Category Archives: Sociology

The Slow, Inevitable Collapse of the Two-Party System

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By Russell A. Whitehouse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In this election year, it’s clear that a seismic political shift is rumbling through America.  Widespread discontent for the status quo is surfacing from both the left and right.  A year ago, it would have been impossible to envision a card-carrying socialist and a pre-WWII style populist mounting legitimate presidential campaigns (much less without Super PACs).  Now, far-left and far-right sentiments are emerging from the underground as perfectly palatable options to Middle America.  Establishment darlings like Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush & Marco Rubio have faced extreme pressure from the New Normal in their respective political tents.

It has become clear that the traditional 2-party system in America is starting to erode.  Sanders’ supporters view Clinton as too untrustworthy & beholden to Big Business.   Meanwhile Trump’s blue-collar base has rejected rank-and-file Republicans as being too unsympathetic to their economic concerns, while his surprising chunk of the evangelical contingent is refuting the Bush-flavored puritanism of Ted Cruz.  Conversely, Clinton’s supporters reject Sander’s bold platform as delusional and Cruz’s base is increasingly being filled by #NeverTrump neocon purists and Romey-ite country club Republicans.

One can see political parallels across the pond, in the UK’s 2015 Parliamentary elections.  The two main parties in Westminster Palace, Conservative and Labour (roughly equivalent to the GOP and Democrats), were shaken up by two popular insurgencies.  UKIP, the UK Independence Party, rose up from the rising flames of the relatively conservative British heartland’s fears of free trade in the EU and immigration, winning an eighth of the popular vote in England. To the north, SNP, the Scottish National Party, won 95% of Scotland’s seats by inspiring among other things, record youth turnout and social media support (sound familiar?), with a message of social democracy and defiance against the British status quo.

Intra-party schisms are also forming in the two Anglophone democracies.  The Tories are tearing themselves apart over the Brexit, austerity and jockeying to succeed Cameron as Party Leader, while the American neocons are assessing the fallout of Trump’s ascendance while in free fall.  Labour officials are debating whether to follow their insurgent leader Jeremy Corbyn to the far Left after 20 years of Tony Blair’s New Labour movement, which moved the party to the center to win back the support of big business and blue-collar voters.  The New Labour centrist putsch coincided with Bill Clinton (and later Obama’s) similar efforts as the face of the Democrats.   Now, Democratic voters are beginning to second-guess this political realignment, spearheaded by the presumptive Democratic nominee’s husband.  Her opponent Bernie Sanders is siphoning away the youth vote and blue-collar moderates from the Democratic establishment, two of the Party’s traditional constituencies, by railing against neoliberal policies like free trade and social welfare cuts.

Given the rise of social-democratic populism and nativist-protectionist populism to either flank of American politics, it would make sense to look at the formation of entirely new parties.  Bernie Sanders can form a Stars-and-Pinstripes version of SNP; he too has the momentum of a more secular, progressive generation reaching political maturity as the more religious, conservative Baby Boomers begin to die out.  Assuming Trump completes his takeover of the Grand Old Party at July’s convention, the neocon brain trust can form a new conservative movement; this is already being planned by members of the #NeverTrump triad. Evangelical and free market diehards can unite to mount a serious challenge to Trump’s right by fielding a Texas crusader like Ted Cruz or Rick Perry, or Mormon elder statesman Mitt Romney.

Regardless of how Trump and Sanders fare in their respective conventions, they could still operate a serious race for the White House.  Both New York loudmouths boast a gigantic wave of rabid new voters, as well as a wellspring of working-class Americans desperate to reverse Wall Street’s increasingly oligarchical dominance, mass layoffs/underemployment, stagnant wages, crumbling infrastructure & the other byproducts of the neoliberal-neoconservative economic policy alliance.  Sanders could march into November as the nominee of the new Democratic Socialist Party, with a trail of young, idealistic future leaders tweeting and live-streaming behind him.  Depending on July’s RNC, we could see a Make America Great Again Party (MAGAP, for short) trumpeting Trump’s message of putting power back in the hands of the American working class or a Romney-Cruz True Conservatives Party ticket touting Christian piety and Wall St fiscal policy.

Get used to Sanders, Clinton, Trump & Cruz.  You may see all 4 of them, come November…

A Crisis of the Heart

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By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

The loss of life for any reason is always to be commiserated with and in instances of collective horror such as the terrorist attacks that have recently beset the West, the heart of oceanic humanity breaks a bit more.

With that said, our social media feeds become filled with national colors and heartful memes in solidarity with members of the human family hit by unthinkable tragedy. It is right to do so. But it is also right to understand that tragedies are occurring all around us, in our own nations as well as others, every single day.  Middle-aged whites in the US are killing themselves with drugs and alcohol and poor eating habits at a rate never seen before. They are hopeless and despairing as the American dream fades. Blacks remain mired in the same hopelessness caused by the same reasons, economic and social, with the added addition of racism and eugenic tactics centuries in the formation. Native Americans on Reservations continue to experience the effects of genocide, a program running in the collective American consciousness since this nation’s inception. The deaths add up and fade into consciousness as the background cries of the disillusioned and dehumanized.

Inhumanity reigns and the statistics state that people have been growing less and less compassionate toward each other for decades in this nation. These computers and smart phones draw us together but also tear us apart, the virtual world is as real as the real one. People spend hours per day jacked into the matrix, seamlessly moving between one and the other. Death by texting is on the rise,  porn increases objectification and consumer culture further consolidates the banality of social interaction and heart-based intimacy.

These realities indicate a crisis of the soul. Of the heart. When we are upset and outraged about one group of people but care nothing for others, something is very wrong. When there is compassion for those whom we might share something in common with and lack of compassion for those with whom we do not, there is a division of the heart, a dehumanization that speaks to the pervasivity of mainstream media programming of the mind.

Perhaps those who say humanity cannot change are right. Perhaps this is the best we can do. But perhaps it is also true that by consciously examining the memes and events and seeking to understand the issues at levels beyond those trumpeted in the mainstream we will come to realize that we have more in common with the Oppressed everywhere than the privileged so many of us wish to join in their glass mansions and private retreats. It is in the experience of self as seen through the eyes of others and experienced in the visceral engagement of souls on an eternal journey that true empathy and compassion are known.

