bullshit? There’s only one answer…and he should really leave that shit in the States.