I was re-imagining the story that I have heard of soldiers on opposite sides of the line, coming together during World War I, to share Christmas Eve. The generals had to reassign the participants to get them to kill again, some had to be put to desk jobs and could never kill again. The reason it came up is because we were in awe at the culture that is trying to express itself across the planet, that guns are agents of change, "protecting" innocents who will, in the end have just blood on their hands. We are continually pumped on the idea that protecting property is tantamount to saving one's life. As if! As if every petty thief was just hankerin' to kill someone. As if those hours you slaved to buy your car or earn the money to buy that property are justification enough for killing. These important concepts never enter the conversation and that is by design. I do not have hard figures, but in my experience, the vast majority of property crimes are perpetrated by corporations who poison whole neighborhoods to make their profit. These criminals never have to look their prey in the eye. We have sacrificed the honor of looking our foe in the eye to the banner of the Castle Doctrine. Guns, and the ability to kill at a distance are a cowards way, we must communicate this amongst ALL of the people.
When anyone feel threatened, it is normal and natural to lose peripheral vision, experience increased heart rate, higher blood pressure and increased visual resolution over a much smaller field. If our conscious mind says "It is your right to kill.", your body will have little inhibition. What if you got to know that person instead? What if you had to look through the pictures of family that they carry in their wallet? What if the words we all know, "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes." were removed from our collective consciousness? Imagine instead, a new guiding principle, Don't shoot until you can look your victim in the eye. If you see them as a valid individual, it gets much less likely that you would choose to kill.
Keep in the front of your mind for a moment that the groups, as we have been assigned to, have been played off against one another for generations, it keeps our focus on the frivolous. The most heinous and costly crimes of all are always going to be perpetrated by the wealthiest, most powerful and influential group. It has become fashionable to refer to them as the one percent. Keep in mind, the county that I want to retire to has annual incomes so low, that to be in the 1%, one would only have to make $100K per year. Our poverty is so vast that many cannot understand the forces that have wrought this desperation so widely. Having tenaciously studied this issue since childhood, I can barely fashion a series of words to convey the depth and breadth of the crimes that have been perpetrated against humanity in the name of profit for the ultra wealthy. Oh, by the way, none of the rich and powerful live in the county to which I want to retire. They could not look their slaves in the eye.
The fly ash from coal-fired electric generating stations in the U.S.of A. kills as many people each year as adding 100,000 smokers to the population. Yet the powers that be have instigated a 50-year crack down on smokers that has saved about the same number of lives that fly ash kills. We have not had a fifty year crack down on wasting electricity, because we do not have to look the victims in the eye.
Some will say that it is our "nature" to push the negative consequences of our actions past arms length or further if possible, yet I see nothing in nature that coincides with that urge. We humans have trained ourselves to overlook, disregard, forget, pay no attention to, and otherwise ignore the down side of any decision. Embedded in the word is the same certainty and cleaving that finds a part of incision precision and excision. Once lopped off, the rest is just garbage after all and is to be left behind. In all natural systems that I have studied, even the waste serves to feed, provide shelter for or somewhere to have sex for other trophic levels. Humans un-naturally create waste that harms other trophic levels, especially when we divorce ourselves from the fact that creating that waste in the first place required us to believe that certain portions of our human family do not deserve to live, or that their impaired lives are "worth" the profit that is to be gained by poisoning them slowly, or killing them outright.
Adding insult to injury, human dead are frequently pumped full of toxic chemicals and or burned to ash with the giant carbon footprint that requires. Instead of feeding the organisms that will be left after our demise, we go out with two more bangs. never even having to consider the other shoe falling, elsewhere.
I would be remiss at bringing up issues that I do not have solutions for, and this is the crux of many different teachings. Twenty-five years ago, I just called it voluntary simplicity, or living better for less, but those terms were stolen to mean other things. The first, became a religiously inspired frugality sub-culture and the second some sort of coupon inspired craze. It was fashionable to use the terms diversity, which got gobbled up by the race craze, sustainability, which people who understand nature realize is impossible or permaculture, again impossible. In nature, flux is the overriding energetic trait. Being agents of change is the most natural impulse in nature.
I watched a program recently on PBS, it detailed the group of nomadic humans that co-exist with the reindeer herds in what is now considered to be Northeast Russia. The reindeer spend most of their time eating lichen all of the needs of the humans are met from the environment and most of that comes through the reindeer. The energetic cycles, the mineral cycles and the water cycle flow through the region and the beings who inhabit it with virtually no contamination other than what floats in from the air. The more the rest of us, "down here" destabilize and excite the atmosphere with our massive heat and carbon releases, the more of our air flows over them, contaminating the lichen as surely as if it were next door or down the block from poison releases. In the land locked lakes on Isle Royal, in Lake Superior, pesticides have been found that were only used in the tropics. Just because no one is looking for toxic compounds in remote areas does not mean that they are not already there.
