This article is written with the intention of showing why a revolution is necessary and offers suggestions about how to make one manifest in practical reality.
Why Revolt?
With a little searching on Youtube (or another less-censored site) you will find a near endless stream of videos documenting elderly people getting tazed and having their skulls cracked by the police. You'll find videos of little girls getting beaten and maced by male-bodied pigs. Despite censorship, you'll even find videos of cold-blooded murder at the hands of the police. Mind you... this is merely what gets caught on video -- and represents only a very small fraction of the police violence that takes place every single day in the USA).
In addition to the street-level violence, the police forces in the United States then help incarcerate more people at a rate seen nowhere else on earth. More people are imprisoned in the U.S. than in any other nation (both in total numbers AND per-capita). Millions of people get cycled through the U.S. prison-industrial complex every year. No nation on earth imprisons more people than the "land of the free."
Environmental Degradation
The extent of environmental degradation is almost too overwhelming to even begin considering. However, without facing the problems collectively a person can't effectively understand the systemic quality of the multitude of threats facing the biosphere.
Dealing with just one problem at a time can leave us vulnerable to another advancing disaster. The idea that one problem can be reformed away then becomes muted because the process of reform generally does not, and can not, deal with several major issues at once. As ineffectual as reform efforts have been at dealing with the issue of global warming, for example, imagine how much more difficult those reform efforts become if they concurrently or simultaneously addressed the issues of deforestation, the Pacific garbage vortex, strip-mining, desertification, dioxin releases, the 6th extinction, et cetera, etc. In the face of such a collective crisis, the slow road of piecemeal reformism will not protect life on earth.
Similarly, the idea of setting a personal example (in terms of personal consumption) does not guarantee the preservation of life on earth. It's a quaint idea, but one that looks to the realm of spiritualism and blind faith, rather than at reality. Even if a good example was set and followed, in terms of consumption, there is no guarantee that enough people would follow it or that those who didn't wouldn't pick up the slack. Like reformism, personal lifestyle choices do play a part in terms of preserving the environment. The problem is that people are not looking beyond themselves at the complete issue of how much damage is being done by other organizations that are not curbing their overall destruction at all. Directly putting a stop, by any environmentally sound means necessary, to major polluters or sources of destruction, can be far more effective than large groups of individuals ceasing their personally destructive activities in the spiritual hopes than everyone else will follow suit.
A Variety of Wars and Their Consequences
The depletion of natural resources is a primary cause for wars. And I'm not even referring yet to fuels and mineral products used for production and consumption purposes -- I'm talking about things like fresh potable water, land, and clean air. As the world population continues to grow, access to the basic necessities of life becomes more difficult and attempts to acquire those things become more desperate on an individual and a collective level.
Obviously, the connection between militarism and environmental degradation is clear. But this fact is easily clouded by other pretenses for war such as archaic ethnic conflicts and the desire for fuels & mineral products used for production and consumption purposes. What then gets overlooked with this situation is that the preservation and defense of natural resources at local levels can prevent some causes of war.
But aside from necessities, wars undertaken by the U.S. today are largely about petroleum oil. High ranking public officials have been blunt about this, and if anyone still has doubts about this they are simple-minded (to put it nicely).
The U.S. government spends incredible amounts on it's military. Having paid for it's gigantic army, it now needs fuel. Faced with peak oil (another idea ought to be easily and clearly understood), the wars in foreign lands are not about liberating the people there or fighting international terrorism. The wars in the Middle East are not even about maintaining relatively cheap oil for SUV drivers. The wars are about securing fuel for the military machine that's already been bought and paid for. In the final analysis, the U.S. government plans on having the only army which still has fuel to wage a total war. At that point, the U.S. will be an empire more destructive and brutal than any other in history (even to a greater extent than it already has been).
Considering the global system upheld by the U.S.A., and the level of destruction it is currently engaged in (at so many levels and in so many forms), it is not out of the question that the U.S. will use another nuclear weapon. The leaders of this rogue nation have shown themselves to be completely without ethics and insincere about any real humanitarian efforts -- they have, in fact, shown themselves to be insane (by almost any standard of definition). Their insanity and clear lack of ethics is what will allow them to launch a nuclear strike without fear of comparable retaliation. They have shown themselves capable of risking mutually assured destruction and, if they resign themselves to only attacking relatively weak nations for the purposes of fuel, who, what other nation, will risk entering into the fray with them? At that point, the U.S. empire will be completely dominant and, as long as it's leaders spread the wealth around to other leaders of nuclear-capable nations... those leaders will subdue their own populations at the behest of the U.S. empire.
One might argue that the U.S. government would not do such a thing because it would fear a domestic backlash. But I suggest, with it's police force in place, that the U.S. government does not fear it's population very much at all. In fact, much of the U.S. population, bamboozled by the corporate media, supports the U.S. government unconditionally. The brutal suppression of protest movements and a truly Orwellian level of surveillance also suggests that the U.S. government will be able to ruthlessly control it's population when push comes to shove -- even if it has to resort to much harsher methods. You will rise for the anthem -- or else. You will watch what you say -- or else. Any real exercise of freedom today can already be expected to result in unpleasant reprisal from a government that claims to to defend that freedom.
For all the populist bluster about defending the Constitution, who actually has? That dried up piece of paper has been effectively neutralized -- and it doesn't matter if you realize it or not. The government treats the Constitution like a Wikipedia page, effectively changing and restoring it as seen fit. It was a fundamentally flawed document to begin with anyway and was written by genocidal slave-owners. That's the history of America -- and not so much has really changed. For all the fine quotes about freedom left for posterity by the founding fathers of America, how many more were, then and since, willfully working against those ideas of liberty? Considering quotes from Jefferson or Madison as emblematic of their time is like thinking Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are typical members of modern congress. Revisionist history might remember them as highly influential (while overlooking their flaws), but the death march of industrial state corporatism marches on.
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