Antierra Manifesto – blog post #16

Chapter 9 – The Young Trainee

“What do we really know of love?  Mostly by all the ways by which it has never been demonstrated, however often defined.” (Voice from the Other Side – Sha’Tara)

So pass a couple of years between training and killing in the arena.  Rarely is there a change unless it’s some sort of punishment, usually when handlers and trainers feel a need for some gratuitous entertainment or think it’s time to assert their authority over us. 

One day a work gang of male and female slaves enter our compound to make superficial repairs to one of the towers.  An older fighter interrupts her training to watch these naked skeletons walk by and is unfortunately noticed by a trainer.  He blows a whistle and everybody stops dead, dropping their weapons.

Two trainers and a handler run along our line-up and grab the fighter.  She does not resist as they take her to the post.  She is dreadfully silent as they flog her to death before not only the fighters but the other slaves.  It is obvious to me they did this just to show their power, not for us but for the worker slaves. 

On another day, some two years after this event and while training I am unofficially and illegally challenged to a sparring match by a handler, not a trainer.  I immediately notice he is high on chakr.  This is not supposed to happen.  The overseer, other handlers, guards even trainers are supposed to intervene immediately and send me to my cage.  Nothing of the sort happens.  They just watch to see what will come of this.  I begin by just defending myself, blocking his blows and slowly giving ground to his attacks, not wanting to provoke some kind of outbreak of violence against myself or the other women. 

There is no protocol for his attack, nor for my response to it.  I wait for him to tire out but the chakr keeps him going.  I wait for my feelings to kick in and they do.  I get angry.  I have a coarse, basic staff made of a very tough hardwood but with with no metal caps, extender or pike end.  Still it is my favourite weapon and I know how to use it in many ways I have seldom demonstrated either in training or in fighting, saving them for the day when surprises are needed.  He holds a top of the line professional fighting staff, complete with spiked end and extender.

Undoubtedly, even if he is no great fighter he has a tremendous advantage.  He must have secured permission to attack me and I know this is to the death.  All the other fighters are standing still, watching this strange match.  I parry his blows as expertly as I know how but I need to attack to tire him out.  Time now to effect some of those “surprise” moves with my staff.  I block one of his blows and strike him hard on the shoulder.  He grins, the chakr now in full force and he can’t feel the pain.  He charges again and again.  I block, waiting, watching for the sudden spring of the extender and trying to knock the staff from his hands.  I aim at his hands time and again, connect twice and break fingers.  He’s still fully under the influence of the drug and coming at me.  I slip under his guard and jab him in the heart.  He stumbles and I strike him viciously across his right hip.  He collapses on the stones and I move to back away.  But the overseer comes over to me and says,

“You, gora, kill challenger or die!”  So I kill him, crushing his skull with a vicious side sweep that brings the end of my staff behind his ear.  It penetrates the skull.  No choice for me, and no reason to choose otherwise if there had been choice given.  For I know he would have recovered and challenged another woman to a fight, choosing a weaker one, probably a young trainee next time.  I did what I had to do.

I wait for certain punishment by flogging for killing a man outside a prescribed combat.  Nothing happens.  Four fighters are ordered to take the male body inside one of the huts and they return, wash blood from their hands and we are told to wash and eat.

I never found out what that was about.  Best guess, some kind of private vendetta, or debt owed that involved a bet made on my ability to defend myself in a non-conforming situation.  Oh well, I’m not a king’s concubine, common expression among fighters.

That night I have another young trainee ‘lover’ in my cage, a new arrival.  This tells me someone is pleased with the results of the fight.  Go figure… or not. 

My reputation as a fighter keeps growing with the consequences that gamblers are pulling back on betting against me.  But you can’t say these men are without imagination.  I need more challenge and they find one for me.  A giant black man captured beyond their deep desert in a coaching sweep for military cadets, has been secretly trained as a challenger and this I’m told is what I must fight.  When I see him I understand the term ‘giant’ in relative terms.  Indeed, he stands a full head and a half over me and is easily twice my weight.  His legs are more like tree trunks than legs and the muscles on his arms ripple when he flexes.  Ouch.  I’d much rather make love to this one than fight him.  And even that could be painful.  He’s well hung as they say.  Now I have to kill him.  Pity.