I have to remind readers of my work through ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. We try to get within arms length of healing the planet and in our experience, the effort helps heal those who participate in our tours as well. We have taken hundreds of folks on tree-planting expeditions, taken dozens more on seed collection trips and always seem to find people once we are out that participate informally as well. Tens of thousands of trees stand as a testament to those who believed and hoped in a future that allowed their efforts to flourish and that is a pretty powerful legacy to leave upon the planet. I am humbled each time to have been allowed to perform the task of being a bridge to this infinite possibility for the intentions of our guests. What we can afford to give back always pays back with interest!
When anyone feel threatened, it is normal and natural to lose peripheral vision, experience increased heart rate, higher blood pressure and increased visual resolution over a much smaller field. If our conscious mind says "It is your right to kill.", your body will have little inhibition. What if you got to know that person instead? What if you had to look through the pictures of family that they carry in their wallet? What if the words we all know, "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes." were removed from our collective consciousness? Imagine instead, a new guiding principle, Don't shoot until you can look your victim in the eye. If you see them as a valid individual, it gets much less likely that you would choose to kill.
Keep in the front of your mind for a moment that the groups, as we have been assigned to, have been played off against one another for generations, it keeps our focus on the frivolous. The most heinous and costly crimes of all are always going to be perpetrated by the wealthiest, most powerful and influential group. It has become fashionable to refer to them as the one percent. Keep in mind, the county that I want to retire to has annual incomes so low, that to be in the 1%, one would only have to make $100K per year. Our poverty is so vast that many cannot understand the forces that have wrought this desperation so widely. Having tenaciously studied this issue since childhood, I can barely fashion a series of words to convey the depth and breadth of the crimes that have been perpetrated against humanity in the name of profit for the ultra wealthy. Oh, by the way, none of the rich and powerful live in the county to which I want to retire. They could not look their slaves in the eye.
The fly ash from coal-fired electric generating stations in the U.S.of A. kills as many people each year as adding 100,000 smokers to the population. Yet the powers that be have instigated a 50-year crack down on smokers that has saved about the same number of lives that fly ash kills. We have not had a fifty year crack down on wasting electricity, because we do not have to look the victims in the eye.
Some will say that it is our "nature" to push the negative consequences of our actions past arms length or further if possible, yet I see nothing in nature that coincides with that urge. We humans have trained ourselves to overlook, disregard, forget, pay no attention to, and otherwise ignore the down side of any decision. Embedded in the word is the same certainty and cleaving that finds a part of incision precision and excision. Once lopped off, the rest is just garbage after all and is to be left behind. In all natural systems that I have studied, even the waste serves to feed, provide shelter for or somewhere to have sex for other trophic levels. Humans un-naturally create waste that harms other trophic levels, especially when we divorce ourselves from the fact that creating that waste in the first place required us to believe that certain portions of our human family do not deserve to live, or that their impaired lives are "worth" the profit that is to be gained by poisoning them slowly, or killing them outright.
Adding insult to injury, human dead are frequently pumped full of toxic chemicals and or burned to ash with the giant carbon footprint that requires. Instead of feeding the organisms that will be left after our demise, we go out with two more bangs. never even having to consider the other shoe falling, elsewhere.
I would be remiss at bringing up issues that I do not have solutions for, and this is the crux of many different teachings. Twenty-five years ago, I just called it voluntary simplicity, or living better for less, but those terms were stolen to mean other things. The first, became a religiously inspired frugality sub-culture and the second some sort of coupon inspired craze. It was fashionable to use the terms diversity, which got gobbled up by the race craze, sustainability, which people who understand nature realize is impossible or permaculture, again impossible. In nature, flux is the overriding energetic trait. Being agents of change is the most natural impulse in nature.
I watched a program recently on PBS, it detailed the group of nomadic humans that co-exist with the reindeer herds in what is now considered to be Northeast Russia. The reindeer spend most of their time eating lichen all of the needs of the humans are met from the environment and most of that comes through the reindeer. The energetic cycles, the mineral cycles and the water cycle flow through the region and the beings who inhabit it with virtually no contamination other than what floats in from the air. The more the rest of us, "down here" destabilize and excite the atmosphere with our massive heat and carbon releases, the more of our air flows over them, contaminating the lichen as surely as if it were next door or down the block from poison releases. In the land locked lakes on Isle Royal, in Lake Superior, pesticides have been found that were only used in the tropics. Just because no one is looking for toxic compounds in remote areas does not mean that they are not already there.
I have to remind readers of my work through ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. We try to get within arms length of healing the planet and in our experience, the effort helps heal those who participate in our tours as well. We have taken hundreds of folks on tree-planting expeditions, taken dozens more on seed collection trips and always seem to find people once we are out that participate informally as well. Tens of thousands of trees stand as a testament to those who believed and hoped in a future that allowed their efforts to flourish and that is a pretty powerful legacy to leave upon the planet. I am humbled each time to have been allowed to perform the task of being a bridge to this infinite possibility for the intentions of our guests. What we can afford to give back always pays back with interest!
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