by Carol Warner Christen
(Swans - August 13, 2007) The people we didn't really elect are creating a political system the opposite of the Constitution because we don't care and we don't read as daily life proceeds on and on and on. Distractions have become daily life: too much work; too little free time; too much shopping to do; too much accumulation to sort; too many tasks; too little human relationship time; and, too many games to play in hyperspace. What do we care if capitalism has become fascism? What does that mean to anyone except the rich? What do we care if some Christians have turned upon Christ pretending He is a killer -- and muscular to boot -- due back any day to seek revenge?
When did humanity deem some humans gods again? Men have so much hubris and arrogance of late that they now speak for God Himself. The president does. All the ministers do and the congregations believe them. The president is now the head of the Church of State in a country with the First Amendment. The president is also above the other two branches because the Executive Branch has, with malice aforethought, overwritten all the checks and balances of the Constitution. That branch now stands above the people, which is an unconstitutional act all by itself. It is hard to fathom how the people can permit one branch to usurp the powers of any other without a vote or even awareness by most. Eyes glaze over in most discussions as if they were programmed.
The jet stream is on a rampage of excessive heat or flooding. Carbon dioxide is so plentiful that the plants on our farm are loaded with excessive greenery, especially weeds. Fruits, however, seem sparse and small without water or bees. We cannot keep up with trimming anymore. The poles melt and that puts the jet stream into new and ominous places because the poles are no longer cold enough to pull the jet stream into its old familiar pathways, although the equator is still too hot. African rains have moved causing serious droughts and a lack of foodstuffs.
I carry cloth shopping bags to the grocery store and when I get home I find the clerks have stuffed my produce into plastic bags to put inside my cloth bags. Public drinking fountains are disappearing; ergo, everyone carries a plastic bottle full of water using precious oil to create another roadside attraction. One of my fantasies is that we will be able to mine the roadsides for aluminum and plastic and junk, perhaps to reuse or crush into new and more marvelous junk. Of course, we must assume our progeny will still be here and marvel at our foresight spreading resources far and wide. Sending our technologies and livelihoods to China and elsewhere was an act of generosity on someone's part for gain.
It seems as if we intend to continue driving, regardless of the environmental implications on highways, by using ethanol made from corn rather than oil that will run out long before our debt for our gigantic military, using more oil than all but twenty countries, is paid. Corn requires fertilizers, or at least a fish, in every mound to grow. The price of corn is up for food because the acreage is up for biodiesel: more driving, less food. If all those cars run out of fuel on all the roads and traffic is jammed, will we find mummies from underfed people trapped within? Who will care? Who will stop the endless driving as a substitute for living? Gridlock means more highways to accommodate more cars until there is no way on or off a road. The smell will be bad and the exhaust pollutants will make surrounding homes hazardous to small children and other wildlife. What is the alternative to the automobile or truck? Will we go back to trains and then wagons and, finally, our feet, whether walking or bicycling?
Many of our young soldiers in Iraq have no clue as to the humanity of an Iraqi. Either they never learned about the Bill of Rights here, the Geneva Conventions, or that penalties exist for murder, rape, pillaging, and torture; or, their fear of the other in a hot, strange land with people speaking gibberish to their ears causes blood lust or fear. Their wanton use of the bullets taxpayers supplied in such abundance to falsely bring democracy in the form of death to a foreign land is aided and abetted by their superior officers. All the dead are equal, after all. We can count on their votes without rigging the system as we have done in our own country to our shame. Anyone want to take bets on whether we have a presidential election in 2008 or the installation of a Hitler clone as dictator?
It is almost as if the Great "Dictator" of the State of the Executive Branch Kingdom was selected by the Supreme Court Beings of the Conservative Non-Denominational Church of State with much scrapping and bowing from the mere Congress of the Elected who permitted vote tampering on a scale to rival Tammany Hall of the past. It's like watching a morality play by senators and representatives paid to serve the People but who actually serve mammon in the form of corporate capitalism run amok. Real people are denigrated for being poorer than the Elect(ed) who hope to decimate poor humanity around the planet as soon as feasible. Quislings and servants to the Elect(ed) abound with hopes of receiving a small boon. They never seem to learn that their usefulness usually ends badly for them. Integrity and ethics wait in the wings without hope.
One amazing number I recently read in The Curse of Ignorance, Vol. 1 by Arthur Findley was this: in the past 4,060 years of history, men have warred for 3,816 years. War: 3,792 points, to Peace: 268 points. Pathetic? (Since Findley wrote in 1947, I added the extra years by percentage to his older numbers since this is 2007.) Might this be why the Founders only wanted us to respect war for the Common Defence and limit the military to two years of funds? An even more amazing number is from the World Revolution Organization. Their world statistics show that there have been 250 more major wars since WWII. In the last century 37,000,000-42,000,000 more millions have been killed. This is, they say, three times more than were killed in the previous 500 years. Is war really the ultimate sport?
So, my country spent 51% of the federal budget for the military at a cost of $1,228,000,000,000 while the rest of the non-military budget is a mere 49%. That doesn't add in the 2002-2007 military budget at the time we started actively coveting a big base in the middle of the Mid-East to steal oil. Paul Bremer said if we could reduce the Iraqi population to 5,000,000, things would work out better. You do the math: 25,000,000 at the start; 2,000,000 left the country; 1,000,000 have been killed. The rest will die without resources and medical services, which is now a fact. When our robot planes are up and running from a secure base in a red state, the devastation should happen faster and, of course, our depleted uranium will also take its future toll on our genetic structures.
