The free market is dead and in its place has grown a corporatocracy bent on greed and the subjugation of human life. Our govt. has been purchased on the cheap and we have been sold out, all in the name of profits. The exchanges and markets have been rigged to keep wealth flowing in one direction and we sit back and let it happen. Our military is used overseas, just like in Smedley Butlers’ day, as corporate/government enforcers to protect “U.S.” interests abroad. At home, our police are becoming more and more militarized and suffer no repercussions when crimes are committed within their ranks. Why punish those violent thugs that will one day be called on to protect your affluence?
Our Judiciary works for corporate interests and are given speaking appearances at corporate events. Democrats and Republicans are just the opposite side of the same coin. The Republicans want us broken now and not later but the Democrats know that it needs to go slow, bit by bit, lest the ignorant masses see what is happening and rise up. Regardless, both parties’ cow-tow to corporations and the money they dole out.
Media gives us the latest shiny bobble and ignores those stories that matter; TPP, any substantive reporting on the Snowden Leaks, misrepresentation of protests at home and abroad as small and violent, no reporting on climate change, etc. is the norm. Corporations pollute and spread disease and cancer on every corner of the globe and we sit back wringing our hands hoping that it doesn’t happen to us.
Corporations tell us that we have to buy their new version of the same thing we bought last year and we do it. We wait in line all night for the honor of handing over our money; earned through blood, sweat and tears. “Oh thank you, yes please take what little I have, I need the new thing to feel good about myself.” We are pathetic little creatures who need to be governed because we can’t govern ourselves. Our needs and our wants are dictated to us by corporations that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars learning just how to convince us to buy the things we will never actually need. But we look oh so cool when we finally have one, “I know because the corporation told me so.”
Maybe Plato and Aristotle were right. Maybe we can’t take care of ourselves. Maybe we are just an ignorant mob. Just look at the people that we keep electing to office. Are we just cattle content so long as we are allowed to chew our cud, blithely waiting to be led to slaughter? How many of you are afraid for your children’s and grandchildren’s future? It seems like we are leaving it to them to fight. We have got to elect a new kind of person to public office now. If it’s not already too late.
Yet, is it ever really too late. Perhaps it is for this current world that we now have. Maybe the loss of all the things we are told are important is exactly what we need. Maybe we need a new religion. A new “Myth” one might say; to show us what is really important. To lose our gods or God may just be what we need. An abandonment of our reliance on fantastic beings, that never seem to answer our prayers anyway, might be in order. To move away from our subjugation by the corporate/finance world that sees the reaping of the natural world as a means to more wealth and move to a belief in a world where we live in harmony, not only with nature but with each other. To say no to the newest ipodpadgadget and embrace each other can be our future and the loss of all of our “things” may be the means to that end. The Buddhists have a lot to say on this matter. But instead of striving for the next life to be a better one, we should strive to make this one better for everyone.
I guess there is always hope and mine is that we see, as a people, that a corporation is not a person. We are people. We, regardless of our color, are the people. I want us to see that we can no longer be a slave to industry and that unfettered capitalism and laissez-faire economics are leading to our downfall, not only as a country but as human beings. If we, as a global society, throw off our desire for and belief in money and can find a new egalitarian way for our work to provide those things we need, we will be free. We don’t need much really. The means exist now for us to move to a post-wealth accumulation world and into an ethical world where each individual has an intrinsic value and where we work together as one towards a goal for all and not a few. A world where our science leads us not to new weapons, but to new heights, for the sake of all of humanity, not for profit and war. A world where no child grows up hungry or sick or in fear. A world where no parent has to be in fear that their child may die from any one of those maladies before they get to grow up, find love and raise children of their own. I hope for a world where no young person is so defeated so young that they can’t look to the future and find hope for themselves. To create a world where all people are encouraged to live a full human existence free to pursue the arts and to raise a family free of need. My hope is that we learn to see and censure any individual that is out of touch and out for their own self interest; where we see the desire for power and wealth as negative qualities and ethics and compassion are seen as noble and desirable. A fundamental shift must occur in the way we all see the world and our place in it. We must begin to see our neighbors as ourselves and not the other. We are greater, stronger, more intelligent and wiser than any one of us.
And that is the problem; I don’t know how we get there.
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