Fighting Back

In the past 24 hours I have watched my wife and friend of 20 years go into a comatose state brought on by pure fear and hopelessness. 

Yes, the chemical explanation is the return of her metastatic activity in her brain terrified her and she produced so much of a cortisol over load in her brain that it literally shut down her brain's ability to the extent that her bodily functions began to fail.

In short her fear of dying almost killed her.

We have battled through this and it appears she is now coming out of this almost coma like state and is beginning to eat and smile and almost enjoy the mere fact that she is alive, again.

It is too early too say, and the next few weeks will be very critical, but for the moment she is fighting back.

During this period of time, though obviously not to the same degree of severity and certainly not to the same degree of finality, we held very ugly meetings with representatives from a supplier with whom we are very dissatisfied.

Yesterday, a good friend and investor and very important part of our company and I spent two hours dealing with the representatives from a major manufacturer of an important piece of the mechanical design of our system for our company battling over whether they "did or did not" provide to us (based on the design and functionality of what we felt we had purchased and believed we had agreed upon contractually for them to provide) and deliver to us what we in fact felt we had paid and agreed too.

I won't name names or trash the actual company and its representatives (that would probably get me in trouble even on my own blog, given the litigious nature of the world in which we live today) but long story short, they were liars and "bull shitters". 

Even given the fact that there is always pretty much two sides to every story this two hour discussion defied belief.

In short, despite an embarrassingly long list of documented design, manufacturing and installation, deficiencies they absolutely, without shame, argued that not a single problem was their fault. 

Now sitting aside the fact that it is statistically impossible for any of us, let alone a company or conglomerate, to be perfect in any given situation and that in any disagreement there are always mistakes made by both sides, the attempts at intimidation and the overweening arrogance of their position bordered on the pathological.

No resolution has been ratified though there is some hope that this pathology was simply a posturing game and that we will be able to move forward without metaphorical bloodshed, (read litigation or arbitration with counter claims and only the lawyers getting richer) yet, the combination of Lori's condition juxtaposed against the absurdity of the posturing of this supplier yielded in a very unexpected way an "epiphany".

The world has gotten to the point where we don't fight back, even when we know we are right. 

Maybe it is we are too comfortable and scared to lose that level of comfortable existence, maybe we are too scared of death and despair to let it have an opportunity to over take us, maybe we are embarrassed or afraid to be embarrassed or embarrass those whom we care for, maybe we are just cowards, but the truth is we don't fight back. 

I am not talking about bull shit political wars and regional conflicts, I am talking how as individuals we have lost our nerve. 

My epiphany is that we have lost our ability to stand up in the world of twitter and texting and Face book, and other social media and say,"that is bull shit" and I did not do that or this, or whatever the hell it is of which I or we are being accused of, by whomever for whatever.

We are afraid of being accused of anything and everything because the world has evolved where "accusation equals guilt" and for some stupid reason we give a damn about how the great impersonal body of "them" judges us.

I read the most tragic article I have read in a long time about a human being today. 

Usually it is stories about animals that tear my heart apart but today, I think on Yahoo, (I may be wrong about the source), I read a story about a young girl who was denied attending her prom and she killed herself. 

How fucked up have we become?

First of all who in the hell has the right or authority on some damn school board to tell a young girl she cannot attend her own damn prom. 

And the fact that she had absolutely no support group around her strong enough to help her through this trauma, to the extent that she felt her only choice was suicide, is a condemnation on all of us.

None of us are perfect, no one is without sin, I believe in a God and in my case, I believe Jesus was God made physical on this earth to enable us to have some chance to live beyond this stupid material-spirit realm.

But neither Jesus nor God nor belief in both or any other deity makes us perfect. 

We are imperfect, we mess up, we sin, "God forbid", we even have bad thoughts, and we do bad things, but not every sin, not every wicked thought, not every failing, is deserving of societal judgement, let alone condemnation and punishment. 

Any body ever hear of "Judge not least ye be judged".

Nor should it have to go to court or be adjudicated by the "system", that nebulous, unreal, false, and flawed concept of "them" who be in power. 

No one should be in power. 

No government, no body of imperfect assholes, should decide and pass judgment on and for other imperfect assholes. 

Dammit, I hate to sound like Ronald Reagan but given that aside from certain things that are just wrong, like "boiling babies in bath water" or enslaving 5 year olds to work in mines, damn near everything else is cultural and relativistic. 

You kill someone, then " Lex talionis" (probably spelled that wrong) or an "eye for an eye", but truthfully short of that, people need to start fighting back.

One size does not fit all and by "God", there are two sides to every story and nothing is as simple as we all want it to be.

We put up dome 2 today. 

A friend sent me an article from the New York Times touting the fact that some guy (and I give this guy great credit) is now producing 40,000 pounds of shrimp a year in a warehouse somewhere up north. 

If GBT hits half of our production figures two of our domes will produce 1 million plus pounds of shrimp a year.

This is what our farm looks like as of today. 

We have a ways to go and we have some challenges but we are making progress toward finding a sustainable, ethical, way of feeding large amounts of people with copious amounts of healthy and natural marine protein that does not endanger the oceans. 

One of the most moving cartoons of the American Revolution, I think done by Franklin but perhaps some other patriot, was the one where they had a snake cut into thirteen colonies with the caption, "either we hang together or surely they will hang us separately".

We need to quit aiding and abetting "them", we need to start giving our fellow citizens the "the benefit of the doubt", we need to go back to "innocent until proven guilty", not guilty unless you can prove you are innocent".

In short, we need to start "fighting back". 

We to cry "bull shit" on the fake solutions, the false promises, the failed initiatives, and fix the earth ourselves and not let "them" tell us or dictate to us how we have to do it. 

"They" are not fixing anything. 

They are just judging and punishing and taxing us while "they" enrich and empower themselves. 

Fight back, we really do not have anything to lose.