As it turns out, freedom from fear may be the most compelling of the four. It is a mature idea, well beyond a doctrine of safety. In my analysis, it is the courage to put ones self in harms way, whether on a battlefield or in a protest march. It is a freedom from fear that enables us to stand against systems threatening our culture, home, and country.
Strikingly ironic then that our politicians are bloody brilliant in usurping our freedom with fear. Despite the fact that most of our political hacks haven't a clue about economics, they tend to be expert at portraying hallmarks of our free society, like due process or privacy, as stumbling blocks to safety and convincing us, instead, that FISA, the Military Commissions Act, and expansion of executive power will inDEED keep us free safe.
Yep. Promising to keep us safe somehow softens the slaughter of our freedom.
Okay, now we have all these dead uber terrorist bad guys bin Laden, Gaddafi, Kim Jong, and Saddam Hussein, which begs at least one LARGE question: do I still have to take my shoes off in order to board an airplane? With so many bad guys and regimes falling, is it really necessary to glorify a decade-long string of bad policy with the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)?
But hey: We have free markets and free trade and bigger houses and tons of technology. So what if we've imprisoned our social nature and made ideals, like truth, seem irrelevant and useless.
Is it that we humans are not equipped biologically to manage the level of complexity we've designed in our lives? Surely, we're all drowning in ill conceived layers of tangled and completely mangled global networks.
Not to mention: most of us just don't do consequences.
Yet... as Carl Sagan said... we are the stuff of which stars are made... so perhaps the violence and beauty in the ever-moving universe is what we mimic.
Yes. We are violent, horrible, random, brilliant, beautiful and, I believe, unaware of ourselves as a continuum of a chaotic cosmic process.
We have tumbled out of the universe onto this little itty bitty planet, creating ourselves as we go. The question to unravel, I suppose is who are "we" now and what the fuck are "we" going to do... now...
Economic power seems fundamental to mediating and moderating forces... thus it would seem logical to revive regional economies and small business as first steps to help restore equilibrium.
Downsize our ideas about what an economy should do: like ever-expanding growth on in a finite environment just won't work.
School boards, town boards, zoning boards... that's where I think the real work and rewards are. Establishing local and regional platforms of power and influence to push back against the insanity of the few who have lost touch with, well, the bigger picture.
You are in your jet—you don't have a grip on reality. We can lose touch with reality quite easily.
Karl Lagerfield
We've got people in charge of this tiny globe who've lost touch with reality. Writing to them, e-mailing them, calling them in Washington or elsewhere isn't gonna suddenly wake them up.
Changing our lifestyles, buying habits, living leaner & smaller won't wake up those out-of-touch either... but maybe we'll wake up to something more sustainable, sane, and stable that we ordinary folk can negotiate around the globe.
Tue May 14, 2013 at 5:29 PM PT: something I wrote from Dec 2011... i have a longing for the way things were. or do i have a longing for the way i felt before this new century? there were so many things of which i was unaware and inch by inch, i feel like i'm drowning in regret for a world, a civilization that seems gone with the wind.................
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