When life ends, all that matters is the love. The love we give and the love we receive. The divisions dissipate. Living as if each one of us was from Beirut, or Paris, or Chicago, or Kenyan, every, single, day, and sharing our portion of love is how the dogs of war are banished. How the flames of hate are extinguished. The source is never what we are told and the cause goes back so far in the past that the effect is shrouded in mystery.

Share this outpouring of love with the world. Feel the pain of all those sacrificed on the alters of political and economic gain. Those next door, down the street, in the next city and state, and even across the nation. We must stand in solidarity with those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice, but the war is not just between nations and ideologies. The war is within each of us. Every, single day.

The Color Counterrevolution Cometh

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By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

Had Sun Tsu co-authored a treatise on the art of sports with Capt. Obvious, a quote from that seminal work would probably read as follows:

If your team keeps playing an offensive game and keeps losing, eventually it will end up playing a defensive game, and will lose that too.

Stands to reason, doesn’t it? The team I have in mind is the neocon-infested Washington régime, which is by now almost universally hated, both within the US and outside of its borders, and the offensive game is the game that has been played by the Color Revolution Syndicate, with George Soros writing the checks and calling the shots. Having lost ground around the world, it is now turning its attention to trying to hold on to its home turf, which is the US.

Behind the Washington régime stands a group of transnational oligarchs, including many of the richest people in the world, and the game they play is as follows:

1. Saddle countries around the world with unrepayable levels of debt, most of which is stolen as soon as it is disbursed, leaving a population perpetually saddled with onerous repayment terms. This used to be done by the US to countries around the world, and has most recently been done to the US itself.

2. This game often results in rebellion, and the well-bribed national leaders in the rebellious countries are expected to put down the rebellion using any means necessary. But if they fail to suppress the rebellion, or if they side with the rebels, then they need to be regime-changed and replaced with a more subservient leadership, and the Color Revolution Syndicate swings into action.

3. The first ploy is to organize young people into a “nonviolent” protest movement (“nonviolent” is in quotes because mobbing the streets, shutting down commerce and blocking access to public buildings are all acts of violence). Their goal is to erode the boundaries of what’s allowed, until law and order break down and chaos and mayhem take over. At that point, the leadership that is to be regime-changed is supposed to jump on a plane never to be heard from again. But if they fail to do so, the next step in the program is…

4. Mass murder. Snipers are flown in and kill lots of people indiscriminately, while Western media blames the deaths on the soon-to-be-overthrown government. At this point most national leaders, sensing that their lives are at risk, choose to flee. This is what happened with the Ukraine’s Yanukovich. But sometimes, as happened with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, they simply retreat to a well-defended residence outside the capital and wait things out. And then a magic thing happens: the revolution chokes on itself. Local self-defense units form to protect neighborhoods; out of them emerges a partisan movement to thwart attempts by foreigners to further destabilize the country; and, after much bloodshed, law and order and a legitimate government return. This could have happened in Egypt, if it weren’t for the efforts of traitors within Mubarak’s own government. But then there is always…

5. Political assassination. If mass murder doesn’t work, it’s time to send in the assassins and physically eliminate the leadership. This has happened in Libya. As Hillary Clinton put it, paraphrasing Julius Caesar, “We came, we saw, he died!” Beware the Ides of March, Hillary!

By this time, it generally has to be conceded that the Color Revolution did not go according to plan, and the Washington régime starts doing its best to pretend that the sad country in question doesn’t exist. If someone manages to make it past face control and has the temerity to point out that it does exist, then the point is made doesn’t matter because it isn’t a vital interest. As Obama just pointed out [paraphrased by Jeffrey Goldberg writing for The Atlantic]: “Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one.” This caused one Zbigniew Brzezinski to spit up all over his shirt. To be sure, there is fine comedy to be had when things don’t go according to plan for the Washington régime.

Recently, things have only been going downhill for the Color Revolution Syndicate. George Soros’s NGOs, which have been used to organize Color Revolutions, have been kicked out of both Russia and China; the silly “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong-Kong went nowhere slowly; Russia used its military training budget to rescue the government in Syria and to thrash ISIS and friends, and then moved on to negotiating a political settlement. And when Soros, in a fit of pique, tried to attack the Chinese currency, the Chinese laughed in his face and beat him about the head and shoulders with a printing press until he retreated.

Not only that, but things haven’t been going so well for the Washington régime either. The fake Democrat/Republican duopoly, which it has been using to simulate democracy and to disguise the fact that it’s all made to order for the same bunch of transnational oligarchs, is in trouble: a barbarian is at the gates. His name is Donald Trump, and he’s had the régime in his sights for many years. And now he is moving in for the kill.

Trump isn’t even that good at it, but this is a super-easy job. As I said, the Washington régime is just as hated within the US as it is around the world, if not more. Trump’s slogan of “Make America great again!” may sound overly ambitious, but what if his promise is to make America great again at exactly one thing—throwing members of the Washington régime on the ground and stomping on their heads until they pop? I am pretty sure that he can get this done.

Moreover, Trump doesn’t even try to be that good, although he is certainly very good at causing people to lose their minds. I came across one commentator who bounced off Carl Jung’s proto-new-age woo-woo on Hitler being a reincarnation of the Norse god Wotan and went on to claim that Trump is a reincarnation of Wotan’s brother Loki the Trickster. But here is a much simpler idea: Trump is an epitome of Trump. He enjoys being himself, and the unwashed multitudes find this aspirational because they are sick and tired of being told how they should think and behave by a bunch of clueless puppets.

Lastly, Trump gets a lot of help—from his enemies. All they have to do for him to prevail is to carry on being themselves—saying politically and perhaps even factually correct things, toeing the party line, carefully distancing themselves from Trump, repeating the talking points fed to them by Washington think tanks and generally being as useless and boring as possible. Then all Trump has to do to win is to distinguish himself from them by being rude, crude, vulgar, crass, obnoxious and raucously fun. Can you figure out on your own which one the people will pick—useless and boring or raucously fun—or will I need to summon Capt. Obvious again?

The Washington régime, and the oligarchs that back it and profit from it, have finally groked all of this, which is why they have been huddling and trying to organize a Color Counterrevolution that can stop Trump in his tracks. Soros and the ‘garchs started throwing around big bags of cash to get the counterrevolution on even before the actual Trump revolution happens. They were initially successful, shutting down a venue in Chicago with the help of Soros-owned Moveon.org. But it seems doubtful that they will prevail in the end. Instead, it seems more likely that they will give rise to a partisan movement.