He chooses the double handed sword and when he sees me and realizes I’m his fighter, the comprehension slowly showing on his face, he squints his eyes and sniffs the air like a bull, letting out a bellow.  Fortunately they have a neuro-restraint screwed to his head and they control him by remote.  He yells in a deep basso voice, “Female!  Arghhhh!  Give me real fight.  Give me man to kill.  Female!”  He spits on the ground and spittle spatters on his wide hairless chest.  “Kill, cook and eat that, I do.”  He points at me.  “This is dishonour!” 

He stomps the ground and it shakes.  His six handlers point lasguns at him and explain it simply:  “Fight female or we cut off penis and balls.”  Then they emphasize by pressing the remote.  He slumps down into a whimpering mass, shaking.

“I fight female.”  They ‘release’ him and he stands groggily, shaking his massive head.  I’ve changed my mind about the making love thing.  I don’t think that would work.  I’ll fight him.  How do you fight a tree?  I remember an old friend of Earth who’d say, “Use a chainsaw.”  For whatever reason I can’t get serious about this encounter and the image of using a chainsaw on this creature amuses me.  Perhaps because of his ignorant bravado about killing, cooking and eating.  We’ll see who does the killing.  I’ll pass on the cooking and eating – I’m vegetarian after all.

The next morning sees me going through the standard practice of having my fighter meal alone at one of the long tables.  Our current overseer who is called Dalton comes to me and indicates he’s put his money on me. 

“Win this one, slave, and I give you a special treat.  There is young trainee here will be very good for you.  My gift.  You win this fight.  I buy boy for son, need money to pay and get house and concubine too, understand?”

“I win this fight for you sir.  Thank you for gift.”  And I add sotto voce, “I deeply thank you for your confidence, for betting on me.”

The meal over I am splashed with the usual cold water and escorted, shivering and shaking, by two handlers through the cold tunnel and into the entrance to the arena.  I take my sword from the hands of the red-robed weapons judge, turn and walk to the center of the ring.  The plasma lighting is throwing a little heat and with the sun just rising over the battlements my teeth stop rattling.  Why must they insist on giving us that water treatment before a fight particularly?  Stupid is as stupid does!

The challenger arrives a few moments later.  He is in restraints and surrounded by six handlers with lasers charged.  He refuses to look at me and looks down as they remove the restraints and hand him his weapon.  Then they escort him to the center of the ring to face me.  Only now does he look at me and if hate could kill I’d be below the sand.  He doesn’t see my nude female attractiveness.  What does he see?  Something he’s bred to hate.  A female fighter: more than an anomaly – an impossibility; a female who dares oppose a man.  Something to be crushed, destroyed.  A pollutant, that’s what he sees.

His handlers take a couple of steps back from him.  He hefts the sword as if it was a twig.  Not the least effort in holding it; as if he doesn’t even know it’s in his hands.  But he knows.  I know he knows.  Part of his pea-brain is open to me.  He’s trying to look dumb but he’s more than he looks.  This is a different kind of challenge, something I’m not at all familiar with.  Should prove interesting.  How fast can I run in reverse?  If I’m to win this I have to take him down ‘branch by branch’ as topping and de-branching a tree before you cut it at the stump. 

[end blog post #16]

EVERYTHING IS ON ITS WAY TO SOMEWHERE

[thoughts from ~burning woman~ by Sha’Tara]

“Everything is on its way to somewhere” (Movie ‘Phenomenon’)
“Things change and they don’t change back” (Nemesis Games, James Corey)

On the other hand and interestingly, when it comes to the people of Earth, there are never new starts – every start packs something of the old within itself and it all turns to shit again. The older one gets, the closer one comes to that “place” of final change, the more the above reminders become true and undeniably accurate.

