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BS ‘n’ About…
Ten Terrifying Social Observations
Let’s start with a bang. I propose that with just ten premises I can shake the very foundation of almost everything we accept to be true. …everything we trust. …everything we hold sacred. And I can do it by sticking to the facts and pointing out the obvious.
Individually, each of the following has far ranging implications about how frighteningly far we’ve come and what that says about where we’re headed. The following ten pages imply an awful lot of species-level, fighting-for-our-survival type questions for which we don’t seem to have any answers. Taken as a whole, I find them mind-boggling, soul-searing, and downright terrifying.
-1-
Our grandparent’s wood, leather, and steel world was more similar to Roman Times than it is to the world we live in today. For the first time in history, we live and work among strangers. We spend more time with cars, TVs, computers, cellphones, ipods, and other gadgetry of the Information Age than with real people. From the dawn of time through Grandma’s Day, the extended family/tight-knit community was the canvas upon which we painted our lives. In one lifetime, this has been replaced by a media-driven, individual/nation state frame of reference that has left us locked up inside our own heads, deluged by input, and cut off from those around us.
-2-
Ours is the first major human culture where Mom has been removed from the home, hearth, and farm without leaving behind her a foundation of extended family and community. Since we’re afraid of the neighbors, we lock the kids in their rooms and plug them into something. We are afraid of our neighbors because, in our commuter world, we no longer work with, socialize with, frequent businesses run by, nor often even know those neighbors. Never before have our children been so influenced by events and entities beyond the physical horizons of their world. …events and entities so beyond our control.
-3-
Humanity will evolve only in the direction our political, economic, spiritual, and cultural systems point us. These lay out the rules by which we play the game and instill in us the passions and values that mold us as individuals. Human history becomes a lot clearer when viewed on the grand scale of systemic conflict, and doing so makes it much easier to handicap the future.
-4-
Capitalism is the most voracious system yet devised, having gobbled up virtually every faith, ideology, and culture on the planet. It has conquered the monarchies, the new world, fascism, and soviet communism. It has made serious inroads against Christianity, Chinese communism, American Democracy and the American family. It now takes on Islam. Along the way it is changing who and what we are, driven as it is by much of what is worst and most powerful in us. Should capitalism succeed in bringing about a one-world economic system, it will strip a polluted Earth of its every resource, replace cultural diversity with corporate sameness, and subvert every government on Earth. All the while it will promote overpopulation, while at the same time destroying the communal and familial building blocks which have brought us so far. We have created a monster and it is devouring us from every direction.
-5-
Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, JFK, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan all made their runs for the Presidency with fiercely waged Primary campaigns, unlike today where each Party gives us a shoo-in, (Bush, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Dole, etc.), and a one-issue challenger, (McCain, Dean, Robertson, etc.), the shoo-in having been anointed because he collected the most money from the special interest groups and Big Business before ever taking his message to the people of New Hampshire. Once in Washington, virtually every White House, Congressional, and Supreme Court vote is split along Party lines. That means poor, black, Mississippi Republican Districts are voting the exact same slate as upper crust Westchester Republican Districts. That means out-of-work, Detroit Democratic Districts are voting the exact same slate as Gucci-clad, Beverly Hills Democratic districts. That sounds a whole lot like taxation without representation. That sounds a whole lot like what pissed off our Founding Fathers in the first place. We, the People have been taken out of the process. We have lost all choice. We, the People have lost our Voice.
-6-
American history is entirely at odds with our patriotic, land-of-the-free-and-home-of-the-brave vision of ourselves. We cock-a-doodle-doo about freedom, yet every sub-segment of our society has had to fight tooth and nail for every freedom it has. We treat our women like second class citizens, educate our kids on the scraps, and ship our parents off to Florida. We enslaved our black citizens, wiped out our red citizens, threw our yellow citizens into concentration camps, and want to build a wall to keep out our brown citizens. During the Cold War we always supported the Shahs and Generalissimos, never the people, peasants, or workers: The Shah’s Iran, Diem’s Vietnam, Batista’s Cuba, Marcos’ Philippines, Noriega’s Panama, Duarte’s el Salvador, Allende’s Chile, and Saddam’s Iraq. Yes, that Saddam. Our friends. We pay for these friends by working our citizens harder, with less time off, than any other industrial nation on Earth. Yet many countries have better education, health and social programs. We are the last citizens of a civilized country being asked to sit in death penalty judgment on our fellow man.
-7-
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all worship the exact same God, that of Abraham. Each claims Him to be a loving, forgiving deity, yet each manages to rationalize the hatred towards and killing of His other followers simply because they sought His message through the ‘wrong’ prophet. It will be the exact same God who judges the jihads, the rockets into the West Bank, and the bombings of the abortion clinics. We are killing and dying for the exact same deity.
-8-
Our scale, senses, and biology are decidedly Earthly, primitive enough to be ‘decoded’ within a lifetime of being dependant on fire, and, as far as we can tell, fairly useless to us anywhere in the Cosmos but here. Even were we to overcome our miniscule life spans and incredible distance and logistic problems to get anywhere else, we’re a base 10 being in a Galaxy with 300,000,000,000 stars. There are 100,000,000,000 other Galaxies. We have 26 letters in our alphabet and ten spaces to the left of the decimal on our calculators. We are to the Universe as one of our individual atoms is to us. We ain’t goin’ nowhere.
-9-
Earth’s situation is not unlike that of an adrift spaceship, stranded in the vast nothingness of space, no known physical help on the way. Earth is all we have ever known, all we’ve got, and all we have to leave for our kids. And, when it gets down to it, the Earth is a fairly small place with a fairly fragile ecosystem. Yet here we are, entrusted with what is undoubtedly the most incredible thing we are aware of in the entire Universe, and we’re trashing the place like frat boys on spring break. We’re breeding like rabbits and consuming everything in site. We’re squabbling over everything, driven by chaos. We’re messing with the recipe. We’re trashing Paradise. If we’re subletting this place from God, we’re not getting our deposit back.
-10-
We are the only thing on Earth that is outside the natural order of things. We are different than everything else in a sentient sort of way. Biologically, we are to the Earth as cancer is to us. We are an exponentially breeding organism in a finite environment, killing our host’s life force, (oxygen), with our every breath. We are overrunning and consuming our host organism on a cosmic scale infinitely faster than cancer or Ebola consume us.
(Read this one again!)
I don’t know about you, but these ten premises terrify me as to what they foretell for my species, my world, my nation, and myself. We’ve come so far, so fast, that we’ve quit paying attention to a lot of the details. We’ve changed so much, so fast, we almost don’t remember being any other way.
I find that to be the scariest part of all. But it’s not important what I think. What’s important is what we think. Except for a bit about myself in the next section, this will be the last ‘BS ‘n’ About’ written in the heavy-duty first person until we say our alohas at the end of this work. Though where I’m coming from is obviously quite obvious, I’m going to try and stay out of your way as you digest the issues for yourself. I’ve tried very hard to respect each of us and each of our individual beliefs, but I didn’t pull any punches either.
Much of what follows won’t be easy to accept, digest, or even reflect upon. But the very survival of our species may depend on us doing just that. Tomorrow will be what we make it.
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