I care for my fellow human beings, regardless of the mistakes they make, or the crimes they commit. I am concerned with every creature I encounter, and being on this earth. I wait for facts, details, and the opinions of others before I draw conclusions about complex events that I have not witnessed first hand. When new information contradicts the old I change my mind. When engaged with an incompetent ideologue, I retain the hope that the misguided will someday find their way. In this sense I am an unapologetic liberal.
How much of your own food do you grow? How much firewood can you put up with your own hands? How far can you walk in the woods and how long could you stay alive out there if you had to? I think these questions reflect conservative values, and I consider myself a true conservative by this measure.
When it all does come down it is going to suck the most for the folks at the top. Remember, the government is here to protect their wealth. Starve it long enough and it will die, then they face the peasants alone. Of course, one can hardly imagine the consequences, it would be in America as it is all over the world today. Grim sickness and painful death coating the ground in a sticky residue of human suffering. Shopping would be seriously curtailed.
At this point, the federal government is so perfectly dysfunctional that it is hard to argue on its behalf. Yet, the rights and privileges that it appears to insure are just too precious to let go of. Maybe this is the key to understanding the development of America's split personality. At home we are brave and free, but away we are despised and detested. How can this be? What is the lie that is told by the people of a free nation, when they labor for a monstrous empire straddling the planet, spreading the drone's death and ravaging any culture that happens to develop above a resource that simply cannot be done without?
A little harm, a venial sin, a peccadillo, what of it? Why not ensure that we have some rights and privileges above those who are not quite up to it yet? Our children's future is on the line! For God's sake it is about my family, and you see how that exonerates me from any responsibility for the suffering of others. They may have had it coming after all, or else they are not quite human enough to care.
Until we are willing to give up every modern privilege, the catastrophic end remains unavoidable. If we do not put down the weapons of our own accord, they will fall from our twitching hands in death. No matter the desire within our hearts that peace and prosperity be the terms of life on this planet, until we act to achieve this without concern for ourselves, the mysterious agreement remains in place. We continue to be unwilling to trade our comfort for the lives of others.
There is no magic solution to this problem, only painful and difficult ones. Our comfort denies others the right to live. It is not the fault of malign forces, they only do what we allow them to. It is not that things have always been this way, and it is certainly not that it should go on any longer. In order for this despicable age of gross inequality--the suffering of the many for the pleasure of a few--to finally end, every individual who lives comfortably and without care must risk everything they have to find peace. Whether in the end they lose it all will depend on the earnestness of their effort, and our fortunes in a world that has only ever wanted to sustain us.