"Our" American Imperialism has deep roots, running far back, beneath Wilson "making the world “safe” for democracy" long before any speechwriters scripted Reagan or Bush Sr. stumping for freedom or democracy. American will was flat fiat. No president, on either side of the aisle has shifted or questioned the course of U.S. foreign policy to impose our markets and their owners will. We are finally beginning to see the cost of such policies.
The largely muted and consistently oppressed dialogue about, or examination of, the costs of empire has been facilitated by the tsunami of mindless media advertising cheap consumer goods.
What dialogue that has made it out into the market place of ideas and concern is focused on species, as well as “collateral” populations of non consuming human and non human portions of the biosphere. However I suggest, that in such a purely “subjective focus” we miss the opportunity or ability to address the market functions and economic imperatives that drive the cannibalistic consumption of the planet. I mention Biosphere here to remind us that a hungry human or animal will kill to feed his child, and that in our greed and lust for “democracy” we have impoverished not only ourselves, but the world.
I suggest that we recall that is our Ancestors (bless them) in their blithe hubris of self sufficiency and isolationism we slept through the watch and facilitated the deconstruction of what was, (so I hear) at one time, a decent rhetorically challenging, and affordable, national educational system the envy of the world.
It's non efficient replacement produces a citizen consumer ill fitted to sleep well in a market driven system filled with demonically possessed market architects at the helm of capitalist empires such as Monsanto, Blackwater, Halliburton, Texaco, pharmacy, and the merger between big agricultural and genetic market investors.
This corporate kleptocracy in turn funds, controls, and formulates our dialogue of our so called political system. Only when we successfully engage the body politic holistically will we succeed in shifting our collective and individual prioritizes towards actions that create beauty and meaning rather than consuming it.
Our Collective inability to engage “the right” merely exposes us for poorly educated elite without the capacity for imagination and inspiration to engage in both rigorous rhetorical and compassionate thinking. Which first and foremost is best applied to own little souls. The lack of educational ritual, rigor and maturation has created a society of narcissistic addicts bent on self destruction. This mistake has dam near doomed the world.
The lucky and the self entitled Bourgeois collectively fuck the world. As Leonard Cohen calmly states in “Everybody knows” Blindly and compulsively we replicate and consume our way through life in an attempt to avoid the unconscious fact at the root of our (mostly)white privileged, sex obsessed souls that we know there is another way.
America is a continent and hemisphere, as well as a media icon. Another truth is it is a land onto itself, with its own imperiled aboriginal, flora, fauna and tribes.
We are survivors. Call it humanity or Darwinism, Luck or “god’s will” or evil or simply what appears in awareness. The weak, the poor, the different, the stranger, often, mostly die. I know Jared Diamond might argue.
We non aboriginals have diverse gods and ancestors. We are refugees, slaves, and invaders. Some are like my family; members of the first wave of refugees and invaders. Some are more recent. Their choices are few and elusively subtle, yet with profound consequence.
One of these is the chance or opportunity to recognize and most importantly, remember our innate humanity and love. From that choice we live in either heaven or hell. The global “Clampdown” is simply to present and too serious to play games any longer about the world or our roles in it.
Refugees and criminals are defined by economic resources, timing, witnesses and chance. It is our responsibility to remember, to viscerally re-call the spirits of this land, our ancestors, and the land’s of our families birth. Through this collective re-tempering we may actually begin to meaningfully relate with each other and our colective dilema of how to live together on /with our mother-father planet spaceship.
I suspect “that everybody knows” we are far more intuitive or “savage” than we care to admit. Regardless if our efforts are beyond the "tipping point" we still have the ability and vision to offer our children a good and peaceful death, owning our part, and our complete lack of intention to suffer. This is a bright lining on a dark cloud. There is no reason not to celebrate what we have, the challenge is to share what is good and make space for each other, whether flora, fauna or enemy.
Is this moment an opportunity for a change in the consciousness of the American public? Are we desperate enough in our withdrawal from consumerism to have the fundamental realization of all recovering addicts, that untreated addiction destroys societies, worlds and lives.
It matters not if its power or crack, the ends are the same and yes, the solution is both internal and external, both within our bodies, families, and communities, but also in our immigration, employment, education and environmental and economic priorities. The fundamental failure of the “Left” is it's entrapment in dualism. when we can bow to the hawk within, we will risk the possibility of compromise as well as compassion. We cannot find unity without, if we do not free ourselves and our dialogues of shame, blame and guilt.
While it is an effective story to release adrenaline and stress hormones, our collective or personal focus on past or present human sacrifices, to our gods of national defense and fear, or too loose ourselves and grieve the dead. We repeat the trauma and remain a nation lost in narcissism and personally and collectively isolated.
It may be through the opportunity of the current global environmental economic moral crisis that we may seize this opportunity to evolve as a species dependent upon the bio-sphere we have poisoned in the name of secular profits.
Collectively we have the resources of imagination and implementation to make a quantum jump both as individuals and begin to husband the planet. Perhaps we have looked down in confusion, pain and anger. It may prove more humane to raise our gaze and our hearts to the heavens and make this day and this world all it may me. There is in simple honesty, an opportunity to unite, move forward and focus on life and it's inherent beauty in each and every moment. Yet there is hope that such a small shift may be the missing catalyst for our collective salvation.
More to come later, thanks for reading.