None of us knows much about ‘Life’ in general. We call one physical passage on this world a ‘life’ from which we gain a few experiences which serve no purpose whatsoever because it’s followed by either permanent lights out or the unknowable endlessly speculated and pontificated upon eternal.

When we’re dying, do we know for a fact who we are? Are we something that’s finally run out of fuel to simply fall by the wayside or something propelling itself into the unknown star fields as a star ship pushed by  its “warp” drive?

At death’s door, what ‘thing’ part of us is on its way to somewhere? Who or what determines if there is a somewhere to go to, and if so, how is that somewhere chosen? Or is it arbitrary? Is it a direction or a place, like a huge bubbling recycling vat from which pieces are taken as building blocks for new words, new universes, new extensions and additions to existing constructs and new experiments?

A shift in thought:

Decades ago I grew tired of being told how to live my life, whether the instructions came from God, bosses, political or religious leaders, corporations, bankers or a sex partner. I got tired of being told what I should or should not believe; how I should worship; what I should or should not eat or drink or buy or wear; what sort of people I should associate with or not and what constituted my family; my “home” and my “people.” “Enough!” I heard myself scream in my mind one say and everything turned on its head.

While so many of these controlling people around me were busy building and rebuilding walls to try to make themselves feel safer and happier I found myself tearing mine down. I was pretty sure that freedom was unattainable on earth but at least I wanted openness. I wanted to be able to see the horizon in my mind. I didn’t want to be staring at blood-stained walls of arrogance, bigotry, racism and misogyny.  I was through trying to fit in.

How can you be going anywhere when surrounded by walls of exceptionalism; of exclusive belief; of oppression and extortion; of self-protection? Walls made of greed, fear, hate and paranoia? The caterpillar doesn’t go into a cocoon for self-preservation but in the hope of breaking forth as a butterfly. Do man-made walls ever turn anyone into a butterfly?

Across the international border a few miles from this town is a nation that is closing in on itself, helplessly it seems as, if it was entering into a cocoon. But this is not a life-changing cocoon, it’s a strangling prison. It wants a wall on its southern border because it fears its neighbours but if that wall is built, it won’t stop there. The wall will continue to grow, partly in a physical way but mostly in the imprisoned hearts. Unseen and untouched the neighbours behind the wall will grow horns and forked tails, morphing into demons and monsters. The wall won’t be enough to guarantee safety. In all likelihood the monsters and their children will have to be nuked. But that will only amplify the threat.

That’s where we come face to face with all our new starts and realize how true it is that there have never been any such on this world, or at least for as long as this patriarchal civilization has existed. Walled in, repetitive, entropic, too weak, too ignorant, too closed-minded to make that jump into the new.

What somewhere would you want to be heading for, people of Earth? What sort of change that doesn’t change back would you like to see happening?

How would you propose entering into a new start that packed nothing at all of the old so you would not condemn yourselves to repeating it?  Could you even imagine such an event?

Should the U.S. build the wall?

I am working at keeping politics down to a dull roar on here but once in a while something comes by that merits re-posting.  The following came via email and there was no authorship given, so I’m posting as “anonymous”.  Also I’ve just upgraded this site to paid, so I thought I should give that a bit of a ride. If it gets rid of the ads it will be worth it.  I HATE ads!

Now on that wall thing,  physicians try to reach a consensus:

The Allergists were in favour of scratching it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves.

The Gastroenterologist’s had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought Trump had a lot of nerve.

Meanwhile, Obstetricians felt certain everyone was labouring under a misconception, while the Ophthalmologists considered the idea shortsighted.

Pathologists yelled, “Over my dead body!” while the Pediatricians said, “Oh, grow up!”

The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists could see right through it.

Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing and the Internists claimed it would indeed be a bitter pill to swallow.

The Plastic Surgeons opined that this proposal would “put a whole new face on the matter.”

The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists were pissed off at the whole idea.

Anesthesiologists thought the concept was a gas, and those lofty Cardiologists didn’t have the heart to say no.

In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the assholes in Washington!

Antierra Manifesto – blog post #15

begin blog post #15]

“You were dropped here, then?”

