In October 2007 Buhdy wrote…

The Big Picture Vol. 2

There has always been a struggle….most likely there always will be.

It is human nature to struggle, in some that is expressed as full out rebellion. In others it is reduced to complaining under their breath. Or worse….being afraid to even do that.

On the other side of the struggle, there is the range of full time crackdown on the rebels….actively supporting supporting the crushing of rebellion by The People, to indifference and willful ignorance. Ignorance has two forms those who cannot get information….and those who ignore inconvenient or uncomfortable information. Cracking down on ‘rebels….even those who merely mutter is a full time struggle for the status qou-sters

The two biggest chunks of information that are being ignored right now, imo, are Climate Crisis which is literally off the charts in its acceleration….and the fact that not just America, but pretty much the entire planet, is now a Corporatocrasy.

It has been for some time of course, at a lower profile. But as with absolutely everything else any thinking person would condemn as evil or at least Wrong! …under Bushco it has not only flourished and thrived, but has also revealed itself much more nakedly. They are no longer trying to hide it, very much….the fact that they are out to buy up the worlds resources and control all distribution of said resources. Though I don’t get into it much here….the distribution part is critically important as well.

Chevron and Burma is just the latest example of corporations gone wild. Whether it is their intent to be evil or if they are just fulfilling the mission of corporations with brutal efficiency, regardless of consequence to People and to the planet, what they are actually doing to the planet is incredibly and fatally harmful. And certainly with the oil companies and insurance companies, it is VERY easy to ascribe evil intent. I sure do. It is hard not to do the same with many others as well, Coca-Cola buying up water rights worldwide and the chemical companies and Big Pharma etc. The MIC is of course a No-brainer, you can’t get much eviler than selling death.

But the real point is, is that these corporations….in a purely corporate self preservationist internal logic, are now openly buying governments. They then use these governments to obtain and control that countries resources. It seems that there is no limit on their behavior, their ‘business practices’ ….as long as the stockholders are making money.

If you control the worlds resources and the worlds governments you control the world. Though perhaps not a conscious conspiracy, it has become a defacto one. Especially when you factor in the interdependency of needing resources another corporation controls to make your corporations product. Not to mention….mergers.

I won’t try to hazard a guess as to what degree of control the corporations hold these governments or what percentage of the worlds resources they now own. It is not any where near 100%, of course. There is not much point to it since the numbers will just increase. After all, no one is stopping them. Or has any plans to. Hell, no one in power will even talk about it. Because of course….they are all to some degree or another, beholden to those very same corporations. Especially, the Media. And of course their is the money that fuels Americas political process and lobbying industry.

And to further muddy the waters….we are all beholden in various ways as well, whether we own stock, or we work for a corporation or are dependent on a corporation buying the product of our work or merely through consuming corporate products. We are all in the web. Which of course is part of ‘the plan.’ The corporations depend on the consumers. The consumers depend on the corporations. It would be the perfect relationship if it wasn’t for the consumption and waste and destruction it engenders.

And as long as most people are getting what they want….dividends, a paycheck or just Twinkies, it is perfectly ok. Until they start to shed their ignorance and see what the cost of their consumption is. And no, I am not purity trolling. I do not condemn people ….neither do I support people…profiting from corporations. It is the system we live under and condemning people for living under a system is silly. Especially since most people became invested in the system before it truly revealed its raw and destructive face. Or at least when they were young and had no knowledge of the true cost of the system we now live under.

George Bush and his policies didn’t come out of nowhere. They were shaped by two forces, the Religious Wrong and the Corporations….what used to be called Big Business. They got him elected so he would remove any restraints…moral or regulatory from them so that they then could…..go hog fucking wild on fucking everything up. Who was one of Bush’s biggest supporters? Ken Lay from Enron. All of this is old news of course.

But it can longer be denied….just as with Climate Crisis. The Corporatocracy has truly become an enemy of The People. ALL of the planets people. They are the ones who have shaped and are exploiting this world we live in. This world we all bemoan everyday. This is the root of the nearly all the problems we face. From War to Warming to SCHIP etc. But this is also the foundation on which our present society is built. And this is the society that the corporations are working so hard to spread to every corner of the globe, even as that society kills itself more rapidly the more it spreads and the bigger it gets. It is a race to see if we can use up the worlds resources before climate change caused by the consumption and waste products of those resources changes/destroys the world we know now.

Not to mention that the imposition of this society onto Islamic life and culture is, shall we say, proving problematic. Especially since the corporations want to steal their oil.

Many folks have known this for years, many are still coming to terms with it. But as we move forward we must stop pretending the situation does not exist.

The corporations now control our political process and thus to an extent our government, they also control our media. They have shaped our society into a suicidal cycle of consumption. Yet they are the basis of all of our financial structures. And much of our social structure….if you consider watching tv a social structure, but aside from tv, think how much corporations affect your everyday life. They are ingrained.

Mitigating Climate Crisis and taking control back from the corporations will both force massive changes on life as we know it. Just getting off oil will change our lives…dramatically. We either have to face up to the fact that we are committing slow suicide or that we MUST make dramatic changes. And at the rate climate change is proceeding….alarming even the alarmists…we have to make these changes sooner rather than later.

We must react to climate crisis, that means reacting to the corporations who, with our help, are fostering it.

Also, ending the cycle of eternal war for the oil corporations and the profits of the Military Industrial Complex seems like a good idea.

There has always been a struggle….this is the shape of ours. The People vs the Corporatocracy.

