Tag: ecological apocalypse

A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

to the earth with love
KMM

Part One: Resurrecting the Wisdom and Spirit of Tom Paine, Mark Twain, Emerson, and Kurt Vonnegut

Future historians will write that, with all too few exceptions, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is the difference between neurotic and psychotic.  They will show that America’s self-destruction was caused primarily by three factors.  1) A lack of viable multi-party pluralism.  2) A lack of authentic education.  3) The failure of the mainstream news media to inform, edify, enlighten.

Almost all mainstream news media in the USA exemplify “fake news,” and this has long been the case.  Their primary function is to ignorate, not educate.  That’s precisely why, for example, Americans ended up with such viciously criminal presidents as Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Cheney-Bush, and Trump, and why most American citizens remain equally oblivious of the war crimes of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

There is nothing in American history as unpatriotic as the USA Patriot Act.  And there is nothing in recent American history as self-defeating as the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act and the passing of the Citizens United Act.  Yet most Americans could neither date nor explain these democracy-shredding events.

Americans are the most historically illiterate citizens in the advanced industrial Western world.  They are products of an educational system almost wholly devoted to ignoration.  Right-wing religious and neo-conservative radio and television have in recent decades made the problem infinitely worse.  Newt Gingrich and his beloved bastard Rupert Murdoch institutionalized the postmodern quantum leap into the vortex of political and news-media sophistry and lies.

Insofar as most teachers, politicians, journalists, intellectuals and scientists fail to emphasize these points, they embody what a modern philosopher calls “bullshit.”  A kind of intellectual masturbation which, along with omnipresent advertising, is the curse of the modern world.  A self-imposed alienation from the catastrophic lack of relevant insight that dominates what currently passes for “civilization.”

We face a quaternity from hell.  Economic apartheid, another Great Depression, ecological apocalypse, and nuclear holocaust.  What is to be done?

Commit to a life of voluntary simplicity and lifelong self-education.  Demand an end to the American empire.  Bring the troops home and have them engage in ecological cleanup, reforestation, infrastructure repair, and the nation-wide building of solar panels, windmills, and recycling centers.

Promote discussion of universal health care and progressive taxation.  Challenge the Pentagon budget.  Support authentically progressive people and causes.  Institute comprehensive and forceful regulation of the banking system.  Educate about the nation-wide Savings and Loan institutions destroyed during the Reagan Administration.  Become historically informed. Be the change you want to see in the world.

Vote in local as well as national elections, not least in order to preserve sanity and virtue in local school boards.

Monitor your children’s education and teach them what they are not learning in school, especially about modern American history and imperialism since World War Two, and most especially about the wholly unconstitutional and morally depraved House and Senate Un-American Activities Committees in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the not-so-surreptitious efforts of the Republican Party to bring them back to life.

And meanwhile spread the word: What we do to others and the earth we do to ourselves.

Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 4

Posted on by kathiemm

For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

By Stefan Schindler

The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.

In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.

The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the  Depression of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.

Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.

Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:

“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”