Torture and music

Music doesn’t have to be discordant to be torturous – just loud, close, and vibrating your home when you are attempting to sleep.

I have a dream that someone has stuck his hand thru a vent and is pulling on my sleeping bag, trying to wake me up. He is with a woman and they want me to buy drugs from them.

I am torn what to do – I don’t believe in the use OR the punishment of illegal drugs and users.

If you could see how these lands here have been taken from the people and turned into mega-farms – food for the u.s. market primarily I’m sure. Driving here is like driving on I-5 in the valley, as straight but more narrow, and surrounded by fields after fields after fields.

There is more of the natural foliage left growing here along the road and sporadically in between and around fields. The land looks rich brown, much of it delta left from ancient rivers flowing to the ocean. The rivers now are all ugly grey skim on sluggish patches of wet. Banks extend naked 10 feet at least, much like Mt. Shasta Lake during a drought and after a long hot summer.

But unlike Mt. Shasta Lake, these former rivers now have green foliage growing where the bottom of the river should be, if it filled up in the spring.

Of course turning the land into farm land, there was the opportunity to provide jobs for people –  providing they want to be farmers and are growing organic.

But now, there are horrific, low paying, hardest work jobs as those of us who’ve ever worked on a mega-farm know. And dangerous to one’s health handling so much pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers and gawd knows what else.

In my dream I am torn about what to do about the drug dealers. They are gringos, so I know they’re not farmers who have lost anything – or maybe they are.

People who choose to sell drugs are not people who have a lot of other wonderful choices in their lives.

Do I point the police in their direction and if so, which police? I am happy to wake and realize I have no decision to make.

But my happiness is only momentary. It is most likely the loud, booming music vibrating thru my truck that has waken me up, not someone sticking their hand thru the vent. I hear male voices in between the songs and take solace first in the rhythms of the songs, and later in the fact that this is battery-run vibrations.

I’m sure there is hardly anyone on the beach and it stretches – the paved part – for at least ¼ mile. These guys did NOT have to park right next to me. But they might be farther away then I think.

Actually, everyone opens their doors and blasts their music, rivaling the volume of a Mexican nite club, while hanging out on the beach, so loud, so much base, the cars are keeping rhythm.

Usually, I can sleep thru anything, or at least meditate my way thru. Tonite, the batteries – and the interest of the men – seem to last longer than my ability to tune everything out.

I think about the torture we put human beings thru in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan forcing them to be inundated with horrific discordant sounds. I think at least this is music that I like, that I can relate to, that I could almost appreciate if the truck wasn’t bouncing and I wasn’t trying to sleep.

I wonder how I would be able to survive such torture, what kind of strength, fortitude, what? these human beings must have to sustain their lives after such torture.

And as always, I wonder about the human beings who participate – both directly and indirectly – with such torture against another human being.