Now what do we do about it?

The next day, as my first essay at Docudharma, and inspired by what Buhdy had written (above), I wrote…

The End Of The Beginning?

In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.

Questioning cultural norms and prejudices and searching for alternatives that better respected and valued human beings and their relationship with the larger society and with the natural world as the basis and reason for societies actions and existence rather than society and the state and the status quo as the determining factors of how people should interact with each other, were the drivers behind this revolution.

The insecurity of many in the face of insistent and deep questioning that in a religious context would have been labeled blasphemy and heresy caused knee-jerk fear reactions that in many arenas turned into violent confrontations, particularly but not only race riots and countless smaller horrors of the racial Civil Rights Movement, and in the struggle for equality under law and social systems of  more than half the population in the Gay and the Women's Liberation Movements, and what was often termed a Sexual Revolution, all of which had been percolating and growing for many years and all of which naturally contributed to making up the more encompassing psychological or awareness heightening Cultural Revolution of the times.

Noted philosopher Alan Watts in the  sixties in “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” described our situation, our human condition, this way:

It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms- Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body–a center which “confronts an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.

The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world “outside” us is largely hostile. We are forever “conquering” nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. In America the great symbols of this conquest are the bulldozer and the rocket–the instrument that batters the hills into flat tracts for little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the great phallic projectile that blasts the sky. (Nonetheless, we have fine architects who know how to fit houses into hills without ruining the landscape, and astronomers who know that the earth is already way out in space, and that our first need for exploring other worlds is sensitive electronic instruments which, like our eyes, will bring the most distant objects into our own brains.)

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events–that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies–and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

It was during these years of the social turmoil pressure cooker that forced reevaluation of so many previous considered immutable social strictures and standards that the modern Environmental Movement was conceived and born of a spreading awareness of something we already knew in our bones, in fact in every cell of our bodies, and even in our very DNA that the world and the universe we inhabit is a single interconnected organism that we do not come into at birth, but rather spring from and are intimately connected to and part of, as intimately as darkness and light are connected aspects comprising days, or as north and south poles make up a magnet that cannot exist without either.

Watts continued with:

It might seem, then, that our need is for some genius to invent a new religion, a philosophy of life and a view of the world, that is plausible and generally acceptable for the late twentieth century, and through which every individual can feel that the world as a whole and his own life in particular have meaning. This, as history has shown repeatedly, is not enough. Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the “saved” from the “damned,” the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. Even religious liberals play the game of “we-re-more-tolerant-than-you.”

Furthermore, as systems of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be defended and kept “pure,–and-because all belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty-religions must make converts.

The more people who agree with us, the less nagging insecurity about our position. In the end one is committed to being a Christian or a Buddhist come what may in the form of new knowledge. New and indigestible ideas have to be wangled into the religious tradition, however inconsistent with its original doctrines, so that the believer can still take his stand and assert, “I am first and foremost a follower of Christ/Mohammed/Buddha, or whomever.”

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness –an act of trust in the unknown.

We as human beings are the natural world, as much as is the biosphere that we are a fundamental part of rather than simply living in, and whatever we do to it we do to ourselves.

Christianity, the major religion in the western world, says “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”.

Karma can be reduced to “You get what you give”.

The Beatles said “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”. It is the last lyric on the last album they recorded.

Watts also suggested that:

“We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience–a new feeling of what it is to be ‘I’.”

All of our countries and political systems, and all of our differences and conflicts, including our wars are, in this context, social constructs within the larger world, and do not and cannot exist in isolation from it. It is the base medium in which all else grows and lives. Or dies. It is our back yard, and if we poison it we poison ourselves.

Billmon in September of [2006] posted a story about:

British scientist James Lovelock and his warning that catastrophic global climate change is both imminent and unstoppable:

Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.

“There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing,” Lovelock says. “Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover.”

It would be easy to view this as just another kooky end-of-the-world theory, if it weren't for the history of some of Lovelock's other kooky theories — like the time in the late '70s when he hypothesized that chlorofluorocarbons wafted high into the stratosphere would eat great big holes in the ozone layer, exposing first the polar regions and then the rest of the earth's surface to increasingly harmful ultraviolet radiation. What a nut.

As far as I can tell, Lovelock's latest crackpot (or should I say “crockpot”?) idea is still the minority opinion among climatologists, most of whom seem to believe we have perhaps 70-100 years before the seriously disastrous greenhouse effects kick in — although Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist, has suggested that unless major cuts in Co2 emissions are made within the next decade, the process will become every bit as irreversible as Lovelock claims it already is.

If we break it, if we disrupt its integrity, we die. We die. It is as simple as that.

It now appears that we are on the verge of breaking it, if we have not already done so. It is my hope that we haven't yet, but also my opinion that we are dangerously close to doing so. So close in fact that there is no more time to waste. The next year or two may very well be the turning point, if we have not already passed it.

Many say that security of the nation is most important because without it nothing else can happen.

Our environment, our entire world, is immeasurably larger, and the problems we face are immeasurably larger than national security in the context of the arguments about it over the past few years.

Nations cannot and will not exist if the planet is killed.

Our backs are to the wall this time. We are painted into the proverbial corner. There is no escaping it. There is only life, or death, for all of us. We have only ourselves to fault, and only ourselves to rely on. No invisible being is going to come down from the sky and save us from ourselves.

Are we at the beginning of the end? Or are we at the end of the beginning?

If we want it to be the latter, what do we want that `latter' to be?

Where do we go from here?