You see, in the US hatred of the Washington régime runs very deep, with millions of people sick and tired of being swindled by various hated bureaucracies—in government, law, medicine, education, the military, banking… They hate those who took away their jobs and gave them to foreigners and immigrants. They hate those who stole their retirement savings and ruined their children’s futures. They hate the smug university types who keep telling them what to think and how to speak, making them feel inadequate simply for being who they are—salt of the earth Americans, racist, bigoted, small-minded, parochial, willfully ignorant, armed to the teeth and proud of it. There is very little that the régime can ask of these people, because the response to every possible ask is “no, because we hate you.”

And when these people, who are already seething with hatred, look at the political landscape, what do they see? They see the Democrats pushing the candidacy of the banker-crony-crook Clinton, and the only alternative is the full-socialistard “I am from the US government and I am here to help” Sanders who seems to be stuck in some sort of Great Society time warp. (There may be governments that get socialism right; the US government will never be one of them.)

They also see that the Republican establishment, previously so full of pseudorevolutionary puffery, is now so afraid of Trump that it would rather throw the election to the Democrats than support their own candidate, and this fills them with anger and disgust. Take all that seething hatred, mix in lots of anger and disgust, knead it, let it rise, and now you can bake a popular insurgency.

And a popular insurgency, or a partisan movement, is exactly what it takes to defeat the Color Revolution Syndicate. You see, the official authorities, be they the police, the army, the secret service or private security, are limited in the things they can do. In some ways, their hands are tied: if they violate law and order in order to defend law and order, they become mired in self-contradiction, and that just makes it more difficult for them to defend it the next time around.

But the partisans can do anything they want. They can infiltrate the protest movement and commit acts of violence in order to provoke the authorities into taking perfectly justifiable action. They can act to misdirect, demoralize and splinter protest groups. They can use social media to “out” the Color Revolution’s leaders and those who finance them (who, to remain effective, must hide in the shadows). They can liaise with the official authorities and trade favors for information.

If the Color Revolution shows signs of proceeding to the point where the tactics of Massacre and Political Assassination are about to be tried, they can form commando units, to make sure that these tactics lead to some massive unintended consequences, preventing their productive use. And if all else fails, they can form a guerrilla movement which, in order to win, simply has to not lose.

If all goes well then, starting next year, tens of thousands of Washington operatives, along with their friends in various politically connected industries, such as banking, defense, medicine and education, will evacuate to a variety of nonextradition countries (which will no doubt respond by raising the prices of their passports) while thousands more will begin their lengthy sojourns at federal penitentiaries. And thus the crisis will be defused.

And if it doesn’t go well, then we’ll probably be looking at a “deteriorating security environment.” How far it will deteriorate is anyone’s guess, but if you are one of the Washington régime’s stooges then you may want to get yourself a second passport before the prices go up and get out ahead of time.

The Control-Matrix is Crashing because the Truth-Seekers are Winning

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By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The way the masses view the world is a farce. Every single mainstream perspective is either purposely deceptive, or completely misses the point. Even the people in places of influence who we’re meant to trust have either sold out, or are just plain ignorant to the facts. There’s no need to have a heavy heart though; the matrix of control is crashing because the truth-seekers are dealing heavy blows to the false narratives that have for too long shaped the collective mindset of humanity.

Of course the internet can be celebrated for being the primary mechanism which has amplified the sharing of information across location, race, culture and belief systems. In retrospect, the powers-that-will-no-longer-be would be kicking themselves for not trying harder to institute their insidious plan for humanity prior to the birth and growth of the world-wide-web.

Make no mistake though; they have been very successful on many fronts. For example, try to imagine a world where:

      • most journalists don’t report the real news;
      • the majority of doctors don’t truly understand the causes of poor health and how to legitimately resolve it;
      • a high proportion of politicians don’t know how the money supply works and what the agenda is of those who control it;
      • many so-called expert scientists ‘believe’ in a discredited philosophy which resembles a dogmatic religion;
      • the majority of teachers don’t realize they’re teaching a system of indoctrination that nowhere near gets close to the information and critical thinking that should be afforded our kids; and

the masses are not only ill-informed, divided and feverishly fighting against each other over small and irrelevant topics, but they’re also sleepwalking through one of the most majestic and reverent realities that could have ever been conceptualized.

Well, welcome to our world.

As we begin what we call the 21st Century, every system that should be designed to facilitate the health and vitality of the people has been hacked with lies, deception, dysfunction and disharmony. It’s easy to think that this is an embarrassment for our species because it’s beneath our intelligence and ethical capacity, yet there’s no need to lose faith in the inevitable betterment of humanity, including the way in which we organize and economize our societies.

Why? Because all of this dysfunction has been an effective driver of the collective awakening that is rising in the hearts and minds of humanity.

The inspiring fact is that more and more people are slowly waking up and realizing we all have the opportunity to come to our own, informed opinion on the truth, pertaining to both the spiritual and systemic realities. So many more people now understand the mainstream news is not to be taken seriously as its not where we can find information which is aligned with the deeper truths. They’re also acknowledging that we have the choice on what we decide to personally stand and fight for, as well as the legacy we leave for our children and our future generations.

Beware though; once we exit the matrix of control we’re faced with some serious challenges. We have a lot of inner work to do, such as designing a philosophy that ensures we’re at peace, as well as exercising patience in the quest to take back our liberties and design a legitimate and honorable future for humanity.

That’s why we’ve got to feel for those who have been long aware of the many dysfunctions of our world, especially those who have not learned peace and patience. Slowly they’ve watched:

    • the military-industrial-media-politico-banking complex increase their power and continue their pillage across the world;
    • pharmaceutical monopolies amplifying the drugging of society, as well as keeping many of us sick so that they maximize their profits;
    • movements rise up only to be vilified and disassembled, such as the Occupy Movement;
    • science turned into a corporate institution, as well as further hijacked by an inaccurate and small-minded philosophy of reality;
    • wars purposely created with millions of people dying for the whims of the shadow empire;
    • radical extremists massaged into proxy armies to do dirty work for the collapsing power structure;
    • air, medicine, food and water becoming purposely more toxic;
    • governmental policy increasingly being determined by corporate/elite interests;
    • police being militarized all around the globe;
    • the education model struggling to become less of an indoctrination system; and
    • the agenda of global governance becoming closer to fruition.

