I have written about each of these repeatedly, but for stark contrast, I want to put them side by each, (as the Yoopers, from just an hour's drive North say) for all to see, like an open letter to our entire culture. I feel the need to admit to both my own privilege, being able to drive an hour North in the first place reeks of affluenza and I have leaned to use my own privilege as a springboard to gain insight into how elites perceive the world.
When peaceful, loving people look out they see soulless ones willing to consume and desecrate Mother Earth and squander her bounty. I feel great empathy with this view, but I try to reflect the same vehemence of love. I furiously seek to have the oppressors be healed of their estranged ways. I think that a great wounding has occurred to these people, or they would not be able to hurt others the way that they do. I also believe in tough love, so I do not shy away from peeling back the layers of hurt that we all cause one another, that is where problems begin. A great healing has to come and it has got to begin immediately. It rises now in the hearts and very souls of all people, worldwide. Like the child who remarked that the King wore no clothes we must all declare the truth about our current leaders, their relations with oligarchs and the abuse of nearly all of our people for the gain of the 1%. These words are designed to call out the fallacies of which our yoke of oppression has been forged. When we realize just how riddled with holes the logic of oppression is, the easier it is to shirk.
The only thing missing from the visual story that appears below, is the key number that I heard yesterday. The U.S. military (including all contractors and sub-contractors) utilize Thirty-eight percent of all materials and energy used in our nation. 38%. That is thirty-eight percent, today, 38% yesterday and thirty-eight percent for as many tomorrows as we are blessed with or allow.
There are some things that we recognize as gifts, oftentimes there are other things that we do not...one of my favorite definitions of privilege is that the people who enjoy it often do not know that they do. The man, or nation hoarding gold never questions that mountains had to be ground to powder and treated with toxic chemicals to procure the stuff. The nuclear industry representative fervently believe the fictions that they tell, they have to or they would not be able to play their part in the charade. They "believe" the lies themselves as vigorously as we have tried to tell the truth, as much as we have protested, perhaps even more...but their complicity in telling their lies will have far-reaching consequences. When we all start to see that whatever part we play in the game, it carries a shred of complicity, that is when the tipping point will be reached and "the change" will be history. My bikes came from desecrated sites, so did my cars and when I push down on the fuel pedal, it sucks from the same petrochemicals that fuel the rest of the picture. Without knowing, or taking responsibility for whatever part we play, our healing cannot come. we will know the pain of dislocation and the estrangement from Mother Earth and her creatures until we shift to a different paradigm. For a time, perhaps about twenty years ago, the slogan "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm" appeared on countless bumper stickers. It seemed funny to me at the time, because it seemed far more important to forge a new one. This picture parable needs to be taught across the land, to all people and for the sake of all of our nations.
Special thanks again, to the Beehive Collective. This art is part of Creative Commons. Use at will.
I would like to thank the many artists who collaborated through the beehive collective to produce this image because it will help to define what I heard called Servoglobe many, many years ago. In the realm of privilege, it is a pay to play system upon which our current aristocracy has flourished. As you can see in this schematic diagram, there are plenty of distractions in our hyper-monetized system. The permit machine is pumping out permissions to pollute that are stamped with green seals of approval by a fan powered automaton, probably fueled by superheated air produced by coal-fired power generating stations. Another ephemeral (hollow) "dancer" encourages us to give so that we can "Feel Better" and if we look closely, it also tells us that we have almost reached our goal. Wall and Capitol Streets intersect and shadowy figures fly through the revolving doors between Congress and the Stock Exchange. None of this is fiction, we just don't hear about it on the evening news, in as comprehensive fashion, as this iconic representation declaims. The Washington Monument, dwarfed by corporate structures of glass and steel that also rise above puppeteers who are making agreements behind the scenes, on stage, but only through clownish proxies. The pinnacle of the Capitol shows the scales of justice, whose balancing act clearly "proves" that money weighs more heavily than trees which purify our air. Speaking of air, the giant mechanized reaper has even found a way to harvest the swirling veil of dollars that seem to float ominously in the air! Add to this, the seemingly unending streams of cash issuing from the ATMs and you can see, the lion's share is falling into the bag with the logo of approval emblazoned on it. Even the lighted signs reveal that the stock market continues up, up and up as sewerage issues from the very foundations upon which the permit machine is built.
