Coffee, Tea and Strategizing? - Making lemonade out of our crises - Choosing a relative Utopia over a relative Hell
(If any friends want to talk strategy on how to make lemonade out of the hellish lemons I discuss below, I will be at Cafe Ladro West Seattle - 7011 California Ave SW tonight at 7 pm)
We might be said to be at the greatest crisis point globally in human history. Multiple nuclear power plants in Japan are apparently melting down. Large numbers of people in Japan will die before their time because of this and unknown numbers in America and around the world will likely suffer and die before their time because of the fall-out. Neither the Japanese government, nor the US government nor the dominant global media can be trusted to tell us the truth about these dangers. The ring of fire is on fire and nuclear power plants around the world are at greater risk than ever. Movements for justice and real democracy in the middle east, North Africa and globally are spurring extreme counter efforts from totalitarians to control the masses and moves from governments and war profiteers to capitalize on the violence and justify their own profit and control mentality driven violence. Totalitarians in state governments are conspiring to deny all worker rights. Other totalitarians are conspiring to end the use of cash itself, replacing it with cards, so that they can electronically control and track every penny we spend (For those of you who didn't hear it, one piece of legislation being proposed in one of these Republican controlled states is that people on public assistance not be allowed to be caught with more than $20 in cash. I imagine that this may be a step in the direction towards eliminating all cash, as one friend suggested to me a while back that the Powers That Be would eventually do.) Other totalitarians high in one party of our political duopoly are openly suggesting that undocumented immigrants be shot on sight.
The world's greatest hero of exposing the crimes of the powerful, in the person of Bradley Manning is being tortured with the open approval of the president of the United States that campaigned on the promise of ending torture, among other broken promises. That president, Obama, has now broken every significant promise for a more peaceful, just and ecologically healthy world that he ever made. So many of us invested so much hope in him, but most of us ignored the most important things he said. He said ~I can't make the change I promised. You have to make me do it! He said this in different ways a number of different times. I imagine Obama is begging for a peaceful revolution against HIM and against centralized and abusive power itself. The opposite of centralized power is the re-building of community based political power. It is also a combination of using less external physical power, phasing out the use of fossil fuels and increasingly harnessing various forms of sustainable decentralized solar power for our power needs until we wean ourselves off of using much external power at all. It is small, community businesses. It is locally produced food in both small scale agriculture and sustainably harvested from nature. It is locally developed and shared wisdom. It is visiting more with neighbors and family rather than watching so much of your corporate sponsored television shows with their big money produced programming and propaganda.
I believe a critical key to success in a global movement for justice is what the South Africans called "Truth and Reconciliation". Part of the reason for this is that criminal abusers of power now occupy most of the seats of power and still control many levers of fear and we, the people fighting for justice, may not have enough power to convict those now in power, even if we wanted to, but if even a small minority of the world's greatest power abusers start to confess their abuses and expose some of their fellow abusers, it will become increasingly hard for the others to get away with abusive "business as usual" and increasingly easy for those trapped in a cycle of abuse to break that cycle. The Japanese talk about the importance of allowing people to save face. Jesus both talked about healing the sick and about repenting and being saved. For a successful non-violent revolution to work, we need to recognize that the world's greatest power abusers are the world's sickest people that we most need to heal, and that to do this we need to offer them a face-saving way out. That way out is to let them present their abusive behavior as a response to a sick situation. Their abusive parents and the abusive society almost surely contributed to their becoming abusive. (I have long thought that when at least lower level violators of reasonable laws are put on trial, that the judge should convict the society for producing a person with this anti-social behavior and suggest the best method to heal the offender.) In addition to confessing their abuses of power, I would want them to release control of their ill-gotten wealth and power. I would ask them to start to build a pattern of behavior that contributes to the well-being of the community as well as the ecological community of plants, animals and fungi. I believe this is what Jimmy Carter did after being the head of a highly abusive government. In inviting these abusers of power to take the path of constructive contributors to healthy communities, we also offer them a path for healing and personal redemption.
For Obama, I believe he is either under the same kinds of threats that killed JFK, RFK and King or came from a family and a social setting that was involved in deceiving people to serve their inner group at great expense to the majority or both. (If you don't know about what his family was involved in you may want to look into the history of Indonesia and Kenya at the time he was growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii. If you don't know about the threats that led to JFK's murder, I strongly recommend you read Russ Baker's "Family of Secrets" about the Bush crime family. I would contend that Obama follows the same policies as George W Bush because he was effectively bitten by the same "power vampire".) It may be unimportant whether he came from a culture of abuse or if he is giving in to the kinds of threats from a powerful few that, I would argue, killed the Kennedys who failed to give in to their threats. Either way, he could indeed feel that the only way out of the trap of being part of the culture of power abuse if you want to be president is to be forced to by a powerful grass-roots movement that is becomes more powerful than the Skull-and-Bones type corporate and military-industrial, intelligence and media crime family that now largely rules America and the world through fear and control of money. I believe this is what Obama alluded to when he said "I can't do it", "all I can do is give you the opportunity to make that change" and "make me do it!".
These crises in the world today may constitute the greatest common enemy that humanity itself has ever had. This may be the greatest opportunity to unite humanity for common good that we have ever had. The world now speaks one language to a degree that we never have before. The world is connected as if we were one tribe by electronic communications to a degree we never have before. It is as if the Tower of Babel has fallen. There will be those abusers that want to again divide and conquer us and use our new-found connectedness to control the whole world like never before. We have an opener to create a relative Utopia that we never have had, but we have a limited time before it will otherwise degenerate into a global relative Hell of centralized tyrannical power like we have never seen before. This Hell will be the Hell we get because we have enabled an abuser - controller - elitist class by letting them make our decisions for us, and by putting the seemingly intelligent in power. It is what we get when we put people on pedestals of greatness. We put others on pedestals when we internalize our oppressors and consider ourselves too "dumb" to make our own decisions and look to someone "smarter" than us to make those decisions for us.
Rather than give in to the lure of a one world government of centralized power, like the communists of China and Russia gave into the lure of centralized power in the name of the people and got totalitarianism in the name of the people, we can use both the uniting effect of common crises and the electronic and language connectedness of the world to re-build local communities, local community based power, valuing incredibly unique and rich local ecosystems and local human community uniquenesses.
If any friends want to talk strategy on how to make lemonade out of the hellish lemons we have recently been dealt, I will be at Cafe Ladro West Seattle - 7011 California Ave SW tonight at 7 pm and would set up additional meetings if it seems it is working.
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West Seattle Blog
West Seattle Blog
