May The Unseen Be Seen

Statue of Truth outside the Supreme Court of Canada in the capital City, Ottawa in the province, Ontario. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Tomkinsr at English Wikipedia

by Caitlin Johnstone

May what is unseen become seen.

May the hidden dynamics of oligarchy and empire be revealed to all of humanity.

May the depravity of the powerful be exposed before everyone.

May government secrecy end.

May the public become aware of the pervasiveness of mass media propaganda.

May people realize that they’ve been deceived about the world since childhood.

May there be a widespread recognition that things are not as they seem.

May obfuscation and distortion be replaced with truth and clarity.

May the public grow more conscious of the reality of class dynamics.

May the public see money for the made-up game that it is.

May people begin clearly perceiving the horrors of war and economic sanctions, and feel it all.

May awareness sink in of the need for urgent climate action.

May we clearly see the existential need to begin collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem before we destroy it all.

May we all become conscious of racial and sexual dynamics and inequalities.

May we all look squarely at the unacceptable cruelty of factory farming.

May manipulators and abusers everywhere be recognized for what they are.

May abusive dynamics everywhere be clearly seen: in nations, in communities, in families, in relationships.

May unwholesome interpersonal relationships move into clarity or meet a natural end.

May unjust restrictions on consciousness-expanding substances be ended.

May everyone everywhere become conscious of their inner workings.

May our psychological trauma move into the light where it can be healed.

May our unconscious mental and perceptual habits move into consciousness.

May we all become conscious of the illusory nature of self and separation.

May we all become conscious of how experience is really happening.

May we all become conscious of our own true nature.

May we all see clearly what is happening, both inwardly and outwardly.

May we use our clear perception to move efficaciously in this world, and collaborate as one toward health and harmony.

May we build a sane and healthy world together that is based on truth and clear seeing.

Amen.

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Topsoil bomber

Thanks to Fidel Fernando for sharing his work on Unsplash


By BOB SCHILDGEN*


My finest accomplishment–not that I’m burdened with choices
in this department–is the creation
of five-hundred cubic feet of topsoil,
with the aid of billions of unidentified micro-organisms,
and earthworms churning through the compost,
and several rabbits who worked with uncommon dedication
to contribute manure and maintain morale:
Myrtle, who passed away of old age–
Habermas, who was murdered by a pit bull
that ripped the bottom from his cage–
Sartre, who perished suddenly from unknown causes,
and Derrida, who is uncommonly fond of dandelions.
Five hundred cubic feet of topsoil from sheer waste,
to enrich a garden, transform to food and flower
orange peels, tea leaves, clippings, weeds,
a bonsai Mount Fuji of compost power.
The world needs all the compost it can get.
Topsoil made us what we are,
without it we simply don’t exist,
which is an earnest modern way to say
God did indeed make Adam out of clay.

Imagine a world transformed by compost,
fertile, abundant, fecundant reckless green.
Imagine cargo ships loaded with topsoil
for every compost-craving corner of the world.
Imagine nuclear submarines distributing topsoil!
Military transport planes packed with topsoil!
Precision missiles delivering topsoil exactly where most needed.
Aircraft carriers piled high with topsoil!
Bombers dropping two-ton bombs of topsoil!
Preemptive strikes of topsoil,
weapons of mass destruction buried
under thousands of feet of steaming compost!
Imagine composters in every land, tending peaceful heaps,
singing in a vast harmony of regeneration.
Down slopes of compost comes the world’s salvation.

*From Hey Mr Green, Sierra Magazine, May 25, 2010; reprinted for educational and informative purposes.

With the Win-Win Machine, Most of Us Actually Lose

by Roy Eidelson

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Somewhere, deep in the bowels of our nation’s capital, today’s Democratic Party establishment keeps close guard over a hulking, fearsome, and often temperamental machine. With hundreds of moving parts, it’s surprising that the elaborate contraption has only one purpose: to take bold and popular policy proposals that could improve millions of lives, chew them up, and then spit out much feebler versions that don’t materially threaten the status quo. Servicing this apparatus isn’t cheap. But that’s not a problem because so many corporate behemoths—Wall Street, Big Oil, health insurers, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and beyond—are more than happy to foot the bill. They’re also very generous when it comes to tipping the machine’s operators, which apparently is how the Win-Win Machine got its name.

Given how well this arrangement works for its beneficiaries, the Democratic leadership understandably finds it unsettling whenever progressive candidates—having won office despite the considerable obstacles routinely erected by the Democratic National Committee and its offshoots—enter Congress but refuse to get their hands dirty by helping out with the Win-Win Machine. Indeed, worries about the machine’s future—and the buckets of money it reliably brings—are undoubtedly part of the impetus behind a post-election narrative being promoted by establishment Democrats. They claim that support for “socialism” among progressive candidates—in the form of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other efforts to counter injustice and inequality—is the reason the party failed to expand its control of the House or win back the Senate.

But the evidence doesn’t fit this self-serving account. Around the country, progressive candidates—and policies—flourished. Noteworthy winners in their races include Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Pramila Jayapal in Washington, Cori Bush in Missouri, Marie Newman in Illinois, Katie Porter and Ro Khanna in California, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones in New York. As Bernie Sanders wrote a week after Election Day, “It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy. It also is good politics.”

Nevertheless, the seemingly coordinated blame-the-Left propaganda we’re now hearing was entirely predictable—because it soothes the billionaire class. And for those politicians who prioritize comfort over consequence in their careers, that may be what matters most. So progressives are portrayed as misguided and misinformed, as out of touch with what Americans really want, and as proponents of dangerous reforms. In sharp contrast, so-called centrists are depicted as having been unjustly victimized and as blameless for the party’s shortcomings. The don’t-rock-the-boat Democrats who encourage this view have a clear goal: to demoralize, marginalize, ostracize, and intimidate those members who they fear will muck up the Win-Win Machine.

Meanwhile, for the many millions of Americans who were unenthusiastic about Joe Biden’s “nothing will fundamentally change” platform yet voted for him anyway because they understood the necessity of preventing another horrific four years of Donald Trump, this open hostility toward a progressive agenda undermines their interests, their values, and their aspirations. If Biden now selects only corporate-friendly, status-quo-defending advisors and Cabinet members, and if he touts watered-down bipartisan “solutions” as stunning successes, it will further cement the betrayal.

Of course, none of this suggests that Trump, Mitch McConnell, and other Republican Party leaders are any better. Indeed, they’re much worse. Consistently ruthless and single-minded in pursuing a narrow and greed-driven agenda, they count on fearmongering, racist dog-whistling, and appeals to blind patriotism to attract the intolerant and the disillusioned. Even with Trump gone, there’s little reason to expect that this GOP strategy will change.

But this reality doesn’t mean that we have to wholeheartedly embrace and defend Democratic politicians who condemn their progressive counterparts while jeopardizing the common good by deferring to the divergent preferences of their largest donors. Instead, let’s insist that these Democrats begin the new era ahead by finding a more suitable home for their anti-democratic Win-Win Machine.

Two options quickly come to mind: toss the entire contraption into the Potomac, or install it in the Smithsonian for public viewing—as a reminder of how a political party can lose its way by abandoning its core principles and its most vulnerable constituents.

********

Roy Eidelson is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and the former executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. His book Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible is now available as afree PDF. Follow him on Twitter at @royeidelson.