by Joe Kandra (cartoonist) & Kathie Malley-Morrison
Monday’s post on Engaging Peace provided a warning about two obstacles to recognizing when someone is lying to you: 1) you don’t really want to believe people (at least some people) will lie to you; and 2) your personal biases. Now there’s a slippery slope!
Here’s a test. Whatever your personal beliefs are about global warming and other threats to sustaining life on earth, assume for the moment that you’re skeptical about all the global warming warnings (which some people assert are “fake news”).
Really try to get into the character of a doubting Thomas. Now suppose you have the opportunity to listen to a speech by one of the individuals portrayed below. Also suppose you’re actually curious about the ongoing climate debate. To whom would you choose to listen? Who looks sincere and honest and might even have some chance of converting you to the environmental cause?
Even if you’re dubious about this entire exercise, please choose one:
Okay. Which individual did you select as someone worth listening to, someone who wouldn’t lie to you? Why did you make that choice? Were you equally as likely to trust a woman as a man? a person of color as compared to a white individual?
Now think about the current candidates for political office who are trying to recruit supporters. Do you believe they are all telling the truth? If not, what factors are influencing your judgments about them? Do you know?
Pegean says, Personally, I’d be more likely to trust another kitty than a lot of people (but maybe I’m biased). Bottom line, I sure hope someone will put an end to fossil fuels and start reducing global warming. I’m already too hot!
The kids have it right! I’m talking about Greta Thunberg (founder of Fridays for Future ) , and about Jamie Margolin (co-founder of Zero Hour) and about Victoria Barrett (Alliance for Climate Change Education Fellow), plus thousands of other young people who have the courage to recognize the damage being done to the planet and speak out, act out.
Their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles—and
you—should
do the same. Speak out, act out.
Yesterday, at a joint hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, Energy, and the Environment and the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg submitted a recent, dramatic United Nations report providing a science-based warning on global warming. You can read it here.
So,
what to do?
Support the Climate Strike activities today! Check here for events in your area.
Contact your Congressmen and women. Ask them to be as brave as the young climate activists and a) support efforts to stop climate change, and b) oppose war and other militaristic activities that harm both people and planet.
Pegean says: Don’t just be a spectator watching the world from your window (or the TV!). Act! The kids are giving you lots of great examples of ways you, too, can do good.
Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
How do wars start? Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.
Karl Kraus
The battles of the Sixties may someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose dimensions we have yet to grasp.
Mike Marqusee
President Donald Trump makes a
telling point when he refers to the mainstream news media as “fake news.” There’s a lot of truth in his accusation, the
dimensions of which ought to be honestly explored. Behold: those dimensions have indeed been
explored, with awesome authenticity and shocking revelations, by Michael
Parenti, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom
ought to have won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. They have long been denied such
recognition. Had their insights been
widely discussed in the U.S. “marketplace of ideas,” Nixon, Reagan, Cheney-Bush
and Trump would never have risen to the heights of power.
The elephantiastical lies of the
Republican Party – for example: American-trained death squads in Central
America are “freedom fighters;” Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons; global
warming is a “liberal hoax;” mega-tax-breaks for the mega-rich will make
everybody happy and secure – such lies too often succeed thanks to a criminally
complicit Democratic Party, a mainstream news media owned by a handful of
Republican oligarchs, an historically illiterate citizen population who (in
Noam Chomsky’s astute observation) “don’t know they don’t know,” and an
educational system designed primarily to ignorate, manipulate, stupefy and
confuse.
When President Trump slings his
accusation of “fake news” at American journalists – usually exempting the Fox
News Network owned by right-wing Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and
championed by Newt Gingrich – he only does so in order to lie about his lies.
And why not? It worked for Ronald Reagan, who turned
“liberal” into a dirty word, perpetuating the myth of America’s “liberal
media.”
That Gingrich and Murdoch succeeded
in turning American political discourse into a poisonous swamp is largely the
fault of the traditional American mainstream news media, which perpetuates the
ignoration that is the primary function of American education.
Thomas Jefferson recognized the
problem, noting: “A country cannot long remain ignorant and free.” American citizens have lost more freedoms
than they know, thanks to the most unpatriotic act in American history: the
post-9/11 Congressional passing of the unread 340 pages of the Cheney-Bush “USA
Patriot Act.”
