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Are We Willing to Change? If So, How?

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Coinciding with this movement was the continued enslavement of workers throughout the world. And, in the states where union busting has again become the norm, the thrust has been the enslavement of American workers jealous of Chinese girls and Mexican migrant workers slaving for pennies a day. Yes, the anger went towards the slaves rather than the slave owners. The mentality of the pre-Civil War South has not changed. Only the slaves turned scapegoats have changed in race and nationality. Meanwhile, the Bankers and Corporate slave owners laugh!

Americans and many others throughout the world fell for the ploy of the World Trade Center bombing. Does it really matter if the bombing was staged or if the terrorists truly were Muslim? Yes, in retaliation, we Americans drove with Old Glory flags flying on our cars' antennas while thousands of young men and women went into the deserts to locate and kill those nasty sociopaths who had the audacity to attack our Romanized American Way of Life. It wasn't just the death of 3,000 or so people that they felt they needed to retaliate against. It was against the attack on the American way of life...the World Trade Center, the symbol of Wall Street domination.

What these brave young men and women did not realize was that their fight entailed protecting world domination by the corporate world. That knowledge lay hidden behind the falling of the Twin Towers. The terrorists had attacked the wrong thing...the symbol of our "shop till you drop" mentality inherent in a growth without limits economy. It was also a symbol of the enslavement of the likes of Mexican men and Chinese women.

Unfortunately for Wall Street, the plan did not work long term. As young women and men fought and died in desert sands, and as cushiony lifestyles fought for by unions came crashing down under the rubric of Reaganomics, people began to slowly awaken to the lie behind the march to war. Hence, Wall Street was "occupied," and the movement has spread throughout the United States and the world. Where the most recent war supposedly started, the protests rightly began. Yes, people were awakening to the messages behind works such as "Corporation" and "Food Inc." As "Corporation" so beautifully illustrated, we have been led into a potential slaughter by a group that blatantly fits the psychiatric diagnosis of a sociopathic disorder. But is it they who are to blame? Or did we hand ourselves over through our desires for fancy clothes, cars, and the newest, fanciest and most entertaining piece of electronics?

The people controlling our lives were found out to be no better than the Boston Strangler, Al Capone, and Adolf Hitler. It appears the Godfather was a high-selling movie and book because it spoke blatantly about what we respected in our corporate world and government. "It's business," Marlo Brando acting as the Godfather said when he ordered an execution of a human being. What's even sadder is that it spoke to a sociopathic attitude throughout most of our psyches. Yes, the son Michael in the movie portrayed our world's values in the scene where he has a girl pinned up against the door and was violently entering her body. This violence is nothing less than a metaphor for the relationship of the 1% to the 99. It is also a metaphor for our relationship to Nature. Violent disempowering rape is our mode of operandi.

And, for the sake of power, prestige and money, the girl surrenders.

This kind of sociopathic idealism needs to end...both on victim and victimizer levels. The "go ahead, make my day" stone-faced Clint Eastwood holding a gun needs to cease being our idol. Indeed, for every movie such as Ghandi that was put out by corporate media, there were 25 Clint Eastwood and Godfather types of movies and shows handed down to the public. And, we, like fools, suckled the metallic breasts of that sociopathic mother. In the meantime, our metallic mother went crazy in destroying lands serving as that habitat for people, animals, plants and insects throughout the world. Lands that fed the creatures of the Earth were laid to waste by entities that had the ethic passions of a Mafia hit man. "Hey, it's business!" they cried as we fell to their feet begging for the jobs they produced.

No it's not business in our conditioned sense of the word. The creatures, plants and soils are cells inherent in a living planet. Their labor is the maintenance of life on our planet...a life that we are destroying as evidenced by our current high extinction rates of species. And, we too are cells in that life alongside the corporate and political arms that we allow to manipulate us into blind consumerism while engaging in futile political and philosophical arguments.

The change we need to engage in must be fundamental. We must rid ourselves of the parasites feeding on our blood and the blood of our fellow creatures. But we can't do so only via protests and war. We need to evolve a new ethos within ourselves. Indeed, we need to foster real family and community values. These values are nothing like the Right Wing Christian notion of family values as being the suppression of the rights of women and the brainwashing of children through such actions as standardized testing. These Christians are falling right into the hands of the Corporations.   Corporate America doesn't want children who ask questions. It wants children who obey and fall prey to the corporate standards while working for less than subsistence wages.

Each of us needs to ask deeply penetrating questions. The first being "How do we empower ourselves and our children?"   From there, we need to focus on letting go of short-term "feel good" actions and instead look at the long-term consequences of what we are doing. Protesting is not enough. We can't simply ask/tell the governmental and corporate powers to change. Why should they? They're getting what they want now -- at our expense. No, we're the ones who need to change. Gandhi was right when he said, "BE the change you want!" We must create our own economy, agriculture, education, recreational and governance while abstaining from participating in the current system. Soon, by example, the benefits will be shown to all involved.

If you wish to explore this option, then consider this as the beginning of a series of articles that help to foster independence from the current system while developing new systems based on values of cooperation more so than competition and survival of the fittest.

These articles will be based on interviews with people primarily in Maine who are designing and practicing alternative systems to the corporate mainstream. There will be no arena spared in our work. We will be looking at food production, transition towns, alternative economies and lifestyles alongside educational systems and spiritual practices that empower individuals, families and the communities in which we live. The hope in presenting these is that you will take the information and research of these services in your area and/or offer similar services, according to your passions.  

It is by your acts that the world will become a better place and not another Al Capone dressed in Karl Rove, George Bush or Obama attire. Change always begins at home, within your own heart. When your inner Nature evolves, the external world of Mother Nature evolves right along with you. After that, like scabs on a healing sore, the cognitive styles of the lies contained in our psyches and in the psyches of the likes such as Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Obama will fall away on their own. When you see those scabs falling away from the surface skin of humanity, including yourself, then the real disease will be exposed and open to healing.

As the Beatles put it in the 60's, "All you need is love." To put this message into a more modern day perspective, see here.

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Burl Hall is a retired counselor who is living in a Senior Citizen Housing apartment. Burl has one book to his credit, titled "Sophia's Web: A Passionate Call to Heal our Wounded Nature." For more information, search the book on Amazon. (more...)
 
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