The only parts of the natural world that seem to impinge on this heinous reality are the bare trees, symbolizing the winter of our discontent and the butterflies (change agents) trying to illuminate the reality of our "money machine".
Technocrats always side with the status quo, imagining that some benevolent overlord will see the sense of creating the next "solution" to any problem that can be identified. These are also very real victims of privilege, because they have been duped into thinking that we can survive on money (and ideas) alone. Whatever we think the future may hold, I can assure you that we cannot modernize and technologically outrun this heinous reality. Like a cancer in the body, the commercialism that feeds money to the 1% only assures them more privilege and power, politically, they will dictate our rules, morally, they will attempt to exert more social control over our lives and always allow less resources to flow down to the vast majority of people. They make their way by only allowing their terrible wastes to rain down. Billions of world citizens are being ground under the machinery of this mechanized oppression and extraction machine. The cream is not what rises to the top, but the soulless exploiters and their ilk. Our very blood has been used to oil the war machine.
I do not go into this level of detail to tell my readers that there is no hope or way out, but the opposite. I mention these things to make sure that we will all take a hard look around and understand that opting out of the current system may be the only way to catch our breath, to step away from the crack pipe as it were, and take a new turn that allows the old system to atrophy and fall away. We have become addicted to the theory that bigger is always better that there can always be more and more after that and that the ideal of any investor is the lure of exponential growth. Oddly enough, this perspective also turns a blind eye to nature and the systems upon which a healthy life can and has been built since the beginning of time.
Life is tenacious. Of that we can all be sure. Those who know nature know that even if our species dies out, life will continue to reign. We must be wary of where we plant our food, or where we allow our animals to graze. I once had to stop eating "free range eggs" because the farmer allowed his chickens to eat the bugs and stones from around his gravel driveway and the areas where he fueled all of his equipment. I did not know that this was the case, but tasted the diesel in my eggs one the morning. Luckily, I knew what it was and could taste it. Sure enough, when I went to talk with the farmer about the eggs, I saw what the problem was. Falling under the spell of Servoglobe, it is easy to forget, that after we are gone, the fumes that we produce to get places lies behind us like a wake of chemicals that continue to assault the ecosystem long after we are gone. The electric car will help some, but there will always be ecological costs for any high tech device.
We (with the aid of Exxon/Mobil) have contaminated our urban soils with lead. Any roadside built since the phase out of lead still has a host of chemicals spread along them such as brake linings, brake fluid, antifreeze, mercury, various and sundry acids and metals, microscopic and larger pieces of rubber, steel and a variety of nasty chemicals, just far less lead than it once did. One is surprised at how often I still find lead wheel weights in ditches and on the roads. Whatever lifeforms drink in the gutters or associated swales, streams and ponds, or eats food that grows in this contaminated dirt run the risk of ill health and premature death. Females must consider not just themselves, but future generations as well. In their generation they may have health effects, but some chemicals persist and manifest in their children, or two generations later. Consider that when a woman is born, she has all the eggs she will ever release already in her body, and that many of the most pernicious chemicals are stored in fat that is what the outer layer of each of our cells is.
Abundance is found when we step out of the trap that is the dominant paradigm. When we stop using the drug of choice, fossil fuels including coal, petroleum and petrochemicals. Turning away from the drugs of extraction is difficult, I will not lie, but it is well worth the effort. When we walk and ride bike, ride share or use local currency, meet our farmers, walk to our food and entertainment and feel included in a neighborhood that loves, supports and respects us, we take great strides to feeling healthy, happy and whole. What is the true value of doing what you love for people and with people that you care about? Whatever value it has certainly cannot support money-grubbers who live at a distance. This was the great strength of my great (times seven) grandfather Saladin. when his people came to town, he usually accepted half the tribute for twice the protection that any prior King had done before. He fostered what, for many, had been the first taste of having abundance. A great peace descended on Southern Europe under his "rule".
