But it is deeply pathological, not normal.
I
refuse to any longer willingly participate in such an evil system of terrorism
and domination, or give it any more legitimacy by willingly participating in
it.
To
offset the amount of my taxes used every year to support this system's
military/security state operations, I use the information provided at Visualize
Your Tax Dollar - National Priorities Project
http://nationalpriorities.org/en/interactive-data/taxday/
to calculate that amount, then donate an equal or larger amount to charities
such as Doctors Without Borders, national and local food banks, and
organizations helping injured veterans.
I
will continue to write and speak in opposition to the U.S. Empire and all the
evil it commits at home and abroad, knowing full well that my words will do
little to help dismantle such a firmly-established system of terror and evil,
supported as it is not only by immensely powerful and wealthy individuals and
corporations, including the most successful propaganda system in history, the
corporate media, and by the most powerful military on earth, but also by most of
its citizens who rarely, if ever, question the existence, let alone the evil, of
this Empire.
Chris Hedges is an author and former foreign correspondent for the NY Times who experienced firsthand the horrors of war when he reported from Yugoslavia during the bloody breakup of that country and has been to Gaza, the world's largest open air prison maintained by the cruel, oppressive Israeli blockade. In his most recent essay
The presidential election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents. Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves--the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman's right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation--using an isolated act of justice to define one's self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state--is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become.
Hedges ends this possibly prescient essay with a warning to all of us in the complacent United States:
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