I walked onto the train platform in downtown Chicago today. A woman had just finished shopping at Macy's and had several red shopping bags. She was trying to put everything into one bag. The wind picked up and blew some of the empty bags down the platform. I took off running and stopped them from blowing out onto the street.
Then, she yells to me that: "It's OK! They're empty." Then she sits down and waits for the train with her two bags full of stuff. The 5 empty big red bags are just out there on the platform and she makes no effort to pick them up. I told her that I didn't want litter for a Christmas present, picked them all up and threw them in the trash (no recycling on CTA platforms...dammit!).
(Cross posted at The National Gadfly)
I got on the next train and thought to myself, "We're too stupid to save ourselves. We are going to stick our heads in the sand, believing one delusion after another until we're choking in pollution, ravaged by disease and slaughtering each other by the thousands"
I think about that. Are we stupid? Are we naturally stupid or are we kept that way? Is our stupidity manufactured?
We will always stand at the point where knowledge meets ignorance. The known and the unknown. The past and the future. Some people look to the past for comfort and reassurance. Others of us look to the future.
There is a competition between fact and dis-information. Some people actually lie to us and as a result we're kept stupid.
- Robert Niles describes newspapers choosing to keep us dumb, ostensibly for balance. In reality it is a subjugation of press by corporate interests. It is easier to silence from within than without. The great lesson learned by the Military-Industrial Complex during the VietNam war is that the Press is the enemy. In the time since then, they have purchased and silenced all TV, Radio & Print critics of the miltary. Reporters and their employers are told to report what the military wants reported or be denied any access to the news. The deficit has ballooned as a result. Pay attention! Net-neutrality is about killing the alternative - the blogosphere.
- Big Religion as an organized crime syndicate works tirelessly to suppress scientific fact. The religious mobs that grow fat from the multitude of the faithful have spent decades denying, hiding and vilifying evolution. From Galileo and even before, when someone actually looks at the universe in a way that threatens the gravy train for Big Religion, they bring the hammer down. Back room deals, overt denial, calling it the devil's work, 'just a theory', heresy, poppycock, blasphemy and inciting people on a daily basis to attack evolution in any way possible. When that began to fail, they began the Intelligent Design strategy in a strategy designed to overwhelm us with choices and thereby make all knowledge look suspect. The result? Stupid people and rich religions.
Other countries teach evolution directly to children in grade school. The result? Their economies grow, their people prosper and they are more secure. The US (and any other country under the thumb of the Relgion Mafia) are doomed to rising poverty, rising crime, deteriorating health, loss of jobs, weakening economies and strong-arm military police states.
The lies told by the Religion Mob to foster hatred, intolerance, death, suffering and disease are non-stop. Every day, we are assaulted with this crap about 'the sanctity of marriage' so that we can demonize the LGBT community. Cenk Uygur went off on this topic and I am with him every step of the way on this. People, WAKE THE FUCK UP! This exactly what Hitler did. Not "like" - it EXACTLY.
People rush in to defend religion saying that it is unfair to lump all religions into one such statement. Well, I'm-a-lumpin'. I think the only difference between a religion that doesn't persecute and one that does - is opportunity. Give any religion time enough to be infiltrated by people motivated by wealth and they'll morph into the deadly kind. Give a religion - any religion access to an army and watch the bloodshed. The minute any religion tells you that some god commands that women or gays or other faiths are inferior to the true (male) believer, then you just heard the first bullet of intolerance and brutality.
This is because all religions are managed and populated by people. Power corrupts. Also, religions are about faith. Religious leaders use the faithful's habit, willingness or desire to believe the words of the leaders as a pronouncement of their faith. If the preacher is to be believed about god, then the preacher must also be believed about the evils of gays, role of women, story of god instead of evolution. Power corrupts. History and current society are filled with examples of corrupt corporations running corrupt governments and gaining support in controlling the masses with the blessing of corrupt religions. It's not like it happens 'some times'. It happens every minute of every single day. People are dying as a result of it.
- Pollution awareness has been high since the 70's and still we make more and more crap every day. Again, I recommend that you watch the brilliant "The Story of Stuff" by Annie Leonard. There are billions of humans on this planet. More every day. We are eating the planet and covering it with crap. It is a catastrophe. We should be hearing about it on the news, day & night. But we are not. Bring it up as a conversation and see what the majority of responses are. Chances are very good that you will hear resignation and cynicism or denial. That is no coincidence. That ignorance exists because somebody is happy making money just the way things are. They have paid for the liars to tell the lies we are told.
- Every day, people all over the world are getting screwed by corporations either robbing them of resources, polluting the water table, poisoning the crops, supporting corrupt government, and supplying military/militia with the weapons used to itimidate or slaughter any tries to oppose them. These corporations have stolen the message medium to keep us from hearing the truth of their deeds and our world. If we keep letting that happen, then we won't hear about it until it is too late.
We cannot farm poverty, pollution, blight, murder and thievery in most of the world without our foul deeds eventually getting even with us. But, that is not even the point. The point is that it is not right that we farm out misery in millions of other humans. Who pays the price for this? The poor. Folks, if you have not been paying attention - there are more and more poor every day. The worldwide numbers of people living below the poverty line are growing in actual numbers and percentages. Take a good hard look at these next words:
You stand a much greater chance of ending up living in poverty than becoming the next billionaire. It's not even a close second.
Right now, our only apparent US world strategy is to:
a) Fuck over the poor and defenseless for as long as we want. Demonize, marginalize or sell them weapons to slaughter each other. Whether they be impoverished countries, women, gays, transgendered or people who don't look like "us".
b) Build a colossal military police state, so that if anybody tries to do anything about it, we can kill them all.
c) Fill the heads of American taxpayers with lies, overload us with dis-information, call anyone that disagrees 'unpatriotic' and keep the money machine (us) stupid enough to keep paying.
That may be the real 'heartbeat of America.'
If two numbers were lower, we might be able to go on in bloody ignorance. If the human population were lower and the number of nuclear weapons were lower, we might be able to do what we did in the 1950's: stick our heads in the sand, pocket the money and leave this shit for some other generation to clean up. We used to have the 'luxury' of being able spin delusions of grandeur, cover up murder with lies, ruin the land and slaughter ourselves. We have swarmed across the planet like a plague of locusts.
Ignorance is not bliss when it kills us all. It is a choice.
One Pissed Off Liberal went off today and I could not agree more. Read it and get good & pissed. Then start fighting back against stupidity. Learn. Speak. Act. Repeat.
- gadfly