Again he emphasizes the word “dropped” to indicate it means more than what he is saying.  I don’t understand what he really means by it but I infer he means landed by someone not of Malefactus, for some purpose of their own, someone who then vanished without trace in some flying contraption or shuttle craft equipped to detect and foil all of the planet’s detection systems.

“No sir, I do not believe the word dropped is the correct way to put it.”  I still dare not tell him what I really remember about myself: that I was able to reincarnate full grown out there in the desert having travelled here from some place even I can barely describe at this time.  So I try to create a plausible story that he could buy, at least for the moment.

“I must have been cast away then, but I cannot remember from where I am, or what or who brought me here.  I awoke on a sand dune, as the reports indicate.  True, and walked a long way until I smelled the wood smoke from the rebel women’s camp.  I went down into it.  I found I could speak their language enough to communicate easily.  They gave me drink and food and saved my life.

“Two days later the slave hunters found us and the women killed five of them before they were overrun.  All the children were slaughtered and most of the women – there were twenty one of them.

“I knelt upon the sand during the fighting and killing, not knowing what was happening or why women and men were killing each other there – or why men would kill defenceless children.  Six women survived, two badly wounded who were killed and left on the open desert.  Only four and myself made it back here.  That is all I remember.  You know the rest, sir.”

“Yes, yes, I read the damn report.  You take me for a fool, gora?  You’re lying.  How many others were dropped with you, on this planet or nearby worlds?  What do they hope to accomplish here?  What are you here for?”

I look at him and shrug, turning my head just as he lifts his hand and hits me totally unexpectedly and brutally on the side of my face.  As a trained fighter I should have been able to detect some shift of body or some give-away in facial expression.  I should have been able to sense something.  But I saw or sensed nothing unusual coming from him, either before or after he hit me.  It’s as if he’d already planned to terminate our “interview” in that fashion or he wasn’t even aware of what he had just done.

I make no move at all, taking the blow within as if fully deserved.  Blood pours from my lips, cut on impact on my own teeth.  He stands up suddenly and pressing the com unit on his wrist to open the outer door he orders in a peremptory tone that broaches no hesitation on my part: “Go! – Get out!”

I walk out, near to collapse from the blow to the head, the previous beatings in the fight and an empty stomach.  I stand groggily a few steps outside his door freezing and shaking in pouring rain, every rain drop giving the impression of an ice needle going into my skin.  I have to hold my hand over my mouth to keep my teeth from chattering.  Water and blood mix and run freely down my arms, thighs and legs to the wet stones.  I wait, as I must, for no woman is allowed to go anywhere without being escorted.

Handlers arrive, presumably summoned by the doctor, and they escort me to the eating place, to the long rough-hewn tables with smooth-worn benches along the kitchen walls.  Several women are there, as naked as I in the freezing rain, eating from bowls filling with rain water as if this was the most normal thing in the world.  Well, for them, it probably is because they cannot imagine the possibility of alternate choices.  I wish I couldn’t either; maybe what I am going through at this moment would be easier to bear of I did not know of alternative lifestyles.

The food is served by the youngest trainees.  Old women, not fighters, work in the kitchens.  My portion arrives and I find myself ravenous.  I eat carefully, trying to avoid my broken lips, wincing with the pain.  One tooth is loose and I feel terrible.

I force my mind away from my immediate problems to create a “safe zone” in my thinking.

So it was that damned chakr drug that so upset my stomach.  Idiots, they could have killed me with that stuff, or I could have passed out entirely after the fight began – I’m intolerant to most drugs.  Must work on that too.  I can accept the inflicted pain – can I learn to overcome the effects of their poisons and drugs?  On Old Earth billions of humans survived the toxic effects of air, water and soil pollution for over two hundred years.  I remember living a life I considered healthy during the worst of their environmental crises.  So it’s not impossible to adapt to poisonous conditions even given little lead time.  Humanoid bodies are short-lived but quite resilient in their own way.

