Or will we avoid the horrors of Americans killing each other in another futile effort to protect wealth gained by evil and destructive business practices, this time in service of fossil fuels?
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?
"Will America be torn apart again, now that a new network of fabulously rich white men see their fortunes threatened by social and political change? "
Here is another way to ask this question:
Have the channels of information and access to information improved enough since the start of the Civil War to facilitate a more open understanding among the greater population of the nefarious and destructive forces of the billionaire class?
Has the creation and institution of free public education resulted in a population more capable of critical thinking and more resilient to propaganda by the moneyed elite?
Have any of the labor movements of the late 19th century or the early 20th century or the creation of labor unions resulted in a more developed sense of power among the working class, a understanding that the power lies with the workers and not with the managers?
Have we done enough to illuminate the true history of the Civil War and collectively come to realize that it was an outright manipulation of poor people to fight on behalf of the rich?
It is a fair question to ponder, if America will be torn apart, again. But it is also a salacious headline and fails to address how torn apart we remain since the last war, how further divided we are presently and the lack of a focused campaign anywhere in the media to draw us together or to highlight the ways in which we are not divided. We would do better and see more clearly if we can focus on the "...vast majority of Americans.." whom are "...like the good citizens of Winston County..."
“Use every tool at your disposal within the law, especially through estate planning, to keep as much of that money as possible out of the hands of government bureaucrats who will only misuse it. As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need.”-Abigail Disney on what she was taught.
I guess the simplest way to say I think we have hope is that a portion of our youth "gets it". Nerds and activists are popular, so are Teslas.
I do see the danger coming from the right and the fossil fuel barons; they REALLY don't like to lose. But, I think we are well on our way to energy independence that includes as little extraction and burning as possible. The markets are in a constant upheaval with the pandemic and these environmental trends. The disasters have put the emphasis on "dead" in the word deadline. We do not have the luxury to literally fight them and the climate disaster too.
Those poor people in the Denver area! What a miserable, scary way to end the year. Our firefight WILL be in our backyards but with completely different weapons.
Thanks Thom. You are consistent on the oligarch issue and not mentioning the 1933 coup attempt of FDR buy the oligarchs of the Industrial Revolution. Why is that? Is there lack of detail from the Congressional investigation or the statements from retired Marine General Smedley Butler?
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.
"Will America be torn apart again, now that a new network of fabulously rich white men see their fortunes threatened by social and political change? "
Here is another way to ask this question:
Have the channels of information and access to information improved enough since the start of the Civil War to facilitate a more open understanding among the greater population of the nefarious and destructive forces of the billionaire class?
Has the creation and institution of free public education resulted in a population more capable of critical thinking and more resilient to propaganda by the moneyed elite?
Have any of the labor movements of the late 19th century or the early 20th century or the creation of labor unions resulted in a more developed sense of power among the working class, a understanding that the power lies with the workers and not with the managers?
Have we done enough to illuminate the true history of the Civil War and collectively come to realize that it was an outright manipulation of poor people to fight on behalf of the rich?
It is a fair question to ponder, if America will be torn apart, again. But it is also a salacious headline and fails to address how torn apart we remain since the last war, how further divided we are presently and the lack of a focused campaign anywhere in the media to draw us together or to highlight the ways in which we are not divided. We would do better and see more clearly if we can focus on the "...vast majority of Americans.." whom are "...like the good citizens of Winston County..."
“Use every tool at your disposal within the law, especially through estate planning, to keep as much of that money as possible out of the hands of government bureaucrats who will only misuse it. As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need.”-Abigail Disney on what she was taught.
I guess the simplest way to say I think we have hope is that a portion of our youth "gets it". Nerds and activists are popular, so are Teslas.
I do see the danger coming from the right and the fossil fuel barons; they REALLY don't like to lose. But, I think we are well on our way to energy independence that includes as little extraction and burning as possible. The markets are in a constant upheaval with the pandemic and these environmental trends. The disasters have put the emphasis on "dead" in the word deadline. We do not have the luxury to literally fight them and the climate disaster too.
Those poor people in the Denver area! What a miserable, scary way to end the year. Our firefight WILL be in our backyards but with completely different weapons.
Thanks Thom. You are consistent on the oligarch issue and not mentioning the 1933 coup attempt of FDR buy the oligarchs of the Industrial Revolution. Why is that? Is there lack of detail from the Congressional investigation or the statements from retired Marine General Smedley Butler?