Some people have known about much of this for decades, so we should commend them for continuing to fight the good fight. They might have witnessed some disheartening developments, yet as much as all this sounds dire, they’ve also seen millions of people disengage from the propaganda narratives and align themselves with the systemic and spiritual pathways that will be the next stage of our evolution.

The point is that even though we need to be patient and persevere, we should recognize and celebrate the achievements that have been made so far. As I discussed in a previous article called “Whilst the Old System Crashes a New One is Being Built”, there are:

    • economists who want to transform the Keynesian model to legitimate alternatives;
    • teachers who understand the massive holes in the indoctrination system called public education;
    • scientists who want to evolve the way energy is created and shared;
    • health practitioners who see the limits of mechanistic and pharmacological medicine and the need for the reintroduction of natural and plant-based therapies;
    • journalists who demand that the media monopolies need to be disassembled;
    • environmentalists who want to transition the way food is grown and distributed;
    • community leaders who aim to reintegrate them to better support its members;
    • politicians who understand the democratic system has been hijacked by big money;
    • activists who campaign for revolutions in our value systems; and
    • futurists who want to change the systemic template for our societal health and well-being.

There are many beautiful souls who are leading the charge by attempting to redesign our society back into alignment with the natural laws of our universe. We should be one of them, regardless of which way we personally decide to contribute.

To do that, we all need to be super clear within ourselves what we believe and what we want to change. There are many ways to do it too, so finding our passions and strengths is critical to playing our own small part in the shift.

It is simply no longer acceptable to keep our heads in the sand; either we’re a minion of the system or we’re not. Of course its difficult to completely disconnect from the way resources flow through the control channels, yet that needn’t stop us from talking about it, sharing information online and somehow contributing, no matter how small, to local and global movements which aim to transition humanity into the new paradigm of abundance.

After all, the truth is what it is, and it is exposing itself to the world by powerfully flowing through all of us.

Ultimately, we needn’t wait for the zombie apocalypse because its already arrived. Most people are good people, yet the masses have been brainwashed into thinking in ways that are absolutely nowhere near aligned to the truth. They might be sleepwalking through a time where the tipping point for the conscious society builds, but that doesn’t mean they’re not salvageable. That’s why we all have a responsibility to help facilitate waking up the collective so that together we’re more empowered and informed to really bring about a future of justice and honor that we can all be proud of.

To do so, let me give you some advice. Don’t get frustrated, don’t be rude, don’t belittle, don’t condemn. We all had to wake up at one stage so its hypocritical if we are. Instead, be calm, be cool, be real, be articulate. Know the information that you advocate like the back of your hand. If we want to be successful in helping others to face the delusions then we need to ensure their defense mechanisms aren’t raised so they’re more likely to be open and receptive to embrace the truth.

And one more thing; hang in there guys and be patient, we’ve still got a long, arduous way to go but we know all the effort will be worth every second.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

The Courage to Speak Truth to Power

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By Zoe Blunt

Source: DGR News Service

The more we challenge the status quo, the more those with power attack us. Fortunately, social change is not a popularity contest.

Activism is a path to healing from trauma. It’s taking back our power to protect ourselves and our future.

From a spoken-word presentation in Victoria BC, 2009

Thank you for the opportunity to launch my speaking career. Some of you may know me as a writer and an advocate for social and environmental justice. Others may know me as a cat-sitter, odd-jobber, and temp slave. (Laughter)

I knew when I started out as an activist that I would never be a millionaire and I was right. But I have a certain freedom and flexibility that your average millionaire might envy.

The market demand for social justice advocates is huge right now. It’s a growth industry. And the job security is fantastic – there is no shortage of urgent issues demanding our attention. Experience is not necessary, people come to activism at every age and stage in their lives. It’s that easy!

OK, it’s not actually that easy. (Laughter) But it is a fascinating time to be a “radical.”

There is a great tradition of courage and action here on Vancouver Island. There is potential for even greater future action, so we are doing everything we can to nurture that potential. Building community, linking up networks, teaching, learning, coming together, healing – this is all part of the movement.

For most of my adult life, I suffered from social phobia. I was afraid of authority, filled with self-doubt, paralyzed by anxiety. Getting interviewed live on national TV doesn’t make that go away. But hiding under the covers doesn’t cure it either. So my insecurities and I just have to get out there and do our best.

What compels me is the knowledge that we’re rewriting the script – the one that says, “You don’t make a difference. It is what it is, you can’t fight city hall, the big guys always win.” We can remember that we are not powerless. And when we choose to stand up, it is a huge adrenaline rush – bigger than national TV or swinging from a tree top. That’s the reward – that flood of excitement that comes from taking back our power and using it effectively, for the collective good.

It helps to get love letters from friends and strangers who want to thank me for standing up for what’s important, and who get inspired to take action themselves.

But it’s not all warm fuzzies and celebratory toasts. We face backlash and punishment and threats to our lives and safety.

I led a workshop for new activists this year, and I asked them, “Who are your heroes?”

They named a dozen. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Tommy Douglas. Rosa Parks. These folks led amazing, heroic movements, but our discussion focused on the ferocious backlash they faced. British media reports on Gandhi when he was challenging the monarchy had the same tone as white Southerners responding to Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. It was vicious. “Uppity and no-good” were some of the polite terms. They were targeted with hate speech and death threats. We hear the same now about whistleblowers. And feminists and environmentalists. It can be terrifying.

The more we challenge the status quo, the more the entrenched powers attack us. The more effective we are, the more they attack us. As Gandhi said: “First the ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

The fight for justice and liberation won’t be won by popularity contests.

Every campaigner finds their own way of dealing with the counter-attacks. Some laugh it off. Some pray, some cry on their friends’ shoulders. Some go on the counter-offensive, some compose songs, some write long academic papers deconstructing their opponents’ logic. The important thing is, they deal with it, and they don’t give up.

We take care of each other as a community. Because we are all so fragile. Because there is so much trauma and despair everywhere and it affects everyone. But inside that despair, in all of us, there is a solid core of love for the earth and the knowledge that we can act in self-defense. That’s where we find strength.

It’s humbling to note that the economic downturn has done more to preserve habitat and stop climate change than all of our conservation efforts of the past years combined. We take responsibility for recycling and turning down the thermostat, but who is responsible for the scale of destruction from the Tar Sands? That project is the equivalent of burning all of Vancouver Island to the ground. It negates everything we could hope to do as individuals to fight climate change.

