The Gulags in Boston's Seaport District

   In the booming Seaport District of Boston, expensive condos are being crammed together on a strip of land jutting out to sea next to Boston Harbour. General Electric just made the area the site for its corporate headquarters.  A friend who works there described to me the stacking together of condos and corporate office buildings as “a gulag”.  But at least the  high-tech slaves working in the gulag are ordered about as delicately as possible. And unlike slaves in poor gulags, they trudge home from their servile labor to their new condos with credit and debit cards nestled in their handbags or wallets loaded with value. Another difference between the inhabitants of the old gulags and the workers in the Seaport District is that  servile workers who live in expensive condos do not need to be guarded nights and on weekends. Chic restaurants, exercise rooms, love and mortgage payments keep them rooted to the terrain.

  Millennials have been in gulags since junior high school. A successful millennial knows that the only basis for a happy life is life behind walls either real or virtual. A millennial looks forward to working in a corporate gulag. His education has prepared him for it. All his life he has been successful in various corporate environments. He has carefully crafted his mind and his learning experiences to adapt to tasks that produce value for himself by working with others.

   Amazingly, a state of the American union is presently deciding to fight for the rights of citizens in the gulags against the corporations. Angry protests just broke out among business owners and CEOs because the Senate and the House of Massachusetts may approve a bill to require employers to offer paid time off for a newborn child or a sick family member. It would establish 16 weeks of paid family and medical leave and up to 26 weeks of disability pay. This means that a state with more money and more power than any corporation is working to support the interests of millennials in the gulags. Can their political comfort level put up with it? Can successful Americans survive psychologically whole when a state helps him? Can they understand that life in their corporate gulags in places like the Seaport District must not be the only component of civil life in the future? The acts of states like Massachusetts, states with limited sovereign powers, fighting for the rights of individual employees against  corporations must also be a civil component of the future or else the whole of America will become a gigantic, universal gulag. Let the corporations be totally free to pursue and create wealth globally because they are good at it. But we should also favor as a condition of their freedom a global political union of states that works for our individual freedom and welfare against corporations. Washington has been steadily working since the Civil War to reduce the political powers of American states but they have still enough power to help individuals in the civil war they should fight to bring economic benefits and human rights even to gulags.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

Brexit Rules

   An American can reach in the depths of the soul a peculiar solitude that comes from feeling deeply alone without having the trappings around him of a nation. Europeans in the romantic period of the 19th century pushed their lonely imaginings back in time to other less mechanized and less rationalized periods but they always kept the borders of some nation fixed securely about them. Henry Thoreau during the romantic period discovered transcendence and inspiration wandering alone in the woods around Concord. His great book Walden extols the virtues of solitude. As for a nation, he wrote that he had for the first time in his life the experience of living in a nation listening just before the Civil War to a lecture in Concord by the anti-slavery, anti-government radical John Brown.

  Brexit proved many Europeans prefer to be alone in a nation and that being alone without one is perhaps too painful. The young in the UK were all for denationalization. They were willing to face the perils of solitude wandering freely about the 28 nations of the European Union with the political right to live and work in any state of the union simply by taking up residency in one as in America. Their elders decided they needed borders, limits to their freedom, one mighty all-powerful sovereign government, one state, one nation, one monster with a hundred eyes focused on them forever and present even in their solitude which will never be as deep and unbridled as Henry Thoreau’s American solitude.

  Oh, it’s not so bad solitude in America. Brexit is showing signs of ruling here too. We never found a name for our nation because our legal name, The United States of America, simply doesn’t ring true for a nation. But some delegates to both the Republican and Democratic conventions that nominated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to run for President in November were heard shouting, USA! USA! USA!.  It does little to soothe your solitude on a lonely night to tell yourself you live in a place named USA but it will have to do. Brexit is a red flag yelling that many Americans and Europeans don’t like living alone or otherwise with the extensive freedoms and the national emptiness of a union of states.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

