Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but the wicked forces of the rich white bastards have ALREADY torn apart America (again). And Americans are ALREADY killing each other (again) to the horror of a million deaths so far. (Add at least 20% of the uncounted to the official COVID toll.)
That is mass genocide, folks, committed by your fel…
Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but the wicked forces of the rich white bastards have ALREADY torn apart America (again). And Americans are ALREADY killing each other (again) to the horror of a million deaths so far. (Add at least 20% of the uncounted to the official COVID toll.)
That is mass genocide, folks, committed by your fellow citizens. The selfish, dishonest actions of your friendly neighbors across the street (willful ignorance) and the selfish, dishonest actions of their blindly ambitious leaders (criminal negligence) are all very deliberate actions taken by a minority of uncaring fools and assholes clinging to power and privilege, forcing their will onto the majority, the core definition of anti-democracy and authoritarianism.
(Of course, these despicable traitors are not answerable for every single COVID death or for the millions suffering “long-COVID.” But they sure as hell are liable for most of it, enough so that it’s laughably disingenuous to quibble over the truly shocking numbers in the aggregate.)
We can say the same for America’s two-tier economy and her Dark Age social structure: hopelessly indebted peasants crammed into tiny hovels slaving away at miserable, dead-end jobs with no future to speak of, while their money-mongering masters dominate the landscape with gilded castles.
This is the reality right now, not some future dystopia. It is also the cold-eyed reality from time immemorial.
For instance, consider the Irish famine (“The Great Hunger”) in the mid-nineteenth century: It was triggered by the potato blight, but it was caused and sustained by a landlord system that denied prosperity to an ever-growing population of working poor relegated to ever-dwindling sections of land they could never own and which could never sustain them without the potato crop. Much like the cotton gin’s impact on the slave economy in the American South, modern farm machinery in Ireland brought the whole fractured structure of inequality crashing down.
Landlords chased the now-useless laborers off their lands. They died in droves in the ditches along roadways that exported the best meats and produce to other markets that could afford the price. There was no other public land to house the destitute other than “famine houses, which provided the slave labor to operate machinery and perform the services landlords still required on their vast holdings. Neither were there public social programs to match the scale of the crisis. And the heroic efforts of religious organizations simply could not keep up with the numbers of sick and dying.
History is replete with countless examples of the same old story. The demons of greed and cruelty and violence are integral parts of the human psyche, despite all the energy squandered by a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ they weren’t. Facing hard facts point-blank without interjecting pathetic excuses and fragmented “solutions” is the only way to change course on our winding path of chaos and destruction. The magnitude of the problem must be felt at a visceral level more than merely “learned” and then added to a bank of memory soon forgotten.
How many worthless words and useless intellectual concepts does it take to remove your hand from an open flame? None; action is instantaneous. If we as individuals cannot see, simply, directly, the totality of the implications of foolishness and insanity on a personal level and how our own adverse behaviour and those of our neighbors contribute to the whole, then how can we expect society ever to change?
Living is an ongoing experiment in evolution. In essence, a person’s life is a moment-by-moment discovery of both profound beauty in all its glory but also of shocking ugliness in all its savagery. So, is it possible to understand — and therefore to act upon — the deeper aspects of life on Planet Earth with no intervening false judgements of good and evil, all that nonsense conveniently provided by outside “authorities” who know not of what they speak? Is it possible to change such a mind weighed down by a lifetime of conditioning that devises ponderous ideologies and gradual processes toward “gaining” what it falsely conceives as “enlightenment” when it doesn’t even know how to act on the spot in the immediate present, when reality and its boundless energy actually happen?
Agree. The greed of the oligarchs have stolen $50T from the rest of us since 1975, https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/. That's equivalent to $297,000 from every household. However, they have not yet created their oligarchic utopia than Thom is concerned about. Majority rule, which they intend to end, still elected Biden. They don't yet have a Constitutional right to veto any government action, but are planning a constitutional convention to enshrine that right. They have yet to enslave every citizen for maximizing their profit and take all that we own too.
Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but the wicked forces of the rich white bastards have ALREADY torn apart America (again). And Americans are ALREADY killing each other (again) to the horror of a million deaths so far. (Add at least 20% of the uncounted to the official COVID toll.)
That is mass genocide, folks, committed by your fellow citizens. The selfish, dishonest actions of your friendly neighbors across the street (willful ignorance) and the selfish, dishonest actions of their blindly ambitious leaders (criminal negligence) are all very deliberate actions taken by a minority of uncaring fools and assholes clinging to power and privilege, forcing their will onto the majority, the core definition of anti-democracy and authoritarianism.
(Of course, these despicable traitors are not answerable for every single COVID death or for the millions suffering “long-COVID.” But they sure as hell are liable for most of it, enough so that it’s laughably disingenuous to quibble over the truly shocking numbers in the aggregate.)
We can say the same for America’s two-tier economy and her Dark Age social structure: hopelessly indebted peasants crammed into tiny hovels slaving away at miserable, dead-end jobs with no future to speak of, while their money-mongering masters dominate the landscape with gilded castles.
This is the reality right now, not some future dystopia. It is also the cold-eyed reality from time immemorial.
For instance, consider the Irish famine (“The Great Hunger”) in the mid-nineteenth century: It was triggered by the potato blight, but it was caused and sustained by a landlord system that denied prosperity to an ever-growing population of working poor relegated to ever-dwindling sections of land they could never own and which could never sustain them without the potato crop. Much like the cotton gin’s impact on the slave economy in the American South, modern farm machinery in Ireland brought the whole fractured structure of inequality crashing down.
Landlords chased the now-useless laborers off their lands. They died in droves in the ditches along roadways that exported the best meats and produce to other markets that could afford the price. There was no other public land to house the destitute other than “famine houses, which provided the slave labor to operate machinery and perform the services landlords still required on their vast holdings. Neither were there public social programs to match the scale of the crisis. And the heroic efforts of religious organizations simply could not keep up with the numbers of sick and dying.
History is replete with countless examples of the same old story. The demons of greed and cruelty and violence are integral parts of the human psyche, despite all the energy squandered by a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ they weren’t. Facing hard facts point-blank without interjecting pathetic excuses and fragmented “solutions” is the only way to change course on our winding path of chaos and destruction. The magnitude of the problem must be felt at a visceral level more than merely “learned” and then added to a bank of memory soon forgotten.
How many worthless words and useless intellectual concepts does it take to remove your hand from an open flame? None; action is instantaneous. If we as individuals cannot see, simply, directly, the totality of the implications of foolishness and insanity on a personal level and how our own adverse behaviour and those of our neighbors contribute to the whole, then how can we expect society ever to change?
Living is an ongoing experiment in evolution. In essence, a person’s life is a moment-by-moment discovery of both profound beauty in all its glory but also of shocking ugliness in all its savagery. So, is it possible to understand — and therefore to act upon — the deeper aspects of life on Planet Earth with no intervening false judgements of good and evil, all that nonsense conveniently provided by outside “authorities” who know not of what they speak? Is it possible to change such a mind weighed down by a lifetime of conditioning that devises ponderous ideologies and gradual processes toward “gaining” what it falsely conceives as “enlightenment” when it doesn’t even know how to act on the spot in the immediate present, when reality and its boundless energy actually happen?
Happy New Year… same as the old year.
Agree. The greed of the oligarchs have stolen $50T from the rest of us since 1975, https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/. That's equivalent to $297,000 from every household. However, they have not yet created their oligarchic utopia than Thom is concerned about. Majority rule, which they intend to end, still elected Biden. They don't yet have a Constitutional right to veto any government action, but are planning a constitutional convention to enshrine that right. They have yet to enslave every citizen for maximizing their profit and take all that we own too.
It can get much worse for all non-oligarchs.