Like many Americans, since early childhood I was taught that good always triumphs over evil. But as I grew older and acquainted myself with the history of my country, my perspective became less naïve and better informed. My perceptions of reality were altered forever, and I am forced to live, like so many of my readers, with the burden of knowledge that often makes reality painful to bear.
America could have been very different, but it has become a land of unfathomable corruption. It is a place where money rules and lords power over everyone and every process. Corruption has lodged itself in every tissue and every organ of our societal institutions, and riddled them with crippling disease. Perhaps more than any organ it has blinded our ability to see what is before us.
The root of corruption stems from America's love affair with private wealth and conquest. We are a culturally shallow and spiritually deprived people who seem incapable of discerning truth from fairy tales. This may be a matter of convenience for some and a survival mechanism to others.
There are three primary cultural pillars that are the underpinning of our society: government, media, and religion. It is widely assumed that these institutions exist to serve the people. Whatever their intent when they were birthed in the minds and hearts of their creators, these institutions were subverted and used to subdue and control the masses; to make them subservient to power. Virtually everything we believe about America is contradicted by the evidence, but too many of us are unwilling to come to grips with reality, which thus assures the continuation of a brutal and tortuous history of murder and conquest.
In a wonderful essay titled The Problem is Civil Obedience, historian Howard Zinn wrote, "I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvey, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power..." Zinn, as usual, sums up the situation perfectly. But the great majority refuses to see things as they really are. They prefer fairy tales to truth that is too painful for them to acknowledge and to bear; and so the charade continues.
Those on the far right of the political spectrum are fond of saying that America is a Christian nation, when, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The framers of the Constitution, especially Thomas Jefferson, took great pains to keep America from evolving into a Theocracy. Even so, religion should provide a moral compass that steers its participants away from corruption and moral morass. Yet with only a comparatively few exceptions, religion is used against its followers. It serves wealth and power, and keeps the masses ignorant, and subservient to the hierarchy of the church, which is in collusion with the money changers in government.
Organized religion, like the mainstream media and the government, is controlled by the wealthy and powerful. It serves the high priests of capitalism and is little more than an enabler of corruption and conquest. Let us not forget that Manifest Destiny was driven by a puritanical zealotry that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of a continent. The collusion of religion with material wealth lends a false aura of moral authority to disingenuous and misguided human behaviors that follow immoral government into war after war. Thus the rich continue to exploit the working people for the benefit of the ruling class.
At some point in our history Jesus of Nazareth was supplanted by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The Jesus who despised the wealthy and believed in service to the poor, who in anger overturned the tables of the money changers, no longer exists within the American psyche. Unlike Jesus, Robertson and Falwell believe in accruing wealth to themselves and in assassinating their enemies. They work hand in hand with the morally bankrupt leadership that has invaded and occupies 135 of the world's 192 nations. The genuine article has somehow given way to the counterfeit, and too many of us are unable to tell the difference.
In a purer form organized religion-in this case Christianity, would be revolutionary and radical; and it would serve as a bulwark against the accumulation of private affluence in favor of public service, and a massive redistribution of wealth and power. It would find itself, like any conscientious individual, in formal opposition to the conventions of government and society, rather than an enabler of them. But that clearly is not the case these days.
The church, like all things American, more closely resembles a for profit corporation than a place where human souls are instructed in righteous behavior and healed.
Similarly, the naïve among us broadly assume that the mainstream media exists to inform the people, and thus serves as a countervailing force against corruption and malfeasance. In truth the corporate media serves those in power rather than holding them accountable to the people. While it was not always so, the mainstream media, like organized religion, is used to program public perceptions-to steer us away from truth and to perpetuate fairy tales that extol the virtues of bribery, violence, and greed. It makes useful idiots of those who cannot think for themselves and persuades them to act like fools in the eyes of the world.