Unity Guaranteed by Disunity

  The American political system is united by its disunity. That is its genius. There is at work in it a successful union of states because none of them are fully sovereign like nation-states and its central government in Washington has neither full sovereignty nor a location in any state. No doubt the men who created the Constitution and the men in the 13 states who ratified it had no perfectly clear idea of the full meaning of their commitment. States still acted as sovereign states and Washington acted as a state even though it was not a state. 11 states seceded from the union and declared themselves again sovereign even though they had sworn allegiance to a Constitution that limited their sovereignty. Abraham Lincoln used his exclusive power over war granted by the Constitution to make war on seceded states just as though he were the leader of a state. Non-sovereign states decided they were sovereign and the Washington government which is not a state and is not located in a state acted as though it were a state. History shaked and rattled the American system and even tried to destroy it in the Civil War but it held because it was based on unity out of disunity and even the discord of 3 years of war could not break its unity.

  The two political parties we observe at conventions nominating candidates for president have their origin in the reality that there is no such thing in America as one sovereign government with full power. Each party, Democrat and Republican, dreams of holding the governor’s offices of the 50 states, majorities in state legislatures, the presidency in Washington, and a majority in Congress. It is a dream that would unify everything from the bottom up and from the top down. But the disunity that the Constitution sets up always crushes the dream to make America like other states. None of our 50 states are sovereign and our central government is neither sovereign nor a state when dealing with American citizens. Political freedom, real political freedom, does not consist in setting up states with full power but in cutting down their power so that they can concentrate on fulfilling the dreams of humanity for good works rather than on their unholy lust for full power.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

The Birth of a Nation in a Union of 50 States

    The millions of us who will vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have been told now for five generations since Abraham Lincoln that the government in Washington is a national government and that the President is the leader of a nation. President Lincoln decided that his government was national and he used his absolute power over the military to wage war against Americans living in 11 states. At least 600,000 Americans died in 384 major battles. After his extraordinary political machinations and his victory in the war, there was no going back to a union of sovereign states as it existed before the war.Too much blood had been shed. There had to be a reason for it. President Lincoln had to have been right morally and politically. No nation existed before the war nor one afterwards but there had to be one. Most historians writing American history threw objectivity out the window and searched for evidence of an American nation all the way back to 1620 when a small group of English colonists arrived at Plymouth in Massachusetts. The concept of a nation helped  politicians stuff a lot of money in their pockets and they cared nothing about this or that word describing America or this or that use of history as long as they had power. A nation was born. It had to exist to keep more and more power heading to Washington and away from the states.

  So whom should we vote for to lead the nation? We have to vote for the candidate who can best pretend for four years to be a leader of a nation and meanwhile diligently do the real job of an American president by leading the world. Foreigners all believe the United States is both a nation and a de facto world government. They do not see any conflict between the two roles which are logically obverse. They have a world government in Washington that guarantees their existence as nations. We Americans have no government in Washington leading us as a nation and we do not generally in our work-a-day lives accept that it is also a world government that goes on lickety-split all over the world eagerly trying to manage as benevolently as possible everyone but us. We will listen as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton hurl invectives at each other and argue not a bit about real national issues as though there were none. Our votes in November will decide who leads the world. The nation will go on just as Abraham Lincoln bequeathed it to us. We will go on each of us living in one of our fifty sovereign states believing because of our unshakable loyalty to Washington and because of our love for a glorious and profoundly revolutionary political system that our America with citizens of every racial and national origin speaking countless worldwide languages is our nation.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

Penitential Politics

   All the 7 sacraments are outward signs of an inner spiritual transformation. Saint-Cyran, a priest and leader of the Jansenist movement in 17th century France, wrote “that everything is invisible and insensible in sacraments and that it is necessary to keep in view only Good Works which should be our main business.”  Good Works are not for him merely doing something good, which anyone can do easily. Good Works are penitential and painful human acts inspired by grace that fulfill and develop and sustain grace in the soul by selfless acts of self-sacrifice accomplished in the human world. They are equal to sacraments.

   We American Christians can act practically to bring God’s grace to the world. It is a blessed sacrament that you feel in your heart to love someone who hates you or to do penance by doing good works for poor people who do little good and even harm good people.  Grace is everything. But it has a positive side only by penitential good works.

