Something I Wrote

Elections are imminent. Oooooohhhh...

As is much else...for example a possible Great Depression II.

For most people in the world, however, imminent might be too far-off a phrase. The Great Depression of grinding third world poverty's been around for a bit.

Scary developments are under way that, while clearing up what the problems are, confound simple solutions. Plus, however clear a collapse should make things, those responsible look a whole lot like those half dozen folks who own the news.

Wall Street's worth down 2 and a half trillion dollars in the past month. That's this much:

$2,500,000,000,000.00

I have $8.00 in my account right now. If you counted dollar bills, 1 per second, for a week, you'd reach a million. To reach a billion would take you thirty years. I don't even know about a trillion, good Christ almighty.

Iceland's banks are rupt. Which is frightening. Their population's probably not nearly as starved as our southern neighbors however, or F'd as those of the third world within our nation, thanks to our "leaders."

...

Disasters either liberate people from their collective insanity, or drive them to further depths.

Will the disasters we see rumbling in our midst prompt a renewal in thinking and action? Will they shake our faith in unregulated market solutions, privatization, profit motives, competition, bullying foreign policy?

Can this economic disaster prove our politico-financial leaders don't know how to run things in a stable, sustainable, equitable way? That our system denies that possibility?

Can we see the potential in our own hands and minds? Can we build our own communal economics? Can we take matters into our own hands? Create a managable social and economic framework that doesn't depend on the actions of a handful of monstrously powerful and wealthy organizations?

Everyone needs change, just as much as the homeless with the courage to ask for it.

Evolution tends toward diversity. Without diversity there is no stability. Our monocrop economy, mirroring the agriculture our leaders, "liberal" and "conservative," force on the majority of the world, is being devastated by a single strain sickness. Greed.

Greed, like any vice, is harder to carry out when it hurts those we care about. People generally care about their family members. If they happen to hate their family, they likely care about their friends, and would bend over backwards to help them out. Love, developed through sincere personal relationships, is the only ensurer of decent human interactions. Problem is, our actions affect people we will never see, so we constantly commit atrocities fully unaware.

The basis for all organization has to be personal interaction. If our economy is not based on the well-being of our neighbors, people we viscerally know and care for, nothing can truly hold it in check. If we cannot see and understand the effects of our system on the oppressed, the marginalized, the poor, we cannot even begin to change it.

Without local, personal economics, a few hundred billion dollars thrown at a few key financial institutions won't do much in the long run. Greed still dominates our politics, our entertainment, our mass culture. Without undoing our collective alienation, we're not doing much.

...

Hold hugs longer

Push friends' and families' buttons
in good ways,
that squish their comfort box.

Remember who you're talking to
while you're talking to
who you're talking to.

Read Howard Zinn if you haven't already.
and William Appleman Williams
and Thich Nhat Hanh
and Daniel Berrigan
and Noam Chomsky
and Dalton Trumbo
and Kurt Vonnegut
and Harry Magdoff
and Herman Hesse
and Leo Tolstoy
and Malcolm X
and R.D. Laing
and
and
and...Find people smarter than you and pick their brains.

AND:
Question every damn thing.

AND:
Get involved in something
...preferably something that benefits other living things
that need you.

AND...

Smile despite the horrible half of existence,
Because the splendid bear hug happiness of everything,
the other one over two...
Is me and you.