Photograph Source: Tamaki Sono – CC BY 2.0
I hate to say this, but it is now impossible for me to believe that humans can possibly change our damaging behavior. I’m not saying that it is impossible that we might alter our behavior, but rather, that I have no basis on which I can believe that we are capable as a species to transform our preponderance of damaging, self-serving agendas and rise above what seem to be chronic, inherent tendencies which are detrimental to ourselves and to the wellbeing of all forms of life on this planet as we (assume that we) know it.
I also do not know that there is any other possible destination for the planet than the seemingly inescapable increase in degradation which seems guaranteed by this route which we are following. That route is seemingly so deeply rutted (pun) with waves of horrors – which we humans increasingly, passionately, exacerbate into greater restrictions for ourselves – that the likelihood of engulfment grows by every second of time.
I was recently at a family gathering with my siblings and their families and I found myself jokingly saying “I’m only visiting your planet.” It isn’t that I think that I am an alien, but rather that the inner place I inhabit has behavioral requirements which seem to be alien concepts to almost everyone I (assume that I) know.
Joni Mitchell sang a great truth, “Everyone’s a victim. Nobody’s hands are clean.” (“Bad Dreams”). It’s kind of funny but it seems that the only way to have clean hands in this debauchery is to be as close to being a nobody as you possibly can. It seems that our only hope for lessening our toxicity requires that we each erase ourselves as much as possible with as little harmfulness as we can. This, of course, means that every person who seeks power and influence is a person who wants or is willing to risk dirtier hands. I plead guilty.
As far as a national identity is a tool for continuing divisiveness and degradation, consider the Pledge of Allegiance of the fakery known as the USA, especially the words,
“one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
Repetition of these words is an act of self-deceiving propaganda. The only way these words are truth is if one believes that the avaricious accumulating of money is godly behavior and that they should take pride in the fact that liberty and justice are distributed depending upon anyone’s and everyone’s avarice. It is an allegiance to proudly ignoring corruption “in some God’s name.” (Joni Mitchell again)
Here I will offer a possible (though extremely unlikely) substitute pledge.
I pledge to try to cautiously improve my relationships to
other people and other organisms, no matter where they
live on this planet, in a manner which will lesson the
damage I am likely to do as I seek socially responsible
degrees of liberty and justice for all.
I have no doubt that this will be seen as laughably self-delusional.
The idea that any politician could possibly (much less seriously) challenge the religion of monetary accumulation and self-deceit – which is central to so many people because of environmental ignorance and feelings of insecurity – does indeed seem to be an impossibility. The biblical messaging about Faith, Hope, and Charity tells us that Charity (also interpreted as Mercy) is the greatest of the three. This is distinctly at odds with religion of Capital. The promotion of charitable behavior has remained a privatized tactic used for weaponization of a mindset which disdains using the government (such as it is) for guaranteeing equal justice. Within the continuing religiosity of privatizing capital accumulation, charity is first and foremost demanded by the supposed government for the most cravenly avaricious. The cynically derived pridefulness promoted within this corruption and the derision aimed at those who see charity as a needed public policy guarantees its continuation. We are regularly propagandized to believe the only way to counteract the ever-widening global degradation is through those invested in the increase of impunity within their monetary religion and under the guise of the two capitalist, privately owned, (what might be portrayed as) political “construct”ion companies known as the republicans and democrats. These are people who, in a very real sense, would sell termite infested pine as oak and fire as water in order to increase greater sales.
In the fakery known as the USA and in its “allies,” we are regularly sermonized that it is imperative that greater and greater violations against equal justice and even against their own Constitutions are necessary for the religion of capital. As the core of their structures inevitably and increasingly rots, the greediest of these termitic venders continue to proudly push the perverse religiosity to branch outward over a wider territory.
I can only dream of a time when those who still cling to the religion of the democrat’s and republican’s hucksterism are reduced in the balance to their appropriate position as an extreme minority and the vast majority awaken to see the necessity of leaving that minority in an ever-shrinking, self-defeating medievalism which that minority craves to impose on all of us.
You may say I am being delusional, unfair, greedy, and judgmental.
Go ahead.
Say it.
It may very well be our only way out of our addiction to overcompensating for our feelings of insecurity which causes us to repudiate the needed charitable integrity. The democrats and republicans smugly tell us that integrity must be incremental and achieved through proud participation in predatory exclusivity, but pridefulness is not appropriate and it is never conducive to integrity. Pride is an indicator of self-deceit, can only tenuously be connected to charity, and is caustic to even the chance of integrity.
Sadly (or is it appropriately?), my words do reflect that they are to some extent the offspring of feelings of hopelessness and desperation, but hope is frequently a close sibling of self-deception and desperation is not unrelated to dreams. It is the necessity of keeping balance between which keeps us afloat until we might make landfall within ourselves.