How do we deal with that horrible reality? I couldn’t, for the first year of the campaign. I didn’t want to look at the pictures and hear the news stories about the water and air pollution and the rates of illness among the Lubicon Cree people. The scale and the horror of it were too great.

I’ve worked on toxics campaigns and I dread them. Old-growth campaigns are inspiring, because where the action is, the forest is still standing – it’s beautiful and magical and we’re defending nature’s cathedral from the bulldozers and chainsaws. The good earth is here, and the evil destructive forces are over there. It’s clearcut, so to speak. But when a toxics campaign is underway, the damage has been done. The landscape is poisoned and people have cancer and spontaneous abortions, and the birds, the fish, the animals, are dead and dying. It is a scene of despair.

If it sounds traumatizing, it is. And we are all traumatized.

Look at this landscape – concrete, pavement, bricks and mortar, toxic chemicals, but underneath, the earth is still there. We have whole ecosystems slashed and burned without so much as a by-your-leave. We’ve lost whole communities of spruce, marmots, murrelets, arbutus, sea otters, and geoducks. These are terrible losses.

And we humans suffer on every level. Is there anyone here who doesn’t know someone who’s had cancer? Who hasn’t seen the damage caused by diseases of civilization? Who here hasn’t been forced to do without for lack of money? Are there any women here who have never been sexually harassed or raped or assaulted?

(Silence)

Something fundamental has been taken from us here. How do we deal with these losses?

I consider myself fortunate because after a lifetime of abuse from my family and male partners, I participated in six months of Trauma Recovery and Empowerment at the Battered Women’s Support Centre in Vancouver.

And I got to know the stages of trauma recovery:
Acknowledge the loss, understand the loss, grieve the loss.

And the stages of grief:
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

These steps are a natural and necessary response to the loss of a loved one, and also to the loss of our humanity and the places we love.

There are people living in national sacrifice zones, people who burn with determination to make change. They are angry, and they have a right to be. I am angry because I’m not dead inside, in spite of all they’ve done to me. Anger is part of the process of grief, and it’s useful. It grabs us by the heart when people are hurting the ones we love.

For me, part of the process is taking action – rejecting helplessness and taking back power. Stopping the bleeding and comforting the wounded.

I fall in love with places and I want to protect them. I fell in love with the Elaho Valley and some of the world’s biggest Douglas Firs in 1997. That forest campaign was a pitched battle, far from the urban centers, against one of the biggest logging companies on the coast at that time.

In the third year of the campaign, I walked into my favourite campsite shaded by majestic cedars. I saw the flagging tape and the clearcut boundaries laid out, and I realized it was all doomed. I could see the end result in my mind’s eye: stumps and slash piles as far as the eye could see, muddy wrecked creeks, a smoldering ruin.

I realized no one was going to come and save this place – not Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, no MP’s private member’s bill, or whatever petition or rally was being planned back in the city. It was as good as gone. All we had to do was stand aside and do nothing, and this incredible, irreplaceable forest would be just a sad memory.

But after that realization, and after the despair that followed, I had a profound sense of liberation. If it is all doomed, then anything we do to resist is positive, right? Anything that stops the logging, even for a minute, or slows it down, or costs the company money, or exposes it to public embarrassment and hurts its market share, is positive – it keeps the future alive for that one more minute, one more hour, one more day. It was a revelation.

Acceptance, for me, meant being able to act to defend the place I loved. It meant standing up to the bullies and refusing to let them take anything more from me.

In the third year of the Elaho campaign, it was just a handful of people rebuilding the blockades, defying the court orders and continuing the resistance. We didn’t quit when the police came, or when we were called “terrorists” and “enemies of BC.” We didn’t quit even after 100 loggers came and burned our camp to the ground and put three people in the hospital.

The attack was a horror show. People were in shock. But a crew was back with a new camp five days later. By then, the raid was national news. And our enemies had nothing left to throw at us. The loggers didn’t know what to do next. Short of killing us, what more could they do?

We had called their bluff.

We didn’t know about the negotiations going on behind the scenes. We didn’t realize that we had already cost the loggers more than they could hope to recoup by logging the entire rest of the valley. (They were operating on very slim profit margins.) We found out when the announcement came that the logging would stop. And it never started again. We won. Now the Elaho Valley is protected by the Squamish Nation — and by provincial legislation — as a Wild Spirit Place.

The violence of the mob showed the level of fear and desperation of the losing side. It was their weapon of last resort and it didn’t work. And they lost.

In the fourth year of the stand for SPAET – the campaign to stop the development and protect the caves, the garry oaks, and the wetlands on Skirt Mountain – we faced the same tactics. We were called “terrorists,” and in 2007, the developers sent 100 goons to rough up people at a small rally. And again, most of our comrades are still in shock. There’s only a handful of us still bashing away at the next phase of development.

We are winning. The other side has thrown everything they have at us and they have nothing left.

There are still sacred sites on SPAET. The cave is still there, buried under concrete.

Meanwhile, the developer’s little empire fell apart, either because of our boycott campaign, bad karma, or because it was operating on the slimmest of shady margins. We took the next phase of development to court. Our campaign, and the economic downturn, turned out to be enough to scare off investors and cancel the project, at least for now.

This work is difficult, painful, and traumatic. So the first step to courage is to acknowledge that pain and loss. We need to name what has been taken from us. Then we can cry, and rage, and grieve. We can name the ones who are doing the damage. We can reach down inside and find our core strength and our truth, and use it. That’s where courage comes from.

Martin Luther King said, “Justice shall roll down like waters, righteousness like a mighty stream.” But I’m impatient. I want to see that mighty stream now – what’s the hold-up? What’s holding us back, when there’s so much to do?

We’re not heroes, actually – none of us is smart enough, or tough enough, or connected enough, to take this on alone. We don’t have superpowers. We are only human, we struggle and suffer and sometimes, we win.

Some folks assume I have some vision, some over-arching game plan, some magic power that gives me an edge. Nope. Most of the time I am just flailing around on the political landscape, taking potshots when I see an opening. Sometimes it’s intuition, and it pays off. When we are right, it is amazing. When we win, it sets a precedent for the future.

In order for evil to prevail, all that’s required is for good people to do nothing. Don’t be one of those good people.

Activism is part of the healing. It’s taking action to protect ourselves and our future.

