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Utopia 21: The Red God Speaks

   “In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America:  the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a spiritual idea  embedded in a political reality — one nation, indivisible — or merely a  charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and  privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.”–Bill Moyers

Dystopia 20: Tendo

“It turns out, money is power…”–Tim Garrett discussing his  revolutionary equation linking GDP growth to global warming.

Dystopia 19: Capture

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“The state  calls its own violence law, & that of the individual, crime.”- Max Stirner

Utopia 20: The Hospital

The commitment I seek is not to outworn  views but to old values that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes  become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures.  Circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue.

What we have in the United States is not so  much a health-care system as a disease-care system.

The more our feelings diverge, the more  deeply felt they are, the greater is our obligation to grant the  sincerity and essential decency of our fellow citizens on the other  side.–Sen Ted Kennedy

Utopia 19: A Long Way Home

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don’t  stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he that gets  hurt

Will be he who has stalled

There’s a battle outside

And it  is ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls

For  the times they are a-changin’.

Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin'”



Dystopia 18: Greek Revival

A world divided by nationalist struggles and vain fantasies  of dominating the earth’s resources is a world that grows increasingly  insane and self-destructive. Yet many decent and moral people accept the  current construction of politics as a ” given.” They end up  participating in this insanity and calling it “realistic.”

Today,  what people call realistic or common sense, is nothing more than  “inside-the-beltway” assumptions created and maintained by  corporate-dominated media. Only by throwing off those assumptions and  thinking outside the box, can people see the Strategy of Generosity for  what it is – a method to stop insane people who have power from  continuing their disastrous path of destruction.

It is a  delusion to imagine that only one political party or set of candidates  frames our foreign policy in terms of narrowly conceived American  interests. Instead, we must realize that this behavior is a shared  insanity that must be challenged in every part of our political  thinking.  It is just as likely to be articulated by people with whom we  agree, as by people who are overtly reactionary or  ultra-nationalistic.–Rabbi Michael Lerner Tikkun  Magazine Speaking about  the Global Marshal Plan

Utopia 18: The Long Now

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Utopia 18: The Long Now

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dystopia 17: The Spy

“Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.” Jane Austen

Utopia 17: Whent the Red Wind Blows

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita as he watched his creation, the first atomic bomb, successfully detonate.

Actual quote from the Bhagavad Gita:

sri-bhagavan uvaca:

kalo ‘smi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddho

lokan samahartum iha pravrttah /

rte ‘pi tvam na bhavisyanti sarve

ye ‘vasthitah pratyanikesu yodhah //
 

The Lord said: “Time  [death]  I am, the destroyer of the worlds, who has come to annihilate everyone.  Even without your taking part all those arrayed in the  [two] opposing ranks  will be slain!”

(Gita vs. 11.32

trans. after Swami Tripurari)

Utopia 16: Student Driver

               An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.  Howard Zinn

Dystopia 16: A Place of Her Own

The World Turned Upside Down  (One version of the Digger’s Song)

 

In 1649 to St. George’s Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers

Came to show the people’s will.

They defied the landlord, they defied the laws,

They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.


“We come in peace,” they said, “To dig and sow,

We come to work the lands in common

And to make the waste ground grow.

This earth divided we will make whole

So it will be a common treasury for all!

 

The sin of property we do disdain,

No man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain.

By theft and murder they took the land,

Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command.

   

They make the laws to chain us well,

The clergy dazzle us with heaven or they damn us into hell.

We will not worship the god they serve:

The god of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve.

   

We work, we eat together, we need no swords;

We will not bow to the masters or pay rent to the lords.

Still we are free, tho’ we are poor,

You Diggers all stand up for glory, stand up now!

   

From the men of property the orders came:

They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers’ claim.

Tear down their cottages, destroy their corn,

They were dispersed, but still the Vision lingers on!

   

“You poor, take courage, you rich take care,

This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share.

All things in common, all people one, We come in peace…”

– The order came to cut them down.

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