Release Date of Down the Highway, a Peace soon to be known, Dear Reader

This is a note now to my blog readers. Few of you know I have written poetry my entire adult life since the the age of eighteen. Well, that’s hardly earthshaking, now is it?

Two observations I wish to share as an opener here: (a) the years of my life are not exactly chronicled in these poems but with work - which I have now done - they have a story to tell; and (b) having them published has never fueled the writing of the poems (which therefore had but one audience member - myself - to satisfy).

Recently, I decided to sign a contract with Friesen Press which holds itself out to those who in fact are not looking for a vanity press experience, and yet do not have ready access to traditional and established book publishers. Friesen like a traditional publisher also can refuse the authors who can not come to grips with the realities of a contract relationship with a publisher. What Friesen does is leave its author's in position to exploit publication avenues both traditional and new. I have now chosen between traditional retail bookstores and the online world (more about that choice from me will come later).

The contract with Friesen requires that I choose (which meant I had a business decision to make). The balance between the two domains for booksales is slight. The traditional booksellers take a huge chunk of the proceeds (55%) leaving 10% for the author for a royalty payment. The online world can offer upwards of 40% for the author royalty with the online retailer taking just 25% of the proceeds. The market place, if honestly logical, would pay me ultimately the same royalty gross regardless of which pathway I should choose. Alas, the world is not so perfectly inclined (and I am no business major to know better).

What is at risk here is a significant financial investment on my part, which in hindsight I actually value as an incentive (much like being dropped into a wilderness and then having to survive in the wilds). The reason is that once I decided to invest in my book of poems, the making of the book required that the poems reach a higher level of finesse and refinement as part of a larger effort, the book of poems itself.

This is just a start in communicating to you what is going to happen very soon. You will be able to buy a book (paperback or hardback) or ebook of my poetry collection entitled Down the Highway, a Peace.

When I perform the poems live, I will sell books and autograph them and collect the payment for the book. One day if I work myself into being a performer of my poems, I believe I will yet have a return on my investment, not only in dollars paid to Friesen Press but also the personal investment in writing poems that I ultimately saw fit to share with the world at large (which clearly has no interest in these poems which are not especially learned or academic or approved literature but hopefully insightful and entertaining and inspiring too).

Rest assured, my dear readers, the fate of my book as I send it (my erstwhile child) into the world is not dependent on your buying my book. Should you read it one day (even if it was only a used book copy or library copy) do let me know if I entertained you for a good read and a solid elucidation of this life. Or better yet recommend it to a friend or fellow reader.

We are after all partakers of a culture that is premised on beauty and passion and realization of what it means to be fully human, flawed, broken, and yet so very much alive to possibility and to love, albeit a dog or a cat or humanity itself. When next I write you on this blog, it will be to share with you the news of a publication date certain (which should be known to me shortly).

Rick Hilber

Have a great day!

Dear Reader.


One supposes that another who has achieved an advance stage of enlightenment
Does not have to contend with the purely obstructionist character of reality.

The Sage of Past Passions and Meaningless Intellectual Astuteness sends you his healing waves of compassion.

If you read a little deeper in my blog today, a poem and an essay for reflection await you. Have a great day. 

Rick Hilber

So Alone in Your Room - Not!

Sweat Sixteen

by Rick Hilber

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Your church has shunned you
For having accused its elder
Of sexual impropriety.
Your child asks, “What’s that?”

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

The home paid for back in 2009
With your child’s death benefit
Your former wife now has lost,
Lost as she always has been in a stupor.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Suspended from duty, you exclaim,
For shooting dead a homeless man
Who pulled a knife when startled by your stick.
What do you do for your badge of honor?

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Told at the V.A. to suck it up,
The daughter home at last
Sleeps in night sweats
Back in Afghanistan.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Sixteen long years she took to die,
Living for others in the moment,
Your child’s abandoned you now.
Has she really ever left, you wonder?

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

 
News of your only child in prison
Is that he’s started on ministry
To wash himself first of his shame,
A comfort to others just the same.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Your teenager who handed off a gun
To the police officer back in 3rd Grade,
Now reads in the paper its use
In the homicide of a child.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

A former spouse who absconded
With your life savings calls you
Out of the blue for a night’s stay,
But you send him away by rights.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

You’ve been a john in a sting,
Shut out of your home too,
A shame to your children.
Allowed home again? What chance?

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

What help all that practice of meekness
When stopped on the freeway
For a taillight that was out, or not,
And thrown to the pavement and cuffed?

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Trapped in a sadness, a room without exit,
You weep for the suffering of others
Safe in your room, safe but alone,
But not without a paper and a pen.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Your seminary committee
Refused you ordination for
Your spiritual reservations,
Or was it for mental aberrations.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Your husband makes a living
Selling worthless bonds he’s said
Defrauding the simple minded
With his familiar seductive charm.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

I hear they consider you an early senile,
They who now vote down public education,
The same for whom you funded private lessons
And the ones you segregated in exclusive academies.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Your boss refuses you a living wage
While his limousine idles in the lot
And his trophy wife rules from home
That no one is to blame, he parrots.

Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?

Let me take you by the hand,
We are not alone I say.
We have shared what we each have,
What little we have with another.

©2015 by Richard J. (Rick) Hilber.
All rights reserved.

America's for the Downtrodden to Step on Someone Else for a While

America’s for the Downtrodden to Step on Someone Else for a While

By Rick Hilber

I live in a housing cooperative. I am a shareholder in the corporation that is my landlord. I am a tenant. This is as close as anyone wants to come in my country to being a communist. That is communist with a small “c” and without the attitude about religion which makes communism a religion of godless materialism (which is what capitalism is in one’s disinterested understanding of economics). The essence here is the difference between being well and doing well and having it “all”. I think the real point I have to make is buried under way too much human detritus!

Americans are not communists, and my life in my cooperative has firmly established in my mind that we have no business trying to live like a community of owners who have to defer to the collective will. But beyond that and the histrionics of being driven mad by selfishness among co-owners, I have reached the firm conviction that communism (with a small “c”) is like capitalism (oops, another “c” word), both of which have winners and losers. The winners end up with all the marbles, and the rest of us have our soup lines. Boy, is that my punch line, or what?


What that looks like is - Joseph Stalin on one side and Andrew Carnegie on the other. They are both bad for the environment, degrading it, and subverting it to their own self-aggrandizement. Such is the human condition. To prove my point Joseph Stalin ended up in both a hot and a cold war, the hot war with a maniacal dictator like himself, and the other with western capitalism over who has what and who isn’t going to get it or “any” for that matter! By the way, Joe’s statues make good grapeshot, and Andrew’s philanthropy makes western Christianity look like redemption itself!


Remember, those of you who read, that Warren Buffett, capitalist par excellence, knows beyond knowing that you can’t take “it” with you, and leaving it to your children and grandchildren will destroy what cogency they each should have as worthwhile human beings! I think I know why Warren has gotten it right. At ninety plus years of life, he and his buddy Charles T. Munger, did it together. They were always about the fun of getting, not having and spending for itself, and as I would have it, about being, not having. Warren knows that if one is into having, what you have will have you! You would spend all your time worrying about others trying to take from you what you have accumulated, for one thing! For me to find a communist of similar wisdom, I have to go back to St. Benedict, and the root of monasticism, the desert fathers of the early Church (that would be what the early Christian religion reduced itself to when the world itself had been had by the Roman Empire which is the triumph of a bunch of white guys over everybody else - much like our Wall Street crowd which ironically takes welfare bail outs as needed).


Our modern atheists do have a little connumdrum. They can buy into having or being. If they deal with the ethics of that, I am amazed at how Christian communists and Christian capitalists end up in the same place. On the other hand: our modern Christians do seem to shoot themselves in the foot if they lose sight of the economic premise of Jesus Christ himself, the one who originally taught us that being, not having, is probably fifty-one percent of human capacity to be a higher life form than a snake!


So what is this essay trying to say? I’ll tell you in a nut shell. Doing what is right by yourself and your neighbor (or enemy) is what defines us as a higher life form. It takes thoughtfulness, and it takes mindfulness, and it takes mercy both for yourself and another. Marriage is I think the best example of that of which I speak. I for one wasted at least half of my married days focused on having a wife to keep (which I am miserable at doing) and being a husband (which oddly enough doesn’t even need a wife to keep to be fully enacted, lived out, and appreciated).


The best things in life are free and without appreciation either (which means no one else wants them). Been on an early morning walk and watched the sunrise lately? It will be you and maybe just one other on the high bridge over Saint Paul (that would be the city) watching the sun rise over the hills of Pigs Eye Lake just past the airport where the corporate jets are coming in for that really, really big meeting on the fortieth floor of the Wells Fargo building.


So today, be a dad, be a grandfather, be a lover of humanity. Don’t suffer even one minute about what you do or don’t have (including advantages over others), and walk in humility and confidence into the day which by the way God created just for you to be your very best self. If you should read this, it is my self-talk (that would be No. 307) and is not available for other than the sharing it with others. God bless you too for that sharing of hard earned wisdom - should it be in you to pass it on (the “it” being love of your fellows while you are yet here, not above [heaven’s for Christians only I hear], or down under the ground - which is after all our common lot).


Oh yah, one last thing. Don’t bother sharing this with a politician. They will parrot it back to you if they know it’s what you want to hear. Geez, is democracy not great? They even pay you for your vote! A young guy stops me on the street to ask if he can join the Tea Party. I tell him to stay away from the facts, do not subscribe to more than one newstation’s point of view, and let pundits pander to your worst fears about minorities, women, and immigrants. That should do it, I tell him. He walks off with a smile on his face, and looks back at me and says, “Coming from a overeducated bum, that’s not half bad!”