Anyone who can see that a pyramid so tall that the top 85 families on the planet hold as much wealth as all the rest of us, also knows that the only thing that reigns down on over eight million wage slaves are ecological catastrophe, ill-health and ever lower quality of life at ever increasing cost. Turning the tables or toppling such a top-heavy structure only requires us to stop propping up the whole lie-infested system. Lies need constant propping up (and you have to remember who you told what). The truth stands alone and needs no support. Look around.
There are growing local food movements, people know what to do to cut off the flow of money to massive Ag. The trend to have kitchen or victory gardens again is increasing in leaps and bounds. A local group here in Green Bay is installing one hundred and thirty 4 foot X 8 foot (1.3 m X 2.6 m ) garden beds in just three days, Check out this link to volunteer next weekend and help with transforming the future of Green Bay, We are all able to make changes that impact the quality of life that one another can revel in. We must jump at the chance! To the barricades! We must all act as one! Each one teach one, if you can mentor a child, think of the changes that will bring in One-hundred years! There are growing cadres of people who gather around machine shops, or artists cooperatives, natural food stores or local hardware shoppes, tinkers, welders, artists and the like, woodworkers and tradesmen and women of all stripes, who belong to "make" groups or tool lending libraries, quilting clubs or service organizations. Some people are great sources of obtanium (found, useful objects ripe for re-purposing) others have the know how to put objects together in new and creative ways, solving more than one problem by doing so.
First and foremost, what we need to do are the two things that power and control zealots cannot fathom or even risk trying. We are to love all people, care about them, respect and revere them. This trans-formative experience is required if we are to step into abundance. Even those who have slighted you, reigned their crap down on you, even if they tore up the land upon which you base your life and livelihood. Healing can only occur when we are loved. wounds cannot heal as long as they are picked at. There really are only two choices love or fear. Perhaps one day, I will be identified as the one who opened their heart to the soulless, and be taken away to be set before a tribunal, but I do believe that if we all go the right way, the highest echelons will find that they cannot eat money, we will be better off if we offer them a hand in learning how to live in a new way, giving peace a chance for the first time in history.
No longer can the argument hold up that our neighbors are somehow sub-human and deserving of our malice. The only threat since the beginning of "Western Civilization" has been living under illusory threat. this is what fed the ever growing wealth of the top 1%. Since the advent of the idea that someone else having more than you is reason enough to kill, we have lost our humanity. To regain it, perhaps we need to learn to give away our true selves doing what we love to do most, so that everyone can flourish. When the Russians first invaded Afghanistan, they cut down every tree in every compound in the nation. No longer would the people be allowed to have their refuges. What can one expect from that sort of neighborliness? The world leaders are complicit for not standing up then and declaring it a form of genocide. I still contend that if every American soldier deployed in Afghanistan, was given one thousand native fruit and nut trees, and told that they could go home when they had found people willing to care for the trees and helped to get them all planted, that their work there would be done, and that they could return home, we/they would not be having a problem now. Power and control only understands itself, only cares about itself and only exists to wreak havoc on others. I spit to get the words off my tongue.
This is how a single action can transform our culture from one of scarcity to one of abundance. The art of love dates back to before the beginning of language. The art of war is much younger than that. We hold within us the power to change direction, the strength to forge a new way of life. Fear and hate have taken us far off the path we need to be on to assure our survival. We have strayed far beyond the realm of sustainability. No new widget will save us, only using what we know has worked for all time to our advantage. In nature there is no waste, everything cast off is food for something else. When we step into that relationship with the planet, things will fix themselves right quick.
When peaceful, loving people look out they see soulless ones willing to consume and desecrate Mother Earth and squander her bounty. I feel great empathy with this view, but I try to reflect the same vehemence of love. I furiously seek to have the oppressors be healed of their estranged ways. I think that a great wounding has occurred to these people, or they would not be able to hurt others the way that they do. I also believe in tough love, so I do not shy away from peeling back the layers of hurt that we all cause one another, that is where problems begin. A great healing has to come and it has got to begin immediately. It rises now in the hearts and very souls of all people, worldwide. Like the child who remarked that the King wore no clothes we must all declare the truth about our current leaders, their relations with oligarchs and the abuse of nearly all of our people for the gain of the 1%. These words are designed to call out the fallacies of which our yoke of oppression has been forged. When we realize just how riddled with holes the logic of oppression is, the easier it is to shirk.
