We need to ask why we need such an enormous military budget when the wars we have been fighting and are likely to fight in the near future are street fights. If we cut the military budget we might actually be able to pay for universal health care without pain, and assure Social Security beyond the year 2075.
We need to know the big picture. We cannot afford to be silenced because we are told to be scared of "terror:" trust us who are currently in power, we will take care of us. We need to be free to care for ourselves, our family and neighbors, our village, our town. Many states are already doing what the federal government should have done. We need to have many and calm discussions about what terrorism is, and how to deal with it. How have others dealt with it? How successful were they? How successful were we with out own, home-grown terrorists?
I think we need even ask realistic questions of Muslims and others: Why are you people mad at us? I know they would tell us. They have told us, many times. But our media (and our leadership) tell us that Muslims are mad at us because they envy us our freedom. Come now, do we really believe that?
We need to ask in depth questions about the way our economy is structured, almost wholly to benefit the top of the pyramid. Is that what we want? Did we ask for that? Who decides these things anyway? Are we not at least unhappy, and perhaps even mad, at the pharmaceutical companies that are allowed by our government to charge us double for the drugs they sell elsewhere for half or less that price? Need we accept this system?
We need to look farther ahead than the next election, even if that is the horizon of politicians, and we need to look beyond the next quarter's statement of profit and losses (if we can trust the figures) that is the horizon of corporations.
We need to plan together with all others who suffer, and will suffer, the consequences of global warming. We need to observe very carefully how all kinds of animals (and even plants) deal with the unique effects of a warming atmosphere in their unique environment. We need to talk with people all over the world. There are areas that feel effects earlier than others: a number of low island countries in the Pacific already notices the rising of the ocean by inches; some of them fear--know!--that their islands will disappear altogether in the not too far future.
We are not alone.
Of course I know there are people who think of these and weightier issues. We rarely hear about them on the media, or in the political sphere, because we have made ourselves a very noisy world, where corporations who run the world not only make us want "things," but are yelling and screaming so loudly that we cannot hear the thinking that goes on.
Too bad for us.
June '07