Thank you for the opportunity to tell these stories today.

(Applause)

Also read how Zoe Blunt moved from “flailing around on the political landscape” to strategic activism: Deep Green Resistance: Words as tactical weapons

The Clock Inside Us

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By Eman Shahata

Source: The New Inquiry

Once a weapon to combat idleness, the clock has become a prosthesis, augmenting the human body to override its need for rest

IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit. In a recent article for the Guardian, Lucy Rock wrote about CEOs’ “competitive sleep deprivation,” with top executives sleeping for a mere three to four hours, mimicking Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour sleep cycle when she was in office. Similarly, Angela Ahrendts, head of retail at Apple and former CEO of Burberry, has claimed she “gets a headache when she sleeps for more than six hours.”

Such enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity. But it has deep epistemological roots. In the wake of Enlightenment and in tandem with the emergence of capitalism, humans began to view nature as a pool of resources to be tamed, mastered, owned, and directed toward fulfilling human desires. It wasn’t long before this conquest of nature was redirected toward the intransigencies of human nature. Despite all the technological advances that positivistic science yielded, humans were still faced with their own physical limitations. They could build skyscrapers of glass and steel that defied gravity in the name of human reason, yet they could not tame the unreasonable demands of their own body for rest.

The attempt to tame the body of its unprofitable tendency to tire began as an effort to make “saving time” a moral issue. Sixteenth-century moralist and mercantilist discourses already regarded punctuality as a prerequisite for the conception of a modern man, the pinnacle of social development in an imagined context of linear progress. British historian E.P. Thompson points out in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” that toward the end of the 17th century, as wage labor relations began to become more prevalent, time began to be conceived as a precious commodity to be spent rather than merely passed. “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time,” Thompson notes. “And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted.” Tolling bells and fines levied by employers taught students and workers that their time was being counted, that it was a regulated and regimented currency.

Moralists urged “time thrift,” and framed the waste of time as summoning divine punishment. As British nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood put it in the 17th century tract Meetness for Heaven, “This is our working day, our market time … O Sirs, sleep now, and awake in hell, whence there is no redemption.” Paternalist and colonialist discourses, whether in addressing the English poor or indigenous people from developing countries, represented idleness as a trait of those who are “naturally inferior.” For instance, as Thompson notes, clergyman John Clayton’s pamphlet “Friendly Advice to the Poor” urges the factory worker, whom he refers to as a “sluggard,” to use his time efficiently and refrain from “dulling his spirit by Indolence.” Similarly, where theories of social evolutionism gained prominence, time discipline was seen as essential for the transition to “mature societies.” Thompson notes how economic-growth theorists viewed Mexican mineworkers as “indolent and childlike people” because of their deficient time discipline.

Parallel to the rise of “time thrift” comes the monumental role of the clock. In 17th century Britain, clocks restructured work habits by materializing the ethic of time thrift, setting a clear demarcation between “work” and “life” and reminding workers of their tasks. The omnipresence of clocks was a guarantor of regulation, it ensured the institution of order in the workspace. The clock’s ubiquity legitimized time discipline and naturalized it, making it banal and commonsensical. It made sure that no one escaped the tempo.

One might say that the clock becomes a subject, with agency in its own right, shaping social customs and subjecting people to its rhythms. As anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued, technology and things are not simply animated by humans but also mediate human action. And as anthropologist Benjamin Snyder argues, clocks served the purpose of training and manipulating the body to accomplish set tasks, thereby “turning it into an inexhaustible source of energy.” The incessant sound of the ticking clock, the mounting anxiety it almost automatically evokes, has come to regulate the body and embed it within the culture of busyness.

If clocks are agents that shape human actions, is it valid to assume that clocks are an “other”? By making sure everyone maximizes their efficiency, clocks address the physical limitations of the human body, becoming a kind of prosthesis that pushes humans closer to reaching an “optimal” state of activity.

This is reflected in the late 19th century emergence of the idea of an “internal clock,” which exemplifies how biological processes can be redefined in terms of prominent material objects. By this means, the ideology of time discipline— inseparable from the clock—becomes seen as a natural imperative. In the wake of the clock’s ubiquity, positivist and scientific rhetoric began to depict the biological clock as an “endogenous” factor that operates according to “innate” biological rhythms, leading to medical advice shaped by the metaphors it employs: “how to reset your internal clock” and so on. Such advice points to the mechanization of the body, which now requires “daily maintenance.”

It may seem as if the presence of a master clock in our brains, which synchronizes and sets sleeping patterns on its own, means we no longer need an outside force to tame our bodies. Our bodies have internalized this systemic regulation, becoming in this sense, machinic. However, what implications arise from this? This mechanization of the body—a precursor and template for the ongoing reconceptualization of the self in terms of quantities alone—reflects how our bodies have become products, rather than agents, of a culture of busyness and rationality that glorifies productivity. Scientific discourses have succeeded in masking the way we’ve been clocked in and can no longer clock out. 

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome Was a Technology Prophecy

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Editor’s note: Since today marks director David Cronenberg’s 73rd birthday, it’s a good time to appreciate one of his greatest and most notorious works. Though my favorite of his remains the distinctly PKD-like eXistenZ, a close runner up is the cult classic Videodrome, which the following analysis reappraises in the context of contemporary social media-fixated culture.

By Nathan Jurgenson

Source: Omni Reboot

David Cronenberg’s vision of technology as the “new flesh” in Videodrome isn’t so shocking anymore.

Videodrome is the best movie ever made about Facebook.

