by Stefan Schindler
It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. Never before has humanity been endowed with such fantastic opportunities. Never before has humanity’s survival been so precarious, the threat of self-extinction looming on the near horizon.
The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one; and though prophets and sages, assassinated statesmen and pacifist activists have long issued warnings about the urgent need for sane and pragmatic reform, their voices have been muted by a perpetual blizzard of epistemological confetti and jingoistic sloganeering aimed at the citizen populace by sophistic politicians and mainstream media technocrats serving the imperial needs of the richest of the rich.
Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Noam Chomsky adds the necessary twist: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” Hence the enduring potency of Marx’s maxim: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”
America repeats the unlearned lessons of history. Founded on noble ideals undermined by genocide and slavery, America wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy, not knowing she is destroying herself. Men at the helm of the ship of state, swollen with greed and skilled at sophistry, steer civilization toward the abyss. Only the blind can fail to see The Statue of Liberty weeping for another lost chance for human history to be something other than ignorance, violence, and ignoble self-betrayal. With all too few individual exceptions, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is the difference between neurotic and psychotic.
Howard Zinn, noting that the problem is not civil disobedience, but, rather, all too pervasive obedience, declared: “Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.”
Albert Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” He said further: “Money only appeals to selfishness and always irresistibly tempts its owner to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?”
James Thurber once offered the parable of a man standing on his cabin porch watching a forest being cut down to provide timber for the building of an asylum in which to house people driven insane by the cutting down of forests.
Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, “The message here is clear: We cannot rely on either mainstream political party to take us back from the abyss. Stay tuned as Stefan expands further on living in the gratitude, grace, integrity, and activism necessary for peace and social justice.