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As always, I can see the future in big non-verbal symbols and movements but it is hard to put into words. Especially here at DU where every single word you choose gets analyzed to death, you know, and jumped on?
The factions, and the inability to get people on the same page - we never will be able to resolve that, and it is a good thing that we can't because all of the causes of all of the factions are based on the same false premises. We think we are recruiting people or converting people or selling people into a pro-active program, as though the "default" position were a level playing field, or OK, or standard, or normal, or sustainable. That is backwards. The problem is not that we cannot inspire people to pro-actively do positive things, the problem is people's resistance to seeing the negative - the dangerous path we are on. That means that collapse and disintegration and warring factions is a good thing, not a bad thing. We need to recognize and stop doing the very destructive things we are doing, not come up with positive things to do. All of the do-good liberalism is based on the false notion that things are more or less OK, that we just need a few minor tweaks, that there are just a few problems - a few homeless people that we can help and everything will be fine - or if we just end the war than we can go back to the good times, or if we can get corporations to do "socially-responsible things"..... It is all an illusion. People like the "good" part of the illusion and are desperately hanging on to it - we just elect some Democrats and support the right causes and make the right choices and try to be a good person who cares and so forth. It is so easy to see what is wrong with "them" over there - it is all the Republicans fault! - and so painful and difficult to see our own errors, our own complicity, our own cowardice, our own depravity.
Before the physical realities of war and bombing civilians, of torture and abuse, of a collapsing economy, of homelessness and poverty—before these obvious physical signs appear—and they are everywhere now and just screaming at us—there are attitudes, there are premises and assumptions. That is where the battle is. It is a straight line directly from the way that people right here talk to and about homeless people and poor people into the atrocities in Iraq. Read what people write here everyday and it is obvious that these people—all of us—are living in a society that is capable of terrible oppression and abuse, that is a society that could torture and cage human beings, that could reign bombs down on poor villagers, that could admire and emulate those who are lying, cheating, bullying and stealing. It isn't just happening in the White House or the halls of Congress, it isn't just happening in Iraq, it isn’t just coming from a few bad apples. It is all around us, everywhere, every day, in every thing we do, in everything we see, and think and say.
We are in a very dark place. We are experiencing first hand what it is like to live inside of a society that has gone mad, that has headed down that horrible path of hatred and brutality and inhumanity.
It is all rotten to the core. We know this because we can know the tree by the fruit, because the objective evidence is so overwhelming that this is so and can be found everywhere we look. Look around — this is what it looks like from the inside of an unfolding catastrophic global nightmare, this is what it looks like when things have gone very, very wrong and when almost any sort of cataclysm or horror has now become very possible. What people are lacking is not “solutions” or “plans” or “theories” let alone "hope" - they need clarity, they need honesty, they mneed coursage, they need compassion - they need to face the truth about what is, not argue about what should be.
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