  A political act can be penitential. Why then should we American Christians not do something that is painful for most of us? Why should we not force our government to admit to our union of states a state in Africa full of poor, suffering, ignorant people? American Christians are always demanding that the government act in ways that are morally right according to their religious beliefs. Saint-Cyran demands that we force ourselves penitentially to do good works if we wish to do God’s will expressed by his grace. The Constitution says in Article IV Section 3 that Congress can admit new states to our union. Let’s tell our representatives in Congress to admit a poor state as our fifty-first state even if we dislike doing it and realize at last that not only our lives but our politics must be penitential to be truly Christian.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

in various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

The Supreme Value of the West

   Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives and a onetime professor of history, said recently that Moslems who confess they believe in Sharia law should not be allowed to live in Western states because they are in direct conflict with Western values. He is right. As a general principle, no one should live in a state where they are hostile to its values. But what are Western values?

  We have reached in the West a strange new secularism. Its origins lie both in Christianity and in Paganism. The Pagan Roman Empire was secular during the birth and development of Christianity. At first the new Church was non-pagan and strictly opposed to secularism. Its fundamental belief, expressed widely in the writings of St Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries, was that salvation is the result of God’s direct influence in the human soul through grace and that human effort alone is of no value. Writers like Pelagius who taught the opposite were condemned as heretical but the notion that human effort could directly struggle towards salvation independently of God’s grace gained ground in the Catholic Church. Another word for Pelagianism is Secularism and the Church itself over time became semi-Pelagian or semi-secular. It was extremely difficult for the Catholic Church to settle on and announce clearly what it believed and it came dangerously close to becoming legalistic and moralistic and belief-istic rather than grace-istic as St. Augustine taught. It never came close to the legalistic nightmare of life under Sharia law but by Luther and Calvin’s time in the 16th century it was secularized enough to produce the Protestant rebellion. But the freedom to search for salvation individually broke the possibility of one united  Christian belief and allowed secularism and moralism into Christianity in Protestant churches as well as Catholic. The rationalism of the 17th century and the enlightenment of the 18th combined with scientism in the 19th and 20th centuries did the rest. Secularism came into the Western world in full force because so many influences preyed on people now free to think and believe as they wished. Their various churches became divided about what form of Christianity they believed and were not strong enough to oppose secularism. Western secularism is far from the rule of Sharia law but in a world where Christian beliefs can no longer possibly be unified, Christianity became itself an open door to secularism. It is not the old Paganism but it is not the old Christianity either.

   Paganism and Christianity have evolved over time through painful conflicts into the supreme value of Western culture, freedom. Our law is that everything must be free. Religion, politics, love, gender, education, knowledge, governments, businesses and everything else must be free enterprises. We are secular because we have never found a precise way to practice Christianity but the new secularism is nonetheless sacred. The best people are those who have discovered a new wholeness in their being by no longer seeking any final solution or fixed meaning in the face of life's problems. Freedom, real freedom, is their supreme value and the only laws they want are those that produce the civil peace necessary to develop their freedom towards worthy ends. Newt Gingrich is right. People who want a law for everything are not fit to live in the West.

Daniel McNeill

.

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

The United States of the World Is Here

The United States of the World is here. It is the political here and now. The contest for president between Trump and Clinton is about who will lead it. Clinton is more experienced in the subtle and passionate business of interweaving thousands of international political, military and economic projects into the daily, even hourly, fabric of Washington’s worldwide on-going weave. But Trump if elected will also have to sew into the fabric new worldwide designs. He will have no choice. Washington has rivers of money flowing into its hands both from American taxpayers and borrowings worldwide. The President and the Congress must direct the floods of money into new channels and the trick is it makes no sense to send money back directly into the hands of those who sent it. Sometimes enough money in the form of bills passed to aid individuals and corporations passes through Congress and the President in a week to fund many nations for a year. If Washington ever used its power only for the United States of America, it would be an economic catastrophe for the world. A president’s business is to see to it that Washington’s power aids the world to hold itself together economically and militarily as smoothly as possible. One sneeze from Washington and the world will start sneezing too and possibly develop a cold. To keep worldwide power working effectively, Washington must make deals with people worldwide who also have power. This means the rich. This means tyrants. This means rich corporations. So be it. Washington can hold the world together only by working with governments and organizations that also have power worldwide. The United States of the World is here. At present it has very few components holding it together. But it is nonetheless a going business. Political thoughts seeking to create a better world for humanity must somehow sew themselves into its on-going weave or become bits of threads lying useless on the ground.