©2015 by its author Richard J. (Rick) HIlber

A Psychiatrist’s Letter to Young People about Fifty Shades of Grey

A Psychiatrist’s Letter to Young People about Fifty Shades of Grey

The good doctor speaks in a forthright manner.   The movie discussion (what's wrong with this picture - let me count the whys) is indeed an excellent outline for conversation with one's teen and pre-teen children about healthy sexuality.  As the doctor itemizes the "whys" it becomes clear the movie by posing as entertainment teaches the negatives.  Speaking of the abyss of sexualization of a relationship without marriage is not enough information for young people.  They do need much more information.  That's why church communities have embraced education for life and living inclusive of human sexuality.   Watching the movie as entertainment per se becomes a reflection on the individual who might argue in  defense of the postures taken by the two young people in the film!   Hopefully, they have an excellent psychiatrist/psychologist relationship to bring them to the real issues that have destroyed the natural potential for true human intimacy and mutually beneficial relationship without the use or abuse exhibited in this movie.

The Watch is the Statism Watch for Liberal Left and Conservative Right.

Capitalism makes no stranger of statism of any brand of statism: fascism, nazism, phalangism, communism, and socialism. State ownership of the means of production under our system of laws should actually maximize employee/worker due process rights (no termination without just cause).

The really bad press for state ownership is really about enshrining the profit taking behavior of the investor class and the management class at the expense of the working class and the consumer class. Then on top of the bad press, we the American public are told time and time again that income tax assessments of corporations are passed through to the consumers with increased prices. Well, that is a no duh (and what corporation fit to invest in ever really has taxable income?).

What is wrong in all of this is that the effective income taxation of personal income of investors from sale of stock and payment of dividends is minimized by Congress. Thus over time the top 10% and the top 1% grow filthy rich, the middle class of employed workers and consumers begins to shrink, and the poverty class is badmouthed as the cause of social reform public expense (which shields us from recurrence of the Watt's Riots and the revolution that results when society is destabilized by true ruling class - the wealthy). Go figure. But do your homework.

True patriotism is keeping our society open (which means accountable from the top down) and progressive and inclusive.

Note bene. The recent entries by this author to the blog concern statism (which concern properly understood ties the conservative right (even libertarians) to the liberal left. Notice I did not say conservatives to liberals. The reason I am a liberal is that I believe in effective societal and community care with government taking the lead and responsibility for the welfare of people for which and to whom it must be both responsible and accountable. I reason I am a leftist because I want government not to exceed necessary state power. The debate in Congress and the state houses of the country is about that very thing - the extent of state power - and the Courts both state and federal must monitor with absolute rigor what then is both unnecessary and unreasonable grabs of power (which is our watch for creeping statism which unites the right and left in this country with the middle or moderate folks).

Lenin deserves no honor, no remembrance of his birthday

In some quarters, the birthday of V.I. Lenin is being marked today. If you do not object to any honor for Lenin,think again. Why should one object? Here's why and whether you are a conservative or a liberal, or, most especially, a socialist (as in a non-communist socialist):

Bad blood after all these years as between socialism (which is neither atheistic nor theistic nor Christian, and so on ...) over the absolutism of Marxist Leninism. Had Democracy or even representative democracy been allowed to proceed in Russia of 1917, communism might, even if atheistic and anti-religion in its politics, have had some legitimacy in my eyes.

The revolution preceded the crimes of Lenin. The revolution led to the Republic and most assuredly was dead with the execution of Karensky. Sad, very sad.

Just so you know that for years and years I prayed the Rosary for the conversion of Russian which was by state decree atheistic and persecuted persons of religious conviction. Not sure if God can be said to have currently prevailed in the modern Russian state. Today I again pray the Rosary but for a different reason.

What time has taught many of us is that Russia in its very soul lives or dies if the center (the center being the power brokers in the Kremlin) does not hold. Unfortunately for the Russian people and all the bullied ethnic minorities of Russia and its client states, the center has time and time again trashed minorities, especially the individual who says emphatically to the state: NO! The tsars did it, Lenin did it, Stalin most assuredly did it, and others, and sadly Mr. Putin, the old KGB man does too.

Absolutism and statism scare the bejesus out of liberals such as myself, and pardon me if I retch at any idea of celebrating the birthday of Vlad!

Liberals and conservatives who do not know the dangers of statism of any stripe scare the bejesus out of me (as in fascists, nazis, and communists to name a few). Limited government gives people hope, and legitimate government requires of itself the reasonable and necessary curtailment of state power.

Communism in control of the state has proven again and again that it is its own worst enemy for no greater reason than that it prevails by becoming absolutist and dictatorial and extremist. China carries the banner of vested interest in capitalism today. In that sense it provides for now a future for its communist regime (at least if one ignors the human rights abuses rampant in its realm). Capitalism and communism are not strange bedfellows anymore than it was for the Nazi and the Fascists and the Phalangists.