The only thing missing from the visual story that appears below, is the key number that I heard yesterday. The U.S. military (including all contractors and sub-contractors) utilize Thirty-eight percent of all materials and energy used in our nation. 38%. That is thirty-eight percent, today, 38% yesterday and thirty-eight percent for as many tomorrows as we are blessed with or allow.
There are some things that we recognize as gifts, oftentimes there are other things that we do not...one of my favorite definitions of privilege is that the people who enjoy it often do not know that they do. The man, or nation hoarding gold never questions that mountains had to be ground to powder and treated with toxic chemicals to procure the stuff. The nuclear industry representative fervently believe the fictions that they tell, they have to or they would not be able to play their part in the charade. They "believe" the lies themselves as vigorously as we have tried to tell the truth, as much as we have protested, perhaps even more...but their complicity in telling their lies will have far-reaching consequences. When we all start to see that whatever part we play in the game, it carries a shred of complicity, that is when the tipping point will be reached and "the change" will be history. My bikes came from desecrated sites, so did my cars and when I push down on the fuel pedal, it sucks from the same petrochemicals that fuel the rest of the picture. Without knowing, or taking responsibility for whatever part we play, our healing cannot come. we will know the pain of dislocation and the estrangement from Mother Earth and her creatures until we shift to a different paradigm. For a time, perhaps about twenty years ago, the slogan "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm" appeared on countless bumper stickers. It seemed funny to me at the time, because it seemed far more important to forge a new one. This picture parable needs to be taught across the land, to all people and for the sake of all of our nations.
Special thanks again, to the Beehive Collective. This art is part of Creative Commons. Use at will.
The only parts of the natural world that seem to impinge on this heinous reality are the bare trees, symbolizing the winter of our discontent and the butterflies (change agents) trying to illuminate the reality of our "money machine".
Technocrats always side with the status quo, imagining that some benevolent overlord will see the sense of creating the next "solution" to any problem that can be identified. These are also very real victims of privilege, because they have been duped into thinking that we can survive on money (and ideas) alone. Whatever we think the future may hold, I can assure you that we cannot modernize and technologically outrun this heinous reality. Like a cancer in the body, the commercialism that feeds money to the 1% only assures them more privilege and power, politically, they will dictate our rules, morally, they will attempt to exert more social control over our lives and always allow less resources to flow down to the vast majority of people. They make their way by only allowing their terrible wastes to rain down. Billions of world citizens are being ground under the machinery of this mechanized oppression and extraction machine. The cream is not what rises to the top, but the soulless exploiters and their ilk. Our very blood has been used to oil the war machine.
I do not go into this level of detail to tell my readers that there is no hope or way out, but the opposite. I mention these things to make sure that we will all take a hard look around and understand that opting out of the current system may be the only way to catch our breath, to step away from the crack pipe as it were, and take a new turn that allows the old system to atrophy and fall away. We have become addicted to the theory that bigger is always better that there can always be more and more after that and that the ideal of any investor is the lure of exponential growth. Oddly enough, this perspective also turns a blind eye to nature and the systems upon which a healthy life can and has been built since the beginning of time.
 |
Don't try this at home! These ants are trained professionals. |
We (with the aid of Exxon/Mobil) have contaminated our urban soils with lead. Any roadside built since the phase out of lead still has a host of chemicals spread along them such as brake linings, brake fluid, antifreeze, mercury, various and sundry acids and metals, microscopic and larger pieces of rubber, steel and a variety of nasty chemicals, just far less lead than it once did. One is surprised at how often I still find lead wheel weights in ditches and on the roads. Whatever lifeforms drink in the gutters or associated swales, streams and ponds, or eats food that grows in this contaminated dirt run the risk of ill health and premature death. Females must consider not just themselves, but future generations as well. In their generation they may have health effects, but some chemicals persist and manifest in their children, or two generations later. Consider that when a woman is born, she has all the eggs she will ever release already in her body, and that many of the most pernicious chemicals are stored in fat that is what the outer layer of each of our cells is.
