"One can discern two trajectories in current history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens survival; the other dedicated to the belief that another world is possible," in the words that animate the World Social Forum, challenging the reigning ideological system and seeking to create constructive alternatives of thought, action, and institutions. Which trajectory will dominate, no one can foretell. The pattern is familiar throughout history; a crucial difference today is that the stakes are far higher. Noam Chomsky - Hegemony or Survival Racism, hatred and intolerance, as well as all of those other things we do are just distractions to keep us ghoulishly entertained while the fat cats make off with their loot. In the end, it’s money that is at the very root of all evil, and we are each faced with hard choices between what we must do to find sustainable love and what we must do to survive via the pursuit of the legal tender. Money never would have been necessary had we learned to love each other, instead of hating each other. Think of those rich, old men who set out to regimen our minds in Roosevelt’s day. Think about how brilliantly they succeeded at controlling our attitudes towards one another. What came first, racism or money? It was money. Think about it. If the white race became the dominant race throughout most of the world, it wasn’t because they carried out a campaign of global domination in the pursuit of racial dominance. Columbus, Pizarro, Cortez, the Brits, the French, the Portuguese, and others, didn’t come here because the color of their skin told them to do so. They came to plunder the wealth of a new land and destroyed civilizations way more advanced than their own in the process of looting their cities to advance the wealth and power of the crowns they killed for as fully paid mercenaries. And so it is, today, much to the chagrin of many of those who thought they were fighting to spread “freedom and democracy” across the globe. If racial hatred existed between these peoples (and it did) then it was because that hatred was a convenient tool to motivate them to carry out acts of torture, violence and genocide in the pursuit of that wealth for a select few who stood to gain. It’s money that is the spark of racial hatred more than anything else. Those who don’t recognize this fact have been cleverly fooled by those who gain all that wealth that comes about as a result of all of the hatred and intolerance that is spread around the world. But stop to think for a moment just how well that PR campaign to regimen our minds has worked out for the ruling class over the decades. It has us at the doorstep of our own destruction. And consider for a moment the possibility of turning all of that around. Can we do that? Am I a fool for even thinking such a thing? Well, if they managed to bring us to the verge of destruction in seven decades, more or less, what the hell is stopping us from turning that around? Let’s face it; we didn’t have much motivation up until now because humans don’t think in those terms yet. The person who hates a black man because of his skin color or the black person that hates a white person because of his skin color doesn’t normally up and decide he or she is going to change how they think unless there is some powerful motivation for doing such a thing, right? Otherwise, it’s going to be business as usual until the end of time. You know it as well as I do. Okay, so you say we’re progressing in terms of racism, right? After all, we’ve got an African-American president for the first time in this nation’s history. Problem solved, right? Wrong. The hard facts indicate that, while some blacks are better off after the Civil Rights movement back in the day, an equal number of them are actually doing worse. Is that progress? There is no social justice without economic justice I dare say. But, herein, lays the beauty—and the horror—of the vision of the future that confronts us all. We now have—or will have, in time—the motivation to come together in order to save ourselves. Survival is the most powerful of all human instincts. Ever wonder what people are thinking in a jetliner that’s crashed and everyone is racing, stampeding for the door to get out of a smoking plane? It’s instinctual, and it’s powerful. The beauty of this situation is that our survival as a species depends on our coming together. The horror of this situation is the prospect of failure if we do not succeed. Is there another way out? I don’t believe there is. You youngsters may know what a steel-cage death match is in wrestling terms if you watch WWF wrestling on cable. Of course, that death match is contrived and fake, but the one we all facing is for all the marbles. In this case, we’re not fighting to the death, we’re fighting for our survival because that ring the match is taking place in is our planet earth in a symbolic sense, and without its capacity to sustain and support life, we’ll all perish. At least, it’s safe to say that future generations will not survive if we continue on the path we’re on. So, what is the actual solution to our problems? As silly as it may seem to all those tough people out there, it actually is love. Why, you ask? Look at the silliness of our capitalist system that teaches us all a spirit of competition