Daniel McNeill

.

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

Assassination in Dallas and Political Genius

   An elderly African-American leader, a congressman who marched with Martin Luther King in the 1960s, said African-Americans were being “slaughtered” by policemen. This takes black leaders as far away as possible from the political genius of Martin Luther King. He understood that blacks needed political power and that real power existed only in Washington. His tactic was to gain power in Washington by protest marches in the deep south in cities in Alabama and Mississippi. At the time, Washington was promoting itself in the Cold War against communist Russia as a champion of freedom. King aimed his marches against out-and-out racists in the deep south so that television cameras would capture and show to the world that in America freedom was being beaten down in the streets. He attacked Washington indirectly but it was the real object of his attacks.

   An African-American leadership capable of preaching to blacks that they are being “slaughtered” by policeman is hopeless. The assassination of policemen yesterday in Dallas is the result. Blacks need power in Washington. The only way to gain power is to create an African-American voting bloc in Congress. The Irish, another politically oppressed people, had such a voting bloc in the 19th and 20th centuries in the British Parliament and decided some votes in exchange for political power for their people. African-American politicians elected to Congress should do the same for their people. Instead, the present black leadership in Congress passively votes along the lines of the Democratic party. A bloc of votes in Congress, where individual members commonly sell their vote without regard to their moral conscience, is, politically speaking, a huge pile of pure gold which can easily be exchanged for real help for poor blacks. Every rich corporation in the world desires to have the use of such a bloc and African-American leaders dealing with them as a group with great political power is worlds away from assassinating policemen in Dallas and directly in line with Reverend Martin Luther King’s political genius.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill

Crossing All Borders Everywhere Freely

   An immigrant arrived recently in Italy from Kenya in Africa. He said in English to reporters that he came for a better life. That is what I want too. A better life. If it means leaving the state where I was born, then so be it. States can still be states without national borders keeping people out. I and the immigrant from Kenya and everyone in the world should have the right to go and live in any state to live a better life. It makes sense.

   I have so far in my life lived and worked in 5 states. In each state I had the right to register to vote simply because I took up residence in it. None of them had the right to prevent me from living in them with full democratic rights. 45 other states in the American union of states are also open to me. In no matter what state I live, I am subject to laws of the state and also to laws of the central government of the union located in Washington in a federal district. I vote for the governor of the state I live in and for the president of the US. I vote for representatives to the legislatures of two governments, one state and one federal.The citizens of American states have all the democratic power they need because they vote by right for political leaders for two governments neither of which are fully sovereign.The federal government in Washington is not a state, is not located in a state and it like all the 50 states does not possess by law full sovereignty. American politicians in 51 legislatures create laws that can be legally challenged by any citizen and overturned in both state and federal courts. States can still be states without full sovereignty but only in a union of states willing to grant in a written constitution limited sovereign powers to a central government. The American union proves that politicians can recover from addiction to the political drug sending a hallucination flashing through their minds convincing them that they and their citizens can not be free unless they live locked up behind national borders in a fully sovereign nation-state. Nation-states should apply to the Congress in Washington for admission to the American union and completely cure their politicians of a bad habit. Then we can one day all live in any state we wish to try to find like the Kenyan immigrant a better life.

Daniel McNeill

.

Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at

https://www.amazon.com/End-All-Beginnings-Daniel-McNeill-ebook/dp/B01IO1PEXO/ref=sr

Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.

Also available as a book for $5.99.

A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between

a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother

46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five

In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right

from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it

can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected

and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards

one liberating ending to all its beginnings.

Daniel McNeill