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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 2/23/10

UNPREPARED AND UNPLUGGED: JOE STACK AND LIKELY COMING ATTRACTIONS

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It may be a time of crisis, but it doesn't have to be a time of catastrophe. It's in times of crisis that human beings are often most creative and ingenious and that they pull together most effectively to solve their problems.~~Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down

Most of us have heard it by now -- software engineer torches his own house then crashes his private plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas on February 18, 2010. Most descriptions of the event were careful not to call the event an act of domestic terrorism, but rather asked: Was Joe Stack a terrorist or a lone nut? And most mainstream media reports pointed out that Stack was not a Tea-Partier, but some progressive media accused him of behaving like one. Wrong questions, wrong answers. Once again, mainstream media reveals its pathetic depth-perception deficit.

As Rich Benjamin of Alternet notes, Joe Stack's "suicide screed chafes and exposes a raw wound this country does not know what to do with." Bingo.

In the same week as Stack's rampage, an Ohio man so enraged about his home being foreclosed upon, even though he owes far less on it than it's worth, bulldozed the house so that the bank would not be able to repossess it. Not unlike Stack, Terry Hoskins was trying to cope with business debts as well as a lawsuit, and vehemently demonstrated his rage toward banks for all the world to see.

It doesn't take Patrick Jane, "The Mentalist" or Allison DuBois, "The Medium", to grasp that these eruptions of vitriolic rage are, most likely, previews of massive civil unrest worldwide, as individuals and families awaken to the current ghastly global transfer of wealth, so brilliantly exposed in David DeGraw's "The Economic Elite Have Engineered An Extraordinary Coup" -- a wealth transfer of mind-boggling proportions that has left the middle class impoverished and writhing in despair. But this particular side of the Toxic Triangle -- economic meltdown, along with the other two sides, climate chaos, and planetary energy depletion -- signals that the human species has entered, not a long and painful recession, but nothing less than a tipping point in its own evolutionary odyssey.

And now, millions of human beings who, for at least a decade, have been unwilling to look deeply at how their world works, find themselves depressed, enraged, paralyzed, and terrified at best and suicidal and homicidal at worst. Since before the turn of the 20th century, many courageous researchers who were willing to look deeper gave us extraordinary "maps" of who was running the world and what the consequences of that reality would be -- individuals like Mike Ruppert, Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, Peter Dale Scott, Colin Campbell, Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Cynthia McKinney, Sibel Edmonds, and many more. They produced volumes of research related to the Triple Crisis/Toxic Triangle which for the most part, fell on deaf ears.

The corporate capitalist system had forced on American families a lifestyle that left them too busy and too strapped with debt -- and of course, too hypnotically entranced with the proverbial "American dream" -- to read the signals that were becoming more ominous by the day. Besides, in the pubescent ecstasy of the earning/spending/debt party, who wants to be annoyed with downers like becoming an adult and comprehending the facts and their consequences?

And so, those who were too busy, ambitious, hard-working, conscientious, dedicated, and of course, let us not forget, patriotic, have within the past two years been blindsided by that which they refused to acknowledge -- and worse, they who have called the mapmakers and their supporters, such as myself, "whack jobs, wing nuts, conspiracy theorists, fearmongers, and pessimists" now find themselves bewildered, flabbergasted, dumbfounded, and horrified.

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Carolyn Baker.Ph.D., is the author of Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse (2009 IUniverse) and manages her website Speaking Truth to Power at www.carolynbaker.net. She is also the author of U.S. History (more...)
 
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