So it appears we wily humans managed to skirt disaster once again. Truly fortunate, seeing as how existing – as opposed to not – is pretty sweet.
For thousands of years humans have been predicting the end of the world. And you know what? None of them ever come true.
Well, it is a fact that all those people did eventually die. But life itself always finds a way to go on.
So even though at any given moment the world and every single one of us could be wiped out of existence in a flash – a reality of being alive as we know it – this persistent potential demise needn’t be feared.
Instead, embrace the impermanence of life so that every second alive is one cherished as precious. This way you’ll be ensured of getting the most out of your time here.
But there are a select few of the super-rich who tow the line for the rest of the financially fortunate. These individuals (and their cronies and paid-for politicians) are the ones responsible for a system-wide shift which has incrementally stripped entire populations of wealth and power.
It is this minority of the 1% – those with an insatiable greed – who must be reigned in. Not only do they need to be held accountable, steps must be taken to prevent others from doing the same. Whether it’s through public awareness or regulation, the processes by which today’s oligarchs have amassed their dangerous concentrations of power needs to be disrupted.
This won’t happen without a fight, which is why we have to rise up. But in the end, the majority of the super-rich will capitulate and cooperate without too much of a fight, so long as they get to remain amongst the wealthiest people on earth.
Lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford sent a proposal to the American Bankers Association, offering to implement an $850,000 strategy to undermine the credibility of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. The plan was leaked to MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who made the memo available on the net.
The authors of the proposal have exposed just how scared the banking industry really is. Should the Occupy movement co-opt the Democratic party in the same way the Tea Party did the Republicans, according to the lobbyists, such events could “have very long-lasting political, policy, and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”
The document goes on to caution that Tea Party protesters could potentially join forces with Occupy Wall Street because “well-known Wall Street companies stand at the nexus of where [OWS] protesters and the Tea Party overlap on angered populism. […] This combination has the potential to be explosive later in the year when media reports cover the next round of bonuses and contrast it with stories of millions of Americans making do with less this holiday season.”
But, like you’ve read here many times before, the occupy movement will not be stopped. There is too much at stake, and too much already wrong with our system for us to simply give up. The point of no return has been breached and now we cannot stop until we’ve reclaimed democracy for the world.
Instead of running for the hills every time some bad guy says boo, we can just accept that getting-exploded-by-some-ideological-douchebag is just one more item in a long list of things that can kill us.
This way, we’ll have more energy to focus towards a broader approach to terrorism, attacking the underlying social issues, like poverty, which foster violent extremism.
Outspoken author Glenn Greenwald put out a provocative piece today called The Decade’s Greatest Scam which outlines the absurdity of spending billions of dollars to fight terrorism – a threat that kills the same number of people who die drowning in a bathtub each year.
Greenwald says these industries are exploiting the people’s irrational fear as a for-profit business:
Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street’s ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title.
Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade’s worth of fear-mongering. So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.
The author also points out how most of these new security measures will ultimately be used not for protection against terrorism, but rather, as tools used to subdue uprisings and keep the people down:
The Security State has little to do with addressing ostensible Terrorist threats, it has much to do with targeting perceived domestic and political threats, especially threats brought about by social unrest from austerity and the growing wealth gap.
The prime aim of the growing Surveillance State is to impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and anticipated unrest.
The Western World has been fighting the war on terror for ten years, costing tremendous amounts of blood and treasure, not to mention liberty and freedom.
And what has been the result? Death and chaos.
If we really want more security in our world, maybe it’s time to try something else besides wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on the tools of war.
How about investing some of these funds into programs that alleviate poverty and strengthen communities? Then we’ll see which method works better to stabilize societies, resolve conflicts and build a peaceful planet.
There’s radioactive earthquakes rocking Japan while Tomahawk’s launch for Libya’s liberation. Bee colonies have been collapsing, fish stocks are dwindling and we’re running out of oil and fresh water. The earth’s climate is changing, 1/5th of the world starves to death while the super-rich grow even richer, and everyday we find brand new ways to annihilate ourselves completely.
And if that’s not enough negativity for you, the 24-hour fear-mongering news stations will fill in the gaps with a never ending supply of things to be afraid of. Except, of course, for the really scary stuff, like how our democracy is being eroded, giant corporations are robbing us while politicians take their cut, and the system that is supposed to be protecting us has gradually been enslaving us.
Paraphrasing a quote by David Suzuki, it’s like we’re ALL in a car that is speeding towards a cliff, and we’re too busy arguing about who sits where.
But get this. The reality is that we have already flown right over the edge, beyond the point of no return. Right now, humankind is hurdling through the air.
But don’t fret. As the vehicle were in comes careening down towards a catastrophic end, our species will gain the ability to fly.
Humankind is coming together like never before, and when we humans work together, especially on a global scale, there is very little we can’t do.
On top of this, the whole body of human knowledge is expanding faster than ever before, opening new doors and unforeseen powers. It won’t be long until we have the means to meet the basic needs of every human. And, with our growing solidarity, we’ll soon have a level of cooperation sophisticated enough to dismantle the world’s defense industry and forever end large scale wars.
While the future doesn’t hold some techno-utopia for us, it will be awesome nonetheless.
Don’t let today’s world stress you out. Try to remember how, on the universal scale, humans are still so very young. These bumps and hurdles we experience are signs we are maturing, and the pain we feel can be thought of as the cost of progress.
Human beings are amazing, and we’re set to do some incredible things. We will persevere through the plethora of problems plaguing our planet. Believe it.