What felt “vaguely futuristic” about it in 1983 is prescient today: technology and media are ever more intimate, personal, embodied, an interpenetration that David Cronenberg’s film graphically explores.
Videodrome offers a long-needed correction to how we collectively view and talk about technology. As the anti-Matrix, Videodrome understood that media is not some separate space, but something which burrows into mind and flesh. The present has a funny habit of catching up with David Cronenberg.
Still, Videodrome is deeply of its time and place. It’s set in Toronto, where Cronenberg was born and studied at the same time as University of Toronto superstar media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Beyond McLuhan’s reputation, Toronto was also known as a wired city; among other things, it was an early adopter of cable television.
In suit, Videodrome follows a Toronto cable television president, Max Renn (James Woods). He becomes involved with a radio psychiatrist named Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry, of Blondie fame), who reminds us of popular criticisms of television culture: we want to be stimulated until we’re desensitized, becoming (at best) apolitical zombies and (at worst) amoral monsters. Television signal saturates this film. The satellite dishes, screens, playback devices, and general aesthetics of analogue video are on glorious, geeked-out display. Although Videodrome’s operating metaphor is television, this film can be understood as being a fable about media in general. And what seemed possible with television in 1983 seems obvious today with social media.
Over the course of the film, Max comes to know a “media prophet” named Professor Brian O’Blivion—an obvious homage to Marshall McLuhan. O’Blivion builds a “Cathode Ray Mission,” named after the television set component which shoots electrons and creates images. The Cathode Ray Mission gives the destitute a chance to watch television in order to “patch them back into the world’s mixing board,” akin to McLuhan’s notion of media creating a “global village,” premised on the idea that media and technology, together, form the social fabric. O’Blivion goes on to monologue, “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen appears as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality; and reality is less than television.”
This is Videodrome’s philosophy. It’s the opposite of The Matrix’s reading of Baudrillard’s theories of simulation, and it goes completely against the common understanding of the Web as “virtual,” of the so-called “offline” as “real.” O’blivion would agree when I claim that “it is wrong to say ‘IRL’ to mean offline: Facebook is real life.”
This logic—that the Web is some other place we visit, a “cyber” space, something “virtual” and hence unreal—is what I call “digital dualism” and I think it’s dead wrong. Instead, we need a far more synthetic understanding of technology and society, media and bodies, physicality and information as perpetually enmeshed and co-determining. If The Matrix is the film of digital dualism, Videodrome is its synthetic and augmented opponent.
As P.J. Rey illustrates, fictional Web-spatiality is the favorite digital dualist plot device. Yet more than fiction books and films, what has come to dominate much of our cultural mythology around the Web is the idea that we are trading “real” communication for something simply mechanical: that real friendship, sex, thinking, and whatever else lazy op-ed writers can imagine are being replaced by merely simulated experiences. The non-coincidental byproduct of inventing the notion of a “cyber” space is the simultaneous invention of “the real,” the “IRL,” the offline space that is more human, deep, and true. Where The Matrix’s green lines of code or Neal Stephenson’s 3D Metaverse may have been the sci-fi milieu of the 1990s, the idea of a natural “offline” world is today’s preferred fiction.
Alternatively, what makes Videodrome, and Cronenberg’s oeuvre in general, so useful for understanding social media is their fundamental assumption that there is nothing “natural” about the body. Cronenberg’s trademark flavor of body-horror is highly posthuman: boundaries are pushed and queered, first through medical technologies in Shivers , Rabid , The Brood , and Scanners , then through media technology in Videodrome  and eXistenZ , then, most notoriously, in The Fly, where the human and animal merge. If The Matrix is René Descartes, Videodrome is Donna Haraway.
Cronenberg’s characters are consistent with Haraway’s theory of the cyborg: not the half-robot with the shifty laser eye, but you and me. In the film, the goal is never to remove the videodrome signal that is augmenting the body, but to reprogram it. To direct it. As Haraway famously wrote, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” “Natural” was never a real option anyways.
Max Renn is especially good at finding the real in the so-called “virtual” because he is equally good at seeing virtuality in the “real.” From the beginning, he understands that much of everyday life is a massive media event devoid of meaning. The old flesh is tired, used up, and toxic. The world is filled with a suffering assuaged only by glowing television screens. As the film progresses, the real and unreal blur, making each seem hyperbolic: hallucinations become tangible, while the tangible drips with a surrealism that’s gritty, jumpy, dirty, erotic, and violent—closer to Spring Breakers than The Wizard of Oz. As such, Cronenberg’s universe is always a little sticky: an unease which begs the nightmares to come true, so that we at least know what’s real.
Videodrome’s depiction of techno-body synthesis is, to be sure, intense; Cronenberg has the unusual talent of making violent, disgusting, and erotic things seem even more so. The technology is veiny and lubed. It breaths and moans; after watching the film, I want to cut my phone open just to see if it will bleed. Fittingly, the film was originally titled “Network of Blood,” which is precisely how we should understand social media, as a technology not just of wires and circuits, but of bodies and politics. There’s nothing anti-human about technology: the smartphone that you rub and take to bed is a technology of flesh. Information penetrates the body in increasingly more intimate ways.
This synthesis of the physical and the digital is mirrored in the film’s soundtrack, too. In his book on Videodrome’s production, Tim Lucas calls Howard Shore’s score “bio-electronic” because it was written, programmed into a synthesizer, and played back on a computer in a recording studio while live strings played along. Early in the film, the score is mostly those strings, but as time passes the electronic synthesizers creep up in the mix, forming the bio-electronic synthesis.
The most fitting example of techno-human union in Videodrome is the famous scene of Max inserting his head into a breathing, moaning, begging video screen; somewhere between erotic and hilarious, media and humanity coalesce. There isn’t a person and then an avatar, a real world and then an Internet. They’re merged. As theorists like Katherine Hayles have long taught, technology, society, and the self have always been intertwined. Videodrome knows this, and it shows us with that headfirst dive into the screen—to say nothing of media being inserted directly into a vaginal opening in Max’s stomach, or the gun growing into his hand.

Thirty years after its release, Videodrome remains the most powerful fictional representation of technology-self synthesis. This merger wasn’t invented with the Internet, or even television. Humans and technology have always been co-implicated. We often forget this when talking about the Web, selling ourselves instead a naive picture of defined “virtual” spaces which somehow lack the components of “real” reality. This is why The Matrix and “cyberspace” have long outworn their welcome as a frame for understanding the Internet. It should be of no surprise that body horror is as useful for understanding social media as cyberpunk.

Mother Earth May Have Good Reason to Slaughter Us

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By Jack Balkwill

Source: Dissident Voice

Decades ago James Lovelock constructed a principle called the Gaia hypothesis, contending that a biosphere teeming with life works together with inorganic matter to self-regulate conditions for maintaining a livable planet.

The oxygen levels in our air are maintained, and the salinity of the seas – everything that’s needed to keep conditions within the zones which nurture life on the planet.  This is a theory embraced by many deep environmentalists because it offers hope for the future of life forms on the planet.

When one creature (such as man) gets to be so out of control that it threatens the other life forms, Gaia, or Mother Earth, pushes back toward a healthy balance, according to some theorists (the Gaia principle has many variations).