I don't remember reading this as a goal in the Constitution or its Preamble anywhere. We harbor the predators safe in the American nest for the time being, I guess. When we overuse our resources, the rich will decimate the rest of our nest for black gold, yellow gold, and every resource left. Too many Americans think they are on the way to becoming one of the coveted rich. Life will teach them that only the rich are on their own list.
About 135 generations have been born and died in those 4,060 years. It almost seems as if one generation to the next is more and more brutal, rather than less. What have we taught anyone about their humanity? Our wise men have made no inroads into our psyches; whereas, corporate advertisers are everywhere taking our attention to have more! More! More! (Notice the trap my words created as if we are the center of the planet with a paltry 300,000,000 people.) Translated, that means more money for the "world's 7,100,000 millionaires who are worth the total combined annual income of the entire planet." That number is only twice Oregon's population. The quote comes from a group called worldrevolution.org in an article worth reading, "The State of the World."
When I lived alone in an apartment in the Chicago area, the landlord sprayed ants somewhere in the building. Mine was the last apartment and it contained no spray. The ants fled to my place, flowing through the walls in the bathroom in huge numbers and continuing over every surface they could find, including my bed pillow, to get away. This small lesson has a larger lesson today. Half of the world's forests are gone now; yet, more and more mail comes in from groups pleading for funds with thicker and thicker brochures and "enticements." These groups are receiving less money because the general population's wealth is declining; the groups fear "dying" and inundate everyone with the little money they have left after paying for too much printing, using too many stamps, chasing too little hope, and decimating more trees. None of them seems to be as successful as they were earlier because, in a crowd, a good idea is covered by the cacophony of everyone wanting that dollar.
As a woman, I noticed in the statistics 70% of women on the planet Earth live in absolute poverty while working two-thirds of the world's working hours, producing 50% of the world's food, while taking home 10% of the world's income so we can own less that 1% of the world's property; and, to add insult to injury, 25% of all of us are raped. That does not take into account that 25 to 75% of women are beaten at home regularly. Genital mutilation adds more grisly torture to women's lives; however, since women only hold 12% of the seats in government worldwide, there is no justice, no general welfare, no reckoning this astonishing imbalance to the detriment of the human race. Of those women, two-thirds are unable to read or write, allowing generational ignorance to continue unabated because two-thirds of girls are still without education. Think about that as we bomb the crap out of everywhere so those 7,100,000 rich men may profit.
I feel like we women are some crop raised for men's use or abuse just as we treat the planet and its wildlife as unfairly and disrespectfully. I hope the Hopi are correct that the end of the fourth world is imminent. This way of life is not sane or sustainable and, unfortunately, women aren't armed. I took judo for self defense long, long ago. When my ex-husband attacked me after an operation, I put him in an unbreakable head lock under our piano and told my daughters to call the police. The police were not militant in those days; but they thought I was the aggressor. All I wanted was to protect my stitches from bursting. The ignorance of police has grown rather than diminished since then.
Journalists cannot practice their craft because real news has been gobbled up by "the media," a plural form of medium that seems to have morphed into fortune telling rather than the honorable Fourth Estate of the Founders' First Amendment so the people would know what really happens or not. Because only five groups own most of the media, it is very difficult to know the truth that might set us free; they hide and lie about the real state of the world to the advantage of the rich mentioned above to remain in power in the government, also mentioned above.
Air pollution from China and India lands on the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington first before traveling east every 3.5 weeks around the rest of the world. This fact came in the form of information that the entire Pacific Basin is covered with the pollution from our very own outsourcing to a depth of six miles. I wear a mask to prevent lung damage when I feed my goats or go out for prolonged periods to work on the environment here. Imagine my surprise when I bought a box of surgical masks made in China and found, once my husband and I each used one, that they had holes and that they made our lungs feel asthmatic during use. I returned the rest of the box to the pharmacy and my money was returned. I looked for more masks there -- a different brand -- and there were none. During my week away from the pharmacy, all the top shelves had huge boxes from the same Chinese manufacturer for various health items. On the masks, we noticed that they were unevenly pressed and there was no way to know what the blue fiber was. Would a doctor, nurse, or CNA notice?
The gist of this nonsense listed above is that I wonder what will surprise us most. Will it be the atmosphere harmed by global warming one moment too long? Will it be a nuclear war creating the nuclear winter we were once warned about? Maybe some people think this would equal things out. I never mentioned that the bell curve with intelligence centering seventy percent of humanity on the average IQ of 100 was to prevent wild swings into maladaptations to humanity's detriment. The result seems to be that, having warred for most of human existence, we cannot seem to shift out of that "average" mode into a safer, better way of being.
The day of the gladiator is over. The worst is that men still feel each of them is a gladiator as "might makes right." Reason, integrity, ethics are unknown, apparently, in the general discourse. It's more weapons, more death to the other because we are not sure the other is human or worth denying ourselves the satisfaction of dispatching babies to heaven as fast as we can with weapons of war more and more removed from reality. Have you read about the new robotic planes of death operated from a computer terminal in the center of the country? Do you hope you will be spared when these Dr. Strangeloves crow at your expense? That's the real nonsense.
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