Today, despite a precipitous decline in living standards resulting largely from corporate selfishness and misbehavior, many Americans continue to buy into the emphasis on consumption, me-first values, and fantasy life-style promoted by the corporate-sponsored mass media. As long as they remain under the spell of consumerism, narcissism, and escapism, they can hardly be expected to get in touch with their spiritual side and go on the march for economic fairness at home and moral justice in the world.
How, then, do we free ourselves from corporate manipulation? Obviously, we have to first learn from our own life experiences how false its blandishments are as underpinnings of a true human life. Then, we need to start building a life for ourselves that moves toward authenticity. Some first steps might be these:As consumers, let us join in the spirit of Reverend Billy and "The Church of Stop Shopping," and meet such material needs as we may have by buying our goods and services from local shops and developing a sense of community with our neighbors. Culturally, let us resist the flood-tide of hedonistic commercials and meretricious programming on television, and the propaganda and horse-race politics of the news media. These drive us to a conformity of opinion, in which we live by the same values, adopt the same views, idolize the same heroes, and hate the same foes as our neighbors. We need instead to think for ourselves. It is the necessary basis for the desire and capacity to walk a mile in the other guy's moccasins.
Having freed ourselves from psychological manipulation by corporate interests -- many of which are intertwined with those of the very war machine we would disempower -- we can work politically to change the policies of our government.
Let us create or join campaigns for needed reforms: for public financing of federal elections; for regulations that steer Wall Street away from selfish get-rich schemes and toward the lending of investment monies actually needed to shape a creative economy; for government investments in the public interest that can help upgrade our physical and information infrastructure, provide seed money for strategic technological advances, create employment, and enhance educational opportunity at every level; and for shrinking the American military empire around the world to the minimum level required to defend not perceived national interests, but the physical safety of our own country. Let us also join campaigns to encourage peaceful conflict resolution around the world, and support and vote for political candidates who renounce war.
With such a start, I believe Americans can in time elect a government whose foreign policy will support a generous human outreach to the world. Perhaps, with the first gesture of true humanity to our presumptive adversaries, we will be surprised to find that, like our earlier mission of ping-pong ambassadors to China, it is swiftly reciprocated -- making easier, in turn, another gesture from ourselves. By a gradual buildup, such small overtures can lead to a full flowering of the spirit -- of open, empathetic, and compassionate human engagement.
And one last point: Throughout history, man has failed to hear or follow the higher calling of his own nature; he has been driven instead by instinctual fear to pursue control of the "other." In hopes of remedying that deficiency, he has developed complex religious mythologies, rituals, and dogmas that point the way to ethical values and the need to accept, or tolerate, human differences.
The problem is that, despite these complex systems of ethical guidance, we continue to perceive those who are outside the system as the "other." Only the simple human heart itself can achieve true reconciliation, by reaching out to that other in love. In a time of human divisions that need not be, citizens and governments of all nations with the power to do good in the world must yield to the "higher angels" of their nature. Those angels are as real as our biological instincts, and can lift us to the joy of a shared humanity.
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