In the ancient Greek religion, before Zeus was king of the gods in the classical period, or Zeus’ father Cronus was king of the gods, or Cronus’ father Uranus was king of the gods, there was Gaia, the earth mother, who created the heavens, the various gods, and man.  Gaia regulated the growing of crops, healed the sick, and was the earth itself to her followers.

Many of the most ancient religions around the world had as their chief deity a female, and my guess is because they reasoned that since it is the female who gives birth, a creator must be female.

The universe within us

Each of us humans is a microcosm of the Gaia principle.  Within us, we have about a hundred trillion unique creatures which do not share our DNA.  Cells containing our DNA only number about ten trillion, so they are vastly outnumbered.  The microbes within us are in many forms — bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses.

When our microbes are out of balance, it can be life-threatening, so a major function of our immune system is to regulate them, to keep one species from over reproducing, just as, in the Gaia theory, life forms are regulated within the massive biosphere.

If, for example, Candida reproduces to a high level, our immune system will try to destroy enough of it to get back to a balance.  Candida at normal levels may actually be beneficial, and is thought to attack some harmful invaders. At extreme levels of overgrowth Candida may become deadly to us.

Most of the life forms within us are friendly, and we would die without them.  They have a great many functions, working together to keep us alive.  In the end, if we die, they no longer have a home.

And most of the life forms outside of us are also beneficial, aiding Mother Nature in maintaining a delicate balance.

Symbioses

Oak trees have dropped their heavy acorns for millions of years, right beside their trunks.  In such a place, the acorn has little chance of growing with no sunlight under the canopy of mother tree.  But squirrels are happy to carry the acorns away from the tree to bury them in case they are needed for food during an extreme winter.  The squirrels don’t eat all of what they bury most years, giving the oak an opportunity to spread its genetic material.

In return the oak provides a home for the squirrel, which builds nests in oak trees and eats the acorns.  There are interactions between species all over the planet with which we are not yet familiar, but it is clear that species depend on one another for survival, just as the microbes within us are maintained in a balance that sustains life.

A flower may provide pollen to the bee, and in return the bee pollinates other flowers, benefiting both species.

But sometimes man gets in the way

Who would think a massive animal like a moose would rely on the lowly beaver for its well being?  When beaver hats were a popular fad, beaver were killed off in such large numbers that moose began to starve.  One of the favorite foods of moose is the shoots growing in wetlands, and without beavers to dam streams creating wetlands, moose began to go hungry and started feeding on tree bark, killing trees.

Of course, it was inadvertent that a fad of humans started killing off moose.  But we’ve done such things throughout our history and have more control over nature than we realize.

When sperm whales were slaughtered to near extinction, giant squid began to rise up to the surface in the oceans, no longer having to fear their primary enemy, the sperm whales that fed upon them.  Giant squid previously stayed in deep parts of the ocean to avoid sperm whales.  We have no idea what happens in the long term when a creature like the giant squid, with a ravenous appetite, begins feeding in a part of the biosphere from which it was banned for millions of years, but certainly it must upset the food chain.

It is thought that some animals, such as mammoths, became extinct at the hand of man.  Such creatures disappeared in North America about the time it was populated by humans.

Whether directly or indirectly, we are responsible for the extinction of a great many species.

Intelligence, whatever that is

Many people seem to think that humans are somehow superior creatures.  We have a formula for determining intelligence which predicts that a species is intelligent when its brain is large enough to take care of all of the functions of its body, with something left over.  That something left over is intelligence.  So it’s largely brain size in proportion to body size that suggests degrees of intelligence.

There is an old belief that elephants have a pea brain, but it is not true.  An elephant has a large brain, but needs most of it for maintaining its massive bodily functions, so what’s left over may not be great intelligence, but the elephant is certainly an intelligent animal.

The cetaceans, the large toothed whales, all have brains larger than human brains.  Some scientists have speculated that they may be more intelligent than humans.

When people say, “But cetaceans haven’t invented nuclear weapons,” they are showing, perhaps, a flaw in the human being, not a comparative virtue.

Those who support the theory that cetaceans are more intelligent theorize that they may understand that being more in harmony with nature is the intelligent thing to do for long term survival, rather than making automobiles which pollute the planet and the many other destructive things humans do.

At any rate the other creatures appear to help maintain the balance of life within the biosphere, interrelating in complex ways, while humans have reproduced out of control, crowding out other life forms, taking more than our share of resources, and polluting the planet.

So another way to look at the Gaia theory is to describe it as a kind of immune system for the biosphere.  When it has an organism that is overpopulating and causing other organisms to die, that organism must be regulated, just as for a Candida overgrowth or cancer within a human.

The traditional way that Mother Nature has regulated the human population is with disease.  It worked well up to the twentieth century, when humans began to poison their drinking water with chlorine or other agents to kill off water-borne diseases, which had previously wiped out the populations of entire cities.

Will humans be brought under control by Mother Nature?

In the 1970’s there was a movement to reduce the human population, quite popular with many.  I donated to that cause, and was surprised to see it vanish.  I suspected that it was killed by the capitalists, who have a vision that the population must continue to grow for there to be more consumers, hence, more profit.  Capitalists insist that “growth” continue without considering finite limits consistent with the size of the planet.

So how will Gaia maintain the delicate balance with the human organism out of control?  She might introduce a new disease for which we have no antidote.  It was the first thing I thought of when the AIDS epidemic began decades ago.  A perfect killer, to destroy the immune function, allowing almost anything to then kill the host.  But mankind seems to now have that disease under control.

Or Mother Nature might allow us to commit suicide by climate change from our nasty habit of spewing carbon emissions, and other anti-environmental things we are doing in destroying our little blue planet. We are releasing massive toxins into the environment in the form of dioxins from paper and plastic making, radiation from nuclear power plants and bomb making, insecticides, herbicides, and other dangerous chemicals.

A recent report by The World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation stated that at the current rate, the weight of plastic in the oceans will exceed the weight of the fish.  When I heard this a few weeks ago I posted on Facebook, “The epitaph for human beings will read ‘they thought they were an intelligent species.’”

As an old man I take heart that young people seem to be far more aware of the degradation of the planet’s environment, giving me hope that they will find a solution and assist Mother Gaia in her quest for purification and renewal.

The alternative is to leave her no choice but to see us as a cancer that must be eliminated for the good of the whole.

 

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com Read other articles by Jack.