Your
Extinction Will Quell Your Moral And Intellectual Confusion
By Jason Miller
02 September, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Persistently ticking off the
precious seconds in humanity’s “Countdown to Extinction”,
the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists has advanced
to seven minutes of midnight. Yet despite nuclear terror unleashed on
Japan, an arms race of monumental proportions, the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and widespread nuclear proliferation, somehow humanity has managed
avoid nuclear apocalypse for 60 years. Perhaps the virtual certainty
of “mutually assured destruction” will freeze the hands
of the Doomsday Clock and continue humankind’s stay of execution.
As if the possibility of
nuclear devastation was not enough of a concern, Donald Rumsfeld recently
informed us that those who oppose the Iraqi Occupation and the abrogation
of Constitutional law lack courage and are confused morally and intellectually.
"Terrorism" is an existential threat to the “civilized
world” and the Bush administration is justified in all of its
“counter-terrorism” measures, according to Rumsfeld. Remember,
if nuclear war does not annihilate us, the “terrorists”
will.
As you ponder the threat
of “terrorism”, do not forget to consider that the many
invasions mounted by the United States military and the IDF have killed
millions more innocent civilians than the asymmetrical warfare waged
by over-matched victims of imperial oppression.
Killing civilians is a war crime, whether the murderer dons a uniform
and flies a multi-billion dollar plane to make a “precision strike”
or wears civilian clothes and creates crude road-side bombs to blow
up passers-by. (And ordering such murders is a war crime too, Mr. Rumsfeld).
And on the subject of courage,
Rumsfeld has sent over 2600 US soldiers to their deaths yet has not
spent a minute engaged in combat.
Who did the Secretary of
Defense say lacked courage and was morally and intellectually confused?
Soul searching often yields
resolutions to dilemmas posed by “moral and intellectual confusion”.
Perhaps his transaction with Mephistopheles rendered Monsieur Rumsfeld
immune to such dilemmas.
Self-Inflicted Pain
Nuclear devastation rendering
the world virtually uninhabitable, unfathomably cruel war crimes annihilating
innocent human beings, and the impending coastal inundation, droughts,
violent weather, and ecological disasters of Climate Change are harrowing
potentialities and realities with which we humans cope on a daily basis.
The sad irony is that the
common denominator amongst these dire threats to the perpetuation of
life on Earth is that we created them.
Unfortunately, the species
blessed with frontal lobes and opposable thumbs is threatening extinction
of life on Earth in still another way. While less immediate, the consequences
of humankind tenaciously clinging to the prevailing socioeconomic order
will be as disastrous as nuclear war, the escalation of the murder of
civilian populations or Climate Change. Quite simply, humanity’s
present course down a blind alley will inevitably lead us to a dead
end, literally.
Dream the American
Dream
And while not the sole culprit,
the United States bears much of the responsibility for this additional
threat to the perpetuation of the human species. This nation shamelessly
spawned, practices, champions, and proliferates many of the socioeconomic
dynamics responsible for the incredible strain we humans are putting
upon the Earth as we tax this planet far beyond its capacity.
Seemingly destined to become
the “asylum for mankind” Thomas Paine foresaw, the United
States freed itself from a tyrant, created a constitutional republic,
absorbed waves of immigrants, abolished the heinous institution of chattel
slavery, ceded rights to working people, recognized the right of women
to vote, instituted numerous social service programs, and made notable
progress in extending civil rights to minorities. In spite of the genocide
of Turtle Island’s indigenous people, the brutal treatment of
its Black population, and various other significant transgressions,
the United States made remarkable moral progress over the course of
its relatively brief existence.
Regrettably, as the United
States was marching toward fulfilling its rich promise, the enemies
of social justice and human rights were licking their wounds and plotting
the restoration of power to the de facto aristocracy. Men like Goldwater,
Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bush’s have presided over a perverse
and tragic turn of events as powerful corporate entities and a relative
handful of wealthy individuals have hijacked most of the social, economic,
and political institutions of the United States. The lunatics are indeed
running the asylum. And the betterment of humanity is not even on their
radar screen.
Utilizing the public education
system and the corporate media, CEO’s, major shareholders of massive
corporations, obscenely wealthy individuals, and political heavy hitters
in the United States and Israel work tirelessly to keep the "other"
99% of the population spending, consuming, and manifesting the American
Way.
Subjecting the rest of the
world's citizens to its perverse mélange of predatory capitalism,
militarism, self-absorption, narcissism, hubris, avarice, and acute
paranoia, the corporatocracy of the United States of America uses its
unprecedented military and economic power to ram the American Way down
their collective throats.
