A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 1

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.

It’s true—United we stand

Protesting Trump’s cabinet outside Senator Cornyn’s office. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Stephanie from Austin TX

In a world that seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, fueled by hatred and helped along by the capacity for a nuclear holocaust and destruction of environmental sustainability, what do you do?

You can wallow in rage, hatefulness, and vengefulness, wrecking your own mental health and hurting people around you, or

You can join with like-minded individuals who value love over hate, peace over war, compassion over vengefulness, justice over exploitation. You can link up with people who can foresee what will happen to enormous segments of life on earth if greedy exploiters of its resources and promoters of divisiveness are not reined in.

For those of you open to doing something to confront the wages of greed and the destructive isms of the time, one movement you might consider joining is the Indivisible movement.

One of the things I like about the movement is its emphasis on stopping Trump’s platform, the specific things he and his henchmen want to do that will make life worse for millions of people and the earth on which we live.

A lot of the energy in the current resistance movement targets Trump the man, the symbol of the greediest of the one percent of the one percent; the icon for the dispossessed, the disillusioned, and the distraught; the reincarnation of the cataclysmic fascism of the last century.

What I value in the central Indivisible credo is its emphasis on stopping inhumane, unjust, and destructive policies—executive orders, laws, and dis-regulations that hurt innocent people and the environments in which most people struggle to survive. If you can improve the policies, the procedures, the ethics, then individual representatives of greed and destructiveness can do less damage.

Looking for an optimism boost?

Visit the Indivisible Guide to Stopping the Trump Agenda.

Download the Indivisible Guide

Learn more about its efforts to mobilize resistance to the Trump agenda http://billmoyers.com/story/how-the-indivisible-movement-is-fueling-resistance-against-trump/

Check out youtube videos of local actions