I wolf down all they give me and seeing I’m still hungry, they double my portion at a nod from the handlers.  They certainly seem pleased.  My “doctor” may be upset at me now – and may well have me killed – but somebody’s happy from my day’s success, I think.  Somebody made good on my “work” of the day I bet.

And at that moment I feel nothing but absolute disgust for these men.  Ugly, stinking, heartless creatures, all of them.  The women refer to these types as “dungut.”  And their world has shaped itself to their ways.  Why would I have thought, long ago in some never-never world they or their counterparts on Old Earth were worth redeeming?

So, great.  Add “hate” to my list of personal failings to date.  That particular vice was not supposed to be part of my repertoire.  I’m still plummeting toward my personal nadir.

[end blog post #15]

What is the Cost of Maintaining a God?

[thoughts from   ~burning woman~   by Sha’Tara]

Quote: “God, help us all to wake up and learn to love as community and not organization.”

This I’ve learned and this I’ll take with me to my next level of understanding: God (or whatever lives beyond the reach of mere Earthians and parades as creator) will not help “us”. Quite the contrary. The people who believe in God are often the worst kind to have around. And that is as it must be. “God” is, if one bothers to study Earth history, a monster. He is a hater of the feminine principle and destroyer of life, mostly of innocent life.

It is because Earthians have been programmed to “wait upon the Lord” that they cannot, will not help themselves, or one-another openly and freely; cannot break free once and for all from their slavery to “trusted” systems that have now supplanted religion, in particular monetary schemes.

“Man” is what God made him; “woman” less so, for she in truth, rebelled against the original programming. Some say that God is what man made it… if that is true, that only makes man worse for that makes God the scapegoat for all the man-perpetrated evil done in God’s name since the beginning of civilization.

It is said that God is also the author of love and what is that but a chameleonic emotion? A powerless concept, except within collectives where it can be practiced in the most exclusive and selfish ways? People should remember that it was the God of love who instructed His people to go throughout the (known) earth and kill all those who refused to worship Him – man, woman and child. Who instructed his fanatic followers to rip open pregnant women and kill their unborn children before their very eyes. To plunder, enslave, rape, torture and murder — all in the name of His love.

It is the same God, make no mistake, who directs the ways of the New World Order or call it predatory capitalism, the “new” religion of greed that incorporates the old patriarchal “values” based on exploitation, suppression, enslavement, plunder and general destruction of the planet and its life.

It is said that “man” would never know the ways of the Lord God. True. Few men have demonstrated an evil so utterly depraved as to rival God’s though many have tried. Hitler was one of those, a name to remember on the anniversary of the freeing of Auchwitz by the Soviet forces in 1945.

The awakened INDIVIDUAL does not need to know such ways. The awakened looks into the cosmos and knows life. The awakened is free to look in the face of evil and call a spade a spade. Such a one has no soul to worry about, or to feed with emotions and passions. The awakened knows logic and common sense, though not devoid of feelings. Conversely the soul-being is prey to endless roiling of passions and emotions that fight against one-another, for the soul, that precious gift of God, is the container for Earthian madness.

Few can accept this. To most, God is a sacred concept. To know God is to know love. To possess a soul is the mark of life, of belonging. But what is the historical evidence from maintaining such a belief?

If you look at history, you will find that all efforts, bar none, to find “love” – sharing, community, acceptance, freedom, peace, etc., have failed. Even in the tiny groups that survive as “Christian” (or other kinds) in “communities of brethren” have failed to spread and are now rife with dissension and pointlessness. Think of the Quakers, the Amish, the Hutterites, the Mennonites – and many others… they are dying anachronisms in this society. Few are attracted to their ways because they make no sense and their interactions with the modern world are full of contradictions.

What would make sense, then, in today’s world? Only an individual can find that answer, test it, and choose to walk in such a “sensible” way. Only the one who has learned NEVER to cry out: “Help me!” Only the one who has seen beyond hope; who has exposed the mockery of faith; who knows that love is a chimera. Only the one who’s quest for more of life is untrammeled by belief systems, whether such are based on God, Money or raw Power.