Cultural genocide and the
establishment of ruthless oligarchies be damned! “Free markets”,
a win at all costs mentality, obsessive hedonism, perpetual war, and
the relentless pursuit of profit at the expense of human beings are
the United States’ gifts to the world.
Contrary to the tripe peddled
by revisionist historians and the corporate media, the world’s
“benevolent” superpower has not been spreading an enlightened
and democratic socioeconomic system around the globe.
Reality Intrudes....How
Rude!
In his essay entitled Greed,
Julian Edney provides a thought-provoking analysis of the impact the
American Way has had on the populace in its country of origin.
Consider this excerpt:
Modern analysts Cook and
Frank show free market competition has become so stark that we are becoming
a winner-takes-all society (17). In a giant economy, aggressive acquisition,
greed, where so widespread and popular as to be celebrated, has resulted
in colossal differences, so that, as much as we are accustomed to reproaching
the Europeans for their inequalities, we are now caught in a lie. We
have become more unequal. The United States is the wealthiest nation.
But its 20.3 percent child poverty rate ranks worse than all European
nations (18).
Historians Will and Ariel
Durant (19) estimated in their survey that the gap between the wealthiest
and the poorest in America has become greater than at any time since
Imperial plutocratic Rome.
And sample some of Henry
Giroux’s insight from his article The Politics of Disposability
(which recently appeared in The Toronto Star):
The bodies that repeatedly
appeared all over New Orleans days and weeks after it was struck by
Hurricane Katrina also revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics,
one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary
burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. The deeply
existential and material questions regarding who is going to die and
who is going to live in this society are now centrally determined by
race and class. Katrina lays bare what many people in the United States
do not want to see: large numbers of poor black and brown people struggling
to make ends meet, benefiting very little from a social system that
makes it difficult to obtain health insurance, child care, social assistance,
cars, savings, and minimum-wage jobs, if lucky, and instead offers to
black and brown youth bad schools, poor public services, and no future,
except a possible stint in the penitentiary. As Janet Pelz in the Sept.
19, 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer rightly insisted, "These are
the people the Republicans have been teaching us to disdain, if not
hate, since President Reagan decried the moral laxness of the welfare
mom."
Despite the United States
presenting the American Way as an offer the rest of the world can’t
refuse, increasing numbers of nations and groups are successfully resisting.
Since opposition threatens their relentlessly acquisitive agenda, the
US power elite demonize leaders like Hugo Chavez and nations like Iran.
In reality, those who reject the dictates of the American Empire are
worthy of respect for refusing to bend over for an unlubricated fist-fuck.
Anyone up for a little
game of human extinction?
Aside from the obvious moral
depravity and numerous social injustices associated with our greed-driven
socioeconomic paradigm, there is a particularly grave pragmatic consequence
from which no human being can escape. The American Way is a path to
extinction, particularly as the citizens of populous nations like China
and India race to satiate themselves in the orgy conspicuous consumption.
The Earth cannot sustain 6.5 billion people living the "American
Way".
How can we measure the sustainability
of life on Earth? One means at our disposal is to examine ecological
footprints. Each nation has an ecological footprint which (according
to Wikipedia) is the amount of land and water area a person or a human
population would need to provide the resources required to sustainably
support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology.
To gain perspective on how
unsustainable the American Way truly is, consider that the average US
citizen exerts 52 times the ecological pressure as the average Somali.
At 9.57 hectares per capita, the United States has the world’s
largest ecological footprint. (Bangladesh’s .5 represents the
other end of the spectrum). If every nation had the same global footprint
as the United States, we would need 5 Earths to support global consumption!
As we rapidly deplete non-renewable
resources (like oil) and use renewable resources more quickly than nature
can replenish them, we are in a state of ecological overshoot. Deforestation,
diminishing supplies of groundwater, and the depletion of fish populations
are but three examples of disappearing renewable resources.
Wildlife extinction is another
deeply disturbing aspect of ecological overshoot. World-renowned for
his expertise on humanity’s impact on the environment, University
of Minnesota professor David Tillman compared the rate of the emergence
of new species with the current rate of extinction:
"That's sort of a 1
million to 4 million year process, and yet we are causing species to
be lost at rates of 100 to 1000 times faster,"
Blinded by hubris, narcissism,
and technology, many people perceive themselves to be separate from
nature and the people existing “outside” of their insular
worlds. The reality is that we are each inextricably linked with the
rest of the Earth’s inhabitants (be they human, animal, or plant)
in a complex web of life.