Democracy cannot survive the
shredding of civil rights, nor can it long endure sophistry and deception. It might be worthwhile, then, to pause a
moment to reflect upon the words truth
and trust. In his book On the Meaning of Human Being, Richard Oxenberg notes:
The English word ‘truth’ is related
to the Middle English ‘troth,’ whose principal meaning is ‘trust’ (to be-troth someone … is to enter into a
relation of trust ….) A truthful
account, then, is one that is maximally trustworthy. … That Plato had [such an] understanding of
truth is evident from his association of the true and the good. [The true is good – has maximal value – because it is worth our trust.]
To restore truth and trust in
American social discourse and electoral politics, it is necessary to oppose the
Weapons of Mass Dysfunction – deception, distortion, distraction – employed by
the National Security State to bind its citizens with chains of illusion.
Let us give profound thanks that progress toward honesty and enlightenment is now being made. Although fraught with danger, and subject to abuse, the internet has nevertheless become a major instrument for awakening, as evidenced by websites like Common Dreams, Political Animal Magazine, and Engaging Peace.
This is a timely breakthrough in
communication, enhancing solidarity among peacemakers and justice-seekers in
the present conflict-ridden crucible of history.
John Le Carre provides context:
In
our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great
god of indifference. We protected the
strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and
friends of the most disgusting potentates.
And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend
our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.
Having been betrayed by a corrupt
political system, we are now in the early stages of America’s third Civil
War. The second Civil War was embodied
in The Spirit of The Sixties, when the civil rights and anti-war movements –
quietly but greatly aided by Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando – coalesced into
an anti-establishment revolution, emphasizing peace, justice, gender rights,
Earth Day, holistic health, nuclear disarmament, egalitarian economics, and
authentically edifying education.
The Reagan counter-revolution
succeeded in crushing that national outburst of activism, hope, and pragmatic
idealism. It was aided in doing so by
the pseudo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, embodied in the Trilateral
Commission, which in 1975 published The
Crisis of Democracy. The
crisis? Citizen activism in the body
politic, hoping to influence a government supposedly “of, by, and for the
people.” Citizen participation in the
functioning of democracy was, and still is, considered outrageous by what C.
Wright Mills called “the power elite.”
Yet citizen activism was the origin
and impetus for the American Revolution; for the anti-slavery “abolitionist”
movement; for the women’s-right-to-vote “suffragette” movement; and for the
1960s and 1970s anti-war and civil rights movements. Today, with an echo of Thomas Paine’s “these
are the times that try men’s souls,” citizen insistence on a just society
remains our only hope for democracy, peace, and ecological sanity.
To engage or not to engage in self-education, global citizenship, and active resistance to the forces of mega-wealth and tyranny – that is the question which every citizen now faces, and upon which the future of our children and grandchildren depends.
Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry
for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and
Peace Abbey; and author of America’s
Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War. His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.
Teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, seeing little hope for a good outcome at COP24, just called for a global climate strike to take place Friday. (Screengrab/Twitter)
Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old Swedish activist, on Wednesday called for a global climate strike. The day of action is set for Friday at “your school” or “anywhere you feel called.”
Thunberg, who’s made headlines for her now-weekly school strikes to urge her home country to take bold climate action, made the call from Katowice, Poland, where she’s attending the COP24 climate talks, now in their second week.
Unfortunately, she said in her video announcing the strike, “as of now, there are no signs of commitment to climate action.”
“Our emissions are still increasing. At the same time… the science has clearly told us that we need to act now to keep the planet within 1.5 degrees of warming,” she continued. “Whoever you are, wherever you are, we need you now to stand outside your parliament or local government office to let them know that we demand climate action.”
Her call has already gotten support from noted author and climate activist Bill McKibben. Praising her “terrific idea,” McKibben said that while it’s no small ask to urge young people to walk out of their classrooms, “kids who are in school today are going to spend the next 70 or 80 years dealing with an overheated world.””The most important thing right now,” he said, “is to start taking care of that. I am glad that we are seeing leadership from the youngest people.”
Heat waves, floods, and hurricanes are killing hundreds and devastating communities across the world. Climate change is already a deadly reality. Governments are meeting for the U.N. climate talks right now in Poland, and despite the latest stark warning from climate scientists that we have only 12 years to reverse course, politicians are ignoring their call. What use is it learning facts if adults ignore them? That’s why Greta and her fellow students are walking out of school to teach politicians a lesson in leadership.
Addressing world leaders as the climate conference kicked off, Thunberg said, “We have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future. They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not. The people will rise to the challenge.”
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