From the days of Tom Paine we have regressed to an era in which news anchors are rewarded for their loyalty to political regimes by being awarded positions in government. Tom Paine and the spirit of public service have given way to Tony Snow and Katie Couric, and the creation of media celebrities. The boundary between government and media, between church and state and corporate power, no longer exists. They are all interchangeable parts in a machine that makes a mockery of social justice and human freedoms.
Gone are the days of radical, revolutionary religion in America. Gone are the days of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, when a just and Democratic Republic seemed possible. Gone are the days of Tom Paine and the militant press that challenged corrupt power. The hands of time are no longer moving forward; we have reversed them. Once again the dark ages loom large on the horizon before us like an unseen iceberg in the chill dark of an Atlantic night.
Charles Sullivan is a photographer, social activist and free lance writer residing in the hinterland of West Virgina.
Percentage wise, there are far more white collar criminals in Corporate Government, Organized Religion and the Mass Media than in prison. White collar criminals seldom end up in prison no matter human many millions they have robbed, sickened or murdered. Cases involving the polluting of food, water and air with toxics that affect millions don't end up in criminal courts, they are tried in civil courts where the punishments are much less severe than robbing a 7-11 store.
We live in an utterly corrupt society ruled by white collar criminals.
Those who have the gold make the rules.
And those who insist on playing survival of the fittest according to their own rules ought to be reminded, that game has no rules.
When the masses are denied all legal recourse, their only recourse is the guillotine.
by
rabblerowzer (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 227 comments)
on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 12:17:45 PM
Percentage wise, there are far more white collar criminals in Corporate Government, Organized Religion and the Mass Media than in prison. White collar criminals seldom end up in prison no matter how many millions they have robbed, sickened or murdered. Cases involving the polluting of food, water and air with toxics that affect millions don't end up in criminal courts, they are tried in civil courts where the punishments are much less severe than robbing a 7-11 store.
We live in an utterly corrupt society ruled by white collar criminals.
Those who have the gold make the rules.
And those who insist on playing survival of the fittest according to their own rules ought to be reminded, that game has no rules.
When the masses are denied all legal recourse, their only recourse is the guillotine.
by
rabblerowzer (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 227 comments)
on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 12:28:31 PM
Another excellent article from Charles Sullivan, with so much succinct truth laid before us.
And some rambling thoughts of my own, for whatever they might be worth:
The Dark Ages are not on the horizon, they are here now, and have been for a long time. I am free and correct to say this because I went to twelve years of Catholic school, with Dominican nuns running the show and kicking my ass (somehow I learned in spite of this, not because of it). And I've been watching the environment go downhill since I was ten years old, and got a pit in my stomach when I heard a bulldozer next door one morning, and knew in my heart they were tearing up the hilly, weeded lot I often played in.
Additionally, any damn fool can flip through the tv channels for ten minutes and arrive at the same conclusion, namely that we truly are in The Dark Ages.
Mark Twain also wrote about The Almighty Dollar, in one of his lesser known (i.e., snuffed) works, The Damned Human Race. I would classify that as recommend reading for any Homo sapien.
Given that we are in the Dark Ages, the question for me is, "How do we get out of them?"
That we're even having an election, essentially on Bush's insanity, is itself insane.
Members of the choir, such as yourself, surely perceive this. I'm tired of preaching to the choir and want to figure out how to expand the choir, so we can stop preaching.
And the only answer I see is, "Start teaching."
I think George Laekoff is a bag of wind, if you want my frame for him. The issue is not framing, but the fact that we have educated people and uneducated ones. Some of the uneducated ones are slow or non-learners, and others, like Bush and about 33% of Americans (based on polls that show support for Bush, and subtracting my estimate of slow and non-learners), are simply lazy assholes who refuse to do their homework, and thus are incapable of thinking.
Those latter ones are the ones who piss me off. A couple of them I've known for a long time-I'm afraid even related to-and thus hardly a day goes by that I don't wrestle with myself about how to deal with them. Capital punishment is all I can come up with, and I consider myself at least reasonably creative.