and disdain for one another. Look at what the wealthy did in Roosevelt’s day to manufacture consent and brainwash us all. Consider the very fact that if we had enough love in our hearts for one another, we would never have to look at another dollar bill or a peso, or a yen ever again in our lives. Doesn’t it stand to reason that if we truly loved our brothers and sisters that we would actually see to it that each and every one of them had more than enough of everything needed to meet their needs? If it took 70 years for that PR campaign to destroy our mindset to the point of bringing us all to the eve of our own destruction, why would it be an insane impossibility to turn that campaign around and create something that will do just the opposite? Why couldn’t we learn to restructure the way we think about one another, to learn new ways of thinking and caring for one another? Okay, so you’re thinking I must be nuttier than a fruitcake, right? How the hell are we going to do all of this changing and why would normal, destructive, fully indoctrinated, cut-throat, backbiting, hypocritical…..people change in the first place? I’ve been saying it all along. We have the motivation now. That motivation is inherent, it’s built in to the situation we are facing together, and it’s inescapable. It’s survival through mutual cooperation and solidarity or we’ll all go down with the ship as one. Will it take more Hurricane Katrina’s and Sandy’s to wake us up? It’s probably going to take some major calamities to see the kind of action we need to ensure our survival. Let’s just hope it’s not too late for us all when that happens. As for love, it is absolutely true that all you need is love. It is love that can bring us to take care of each other and satisfy our mutual needs. It’s the very finality of the future, the possibility of an abrupt and unceremonious ending to life on earth that ensures we’ll either finally learn this lesson, once and for all, or perish in our failure to do so. We will get rid of this capitalist system that is cannibalizing the planet’s resources, including human resources I might add, get rid of all nations on earth—and their governments—and replace all of this with a new global consciousness, a New Age of Enlightenment of the likes we have never seen in the course of human events, we will doom earth’s very last generation to a bitter and final cataclysmic ending that none of us should find very easy to envision. Remember the bottom line: It’s money that’s at the heart of all of our problems. It’s been class warfare from the beginning. The solution: Learning to hardwire our hearts and minds to love one another. If the bad guys could indoctrinate us into hating one another, then we can teach ourselves to love. It’s not only a scenario that’s possible; it’s inevitable if we are going to survive into the long-term future. The bad guys won’t stop creating conspiratorial plans to undermine any, and all, gains. On one side of the equation, we can teach human beings to care about each other’s needs. "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them," as Albert Einstein once said. And we can balance our needs for love with our physical needs for survival, from an economic standpoint, if we can manage to redistribute the world’s wealth and make that distribution equitable for everyone on earth, then the answer is going to be largely solved. Redistribution of wealth so that everyone has a piece of the pie is unavoidable if we’re going to have a solid solution. I could make the point that the six Wal-Mart heirs, here in the U.S., own 40% of all the wealth. That’s 40% of everything wrapped up in one extended family. Consider the very real fact that, for the very first time in human history, we now have an organization that is attempting to educate global citizens about this problem. It’s called the Occupy Movement, and it will only be as strong as we can make it. Whether it’s a legitimate answer to the problem at this exact moment in time is beside the point for the purposes of my explanation, although 40% of the world’s population that survive on less than $2 per day would wholeheartedly disagree with me that it’s beside the point. But the point I’m making is that, for the very first time in over 5,000 years of human history, the precedent to create such an organization on earth has been set. We see the people in Brazil, Egypt, and Turkey, all doing their part to create a better world for their children. The images coming in from those nations are incredibly inspiring to see masses of humanity coming together in revolution and solidarity to get rid of the bad guys. In these images, we are seeing history take place before our very eyes and should consider ourselves lucky to witness such events taking place. Previous species of humans have been around for millions of years, but with the advent of the Agricultural Revolution some 10,000 years ago, human civilization came into being and, today, we are on the verge, the very cusp of a new beginning for humanity—or its end. The choice is ours. We are at a watershed moment, a glorious crossroads of the kind that has never been witnessed before in human history. --Charles Lamadrid
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 20:29:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015