Abundance is found when we step out of the trap that is the dominant paradigm. When we stop using the drug of choice, fossil fuels including coal, petroleum and petrochemicals. Turning away from the drugs of extraction is difficult, I will not lie, but it is well worth the effort. When we walk and ride bike, ride share or use local currency, meet our farmers, walk to our food and entertainment and feel included in a neighborhood that loves, supports and respects us, we take great strides to feeling healthy, happy and whole. What is the true value of doing what you love for people and with people that you care about? Whatever value it has certainly cannot support money-grubbers who live at a distance. This was the great strength of my great (times seven) grandfather Saladin. when his people came to town, he usually accepted half the tribute for twice the protection that any prior King had done before. He fostered what, for many, had been the first taste of having abundance. A great peace descended on Southern Europe under his "rule".
Anyone who can see that a pyramid so tall that the top 85 families on the planet hold as much wealth as all the rest of us, also knows that the only thing that reigns down on over eight million wage slaves are ecological catastrophe, ill-health and ever lower quality of life at ever increasing cost. Turning the tables or toppling such a top-heavy structure only requires us to stop propping up the whole lie-infested system. Lies need constant propping up (and you have to remember who you told what). The truth stands alone and needs no support. Look around.
There are growing local food movements, people know what to do to cut off the flow of money to massive Ag. The trend to have kitchen or victory gardens again is increasing in leaps and bounds. A local group here in Green Bay is installing one hundred and thirty 4 foot X 8 foot (1.3 m X 2.6 m ) garden beds in just three days, Check out this link to volunteer next weekend and help with transforming the future of Green Bay, We are all able to make changes that impact the quality of life that one another can revel in. We must jump at the chance! To the barricades! We must all act as one! Each one teach one, if you can mentor a child, think of the changes that will bring in One-hundred years! There are growing cadres of people who gather around machine shops, or artists cooperatives, natural food stores or local hardware shoppes, tinkers, welders, artists and the like, woodworkers and tradesmen and women of all stripes, who belong to "make" groups or tool lending libraries, quilting clubs or service organizations. Some people are great sources of obtanium (found, useful objects ripe for re-purposing) others have the know how to put objects together in new and creative ways, solving more than one problem by doing so.
First and foremost, what we need to do are the two things that power and control zealots cannot fathom or even risk trying. We are to love all people, care about them, respect and revere them. This trans-formative experience is required if we are to step into abundance. Even those who have slighted you, reigned their crap down on you, even if they tore up the land upon which you base your life and livelihood. Healing can only occur when we are loved. wounds cannot heal as long as they are picked at. There really are only two choices love or fear. Perhaps one day, I will be identified as the one who opened their heart to the soulless, and be taken away to be set before a tribunal, but I do believe that if we all go the right way, the highest echelons will find that they cannot eat money, we will be better off if we offer them a hand in learning how to live in a new way, giving peace a chance for the first time in history.
No longer can the argument hold up that our neighbors are somehow sub-human and deserving of our malice. The only threat since the beginning of "Western Civilization" has been living under illusory threat. this is what fed the ever growing wealth of the top 1%. Since the advent of the idea that someone else having more than you is reason enough to kill, we have lost our humanity. To regain it, perhaps we need to learn to give away our true selves doing what we love to do most, so that everyone can flourish. When the Russians first invaded Afghanistan, they cut down every tree in every compound in the nation. No longer would the people be allowed to have their refuges. What can one expect from that sort of neighborliness? The world leaders are complicit for not standing up then and declaring it a form of genocide. I still contend that if every American soldier deployed in Afghanistan, was given one thousand native fruit and nut trees, and told that they could go home when they had found people willing to care for the trees and helped to get them all planted, that their work there would be done, and that they could return home, we/they would not be having a problem now. Power and control only understands itself, only cares about itself and only exists to wreak havoc on others. I spit to get the words off my tongue.
This is how a single action can transform our culture from one of scarcity to one of abundance. The art of love dates back to before the beginning of language. The art of war is much younger than that. We hold within us the power to change direction, the strength to forge a new way of life. Fear and hate have taken us far off the path we need to be on to assure our survival. We have strayed far beyond the realm of sustainability. No new widget will save us, only using what we know has worked for all time to our advantage. In nature there is no waste, everything cast off is food for something else. When we step into that relationship with the planet, things will fix themselves right quick.
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