Albert Einstein challenged
us to break the shackles of the illusion of separateness and embrace
interdependence:
"A human being is a
part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and
space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something
separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to
free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace
all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty."
Hopeful Signs on
the Horizon
While it is likely to be
some time before moral and humane movements supplant the ignoble Duopoly
that is bought and paid for by corporate and Israeli interests, they
do exist and are gaining momentum. (1)Populists and Proutists represent
two such movements. A rising tide of democratic socialism in South America
demonstrates that nations in the “developing world” are
freeing themselves from the yoke of the American Empire, but Goliath
will not fall quickly or easily.
As people of conscience search
for ways to create viable alternatives to the brutal inhumanity of corporatism,
many are finding that grassroots efforts offer an effective means of
chipping away at the deeply entrenched status quo. Partners Dr. Timothy
Wilkin and William Brandon Shanley are shining examples of two US Americans
who work tirelessly to counteract the deleterious effects of predatory
capitalism.
Tim Wilken is a physician
and scientist who has devoted himself to the betterment of humankind.
His stated goal is to strive for a world free of hate and violence.
In the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, Wilken seeks to employ his strengths
and efforts to bring about a more humane and sustainable world.
Towards that end, he has
done pioneering work in the field of synergy which Dr. Wilken defines
in this way:
We believe that we must learn
to work together. This means we must become synergic humans. Synergy
means working together—operating together as in Co-Operation—
laboring together as in Co-Laboration—acting together as in Co-Action.
The goal of synergic union is to accomplish a larger or more difficult
task than can be accomplished by individuals working separately. We
are committed to a world where I win, you win, others win and the Earth
wins. Win-Win-Win-Win.
Dr. Wilken maintains a Website
devoted to synergy at http://www.synearth.net/
in an effort to teach humanity:
How to work co-Operatively
with each other. How to nurture the earth and the children of the earth.
How to be a part of tomorrow's solutions rather than part of the today's
problems.
Collaborating with Wilken
in his quest to better the lot of humanity is William Shanley. Shanley
brings a wealth of experience to the partnership. He has worked extensively
in the media industry, including stints as a writer for CNN and as an
independent producer of documentaries. He interviewed Presidents Reagan
and Carter in preparation for his documentary called The Made for TV
Elections with Martin Sheen and worked for President Carter. He also
edited and contributed to Lewis Carroll’s Lost Quantum Diaries.
Together Wilken and Shanley
recently launched an entity called Give-Get Nation at www.givegetnation.net
On the Give Get Nation Website, one can connect with others virtually
anywhere in the world to give, receive, or exchange goods and services
at no monetary cost. Demonstrating that people can act on their values,
seek fulfillment of their needs and behave altruistically without the
impediment of spiritually toxic influences like money, banks, or stock
exchanges, Give-Get Nation provides a refreshing alternative to the
“orthodox” economic marketplace.
Registration costs nothing
but a few moments of one's time. Participating in Give-Get Nation affords
people the opportunity to attempt to give or get goods or services according
to their capacities, desires, or needs, at no profit or cost.
Wilken and Shanley stated
that Give-Get Nation:
“organizes the world's
unlimited surplus product, labor, intelligence and spiritual capital
and makes it available to everybody for free. Think of us as the National
Human Values Trust.”
Give-Get Nation is in its
infancy, but it is brimming with promise. Its selfless approach to exchanging
goods and services offers a spiritually fulfilling alternative to the
rat race that rapacious capitalism’s wage slaves perpetually run.
As membership increases and transactions begin to mount, growing numbers
of people will rise to Einstein’s challenge by widening their
circles of compassion. And perhaps most importantly, the exchange of
surplus goods will help push the Earth toward sustainability. (Give-Get
Nation is indeed anathema to predacious capitalists).
Readers often email me asking
what they can do in the face of the seemingly omnipotent forces of greed
and malevolence which orchestrate many aspects of our lives. Opportunity
is now pounding your door off its hinges. Become an active member of
Give-Get Nation. It is free, legal and subversive to corporate domination.
(What more could you ask for?)
Besides, Give-Get Nation
represents a significant shift in values and priorities. Remember that
the human species has already caused the premature extinction of many
of Earth’s inhabitants. If we humans do not collectively change
our values, WE HUMANS could be the next species to disappear.
(1) http://populistamerica.com/
Jason Miller
is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually
and spiritually. He writes prolifically and his essays have appeared
widely on the Internet. He welcomes constructive correspondence at [email protected]
or via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.