It is the failure to comprehend that all humans are the same species, that we are all intimately tied to the web of life on earth, and that we can all do better through cooperation rather than blowing each other up, that will likely be our epitath.
People need to understand the absolute and utter uniqueness of our planet, our absolute dependence on keeping it as healthy as nature has done over so many eons, and our need to use our alleged intelligence to limit our numbers and to fit into the biosphere as other species do.
That is to say, to realize the true nature of our very existence, and to come to terms with the concept of sustainable living.
The hour is late, perhaps too late, for doing this, but as long as we live and breathe we need to assume that this can be done. If we don't make that assumption, the alternative is to give up, and thus to assure that the hour really is too late, and that our species will go extinct much quicker than most have done in the past (I forget the average life of a species, but I think it is four million years. And for a fact, the "unsuccessful dinosaurs," as a whole, were around for 160 million years, while we've been here about one four thousandth of that time).
So how do we get from the Age of Darkness to the Age of Reason?
First of all, no less than many millions of us already have. Every time I read or learn of a hard working scientist, teacher, social worker, progressive construction worker, to give just a few of countless examples, I ask what the world would be like if everyone in the world had the same or a similar attitude.
The answer is always, "Very different." And also, "Infinitely better than it is."
I recently finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, and just last night saw the last of three DVDs based on the book. Jared is educated, to say the least, and it is so crystal clear that if we all but had his attitude, even without his superior intellect, we would turn our swords into plowshares, starting immediately.
How do we expand the choir? That is the question which, if we can answer, will take us from the Age of Darkness to the Age of Reason.
I am encouraged that it is almost impossible to find an adult alive who does not claim to want a better education for their children. Not only that, but the overwhelming majority of them will be happy to kick a few butts to make it happen, a conclusion I feel is valid after twenty years of teaching.
Perhaps there is a clue to our survival if we think in these terms. It is a crying shame that our current president and a third of our country somehow failed to do their homework.
by
Daniel Geery (26 articles, 75 quicklinks, 123 diaries, 750 comments)
on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 2:45:34 PM
I concur with Mr. Geery's insightful commentary, especially those pertaining to respect for the earth and other beings. Our culture suffers from a lack of ecological literacy, and we have severed our spiritual connection to the great web of life. We try to commodify everything and everyone, to our own detriment, and to the detriment of the planet. We should live with a keen sense of reverential awe, and learn to think for ourselves.
There is no way out of this morass except all the way through. The first step is to awaken the sleeping masses, and then, as Mr. Geery suggests, begin educating them. That necessarily involves tuning out the extraneous interference, the lies and propaganda of the mainstream media. It means educating ourselves and reading books and questioning the unchallenged paradigms of our culture. We must cast off the blankets and clothes placed over us by commerical sources, go outside for long walks in the remaining wild places and take in their tidings.
In the end we will arrive at a great awakening, a revolution of values capable of remaking the world. We are only at the awakening stages at the moment but every person we change is another drop of rain in a gathering storm that is to come.
Action is the antidote to despair. Change begins within ourselves and spreads outward. Each of us can get involved in our communities, and open our homes for discussions like the one we are having now. We can have group discussions about the issues and share DVDs such as Jared Diamond's in group settings, following by stimulating discussions. It is all about reaching out to other people and believing that a better world is possible. Without that there is no hope and no reason to continue.
Even the best ideas are useless unless put them into action.
Charlie
by
Charles Sullivan (78 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 6 comments)
on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 3:14:39 PM
So many of the problems you describe developed with the onset of civilization. Indigenous tribal cultures, unless experiencing starvation, don't act this way. They treat all with respect, have no prisons... We could learn a lot from the few remaining tribes that have not been intentionally destroyed by loggers and missionaries.
by
Rob Kall (869 articles, 4016 quicklinks, 345 diaries, 1847 comments)
on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 6:46:49 PM
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