Capitalism Versus Water (17 Images In Support Of One Thought)

In the final analysis, it will be said of the late stages of capitalism that they could not even provide safe drinking water to the vast majority of the population. Monster Juice, electric couches, and porn, yes. Water, no.

Price gouging in times of crisis:

Public drinking water:

The government is against those who protect water:

What “Woke" Means To Me

The term “woke” is being used of late to describe a state of mind that is capable of seeing beyond the official political narrative. Although there appears to be two official narratives, the liberal and conservative models, the range of debate within those two contrasting positions is so narrow that the two merely represent modest extremes of a single central narrative. The term is best associated with Caitlin Johnstone, author of a book of poetry called Woke as well as an impressive amount of political commentary and journalism. I would like to speak a little about what “woke” means to me, before the term is co-opted by Democrats, who co-opt any concept uttered by legitimate leftists and water it down until it has lost any meaning. 

I sometimes wonder if such a term as “woke” is a little too far out there for the average person to take seriously. In reality, all it implies is that one is able to consider ideas beyond those put forth within that narrow frame of debate as established by the two political parties and the corporate media that provides us with all the context we are supposed to require. Being woke in the political sense, then, is simply refusing to fall in with either of the two narratives we are given as choices. And if you want an example as to how limited those choices are, opposing war is always going to fall outside of them. You simply can’t argue for peace within the parameters set by those who define what is acceptable thought. If you ignore their definition of reality, you are woke.

There are deeper dimensions to the term “woke”, of course. Being politically woke is almost always accompanied by a deep cultural awareness, as well as a desire to explore one’s own psychological and spiritual needs and motivations. It is really not much different than what Sociologist/Psychiatrist Erich Fromm would call becoming an adult. 

Being woke, to my mind at least, is to emerge from the desire for an authority to tell you what to do and how to behave and instead become an active agent in the world. To be something less than woke, something less than a fully emerged adult, is to escape into childish fantasies, to allow others to assume your responsibility to the world you live in. I see it in academics, who find no issue so important that they can’t escape from putting their ass on the line by parsing words until meaning—and hence the impetus for action—is lost. I see it in our political leaders who retreat down the path of least resistance because they really don’t believe in their ability to effect meaningful change. I see it in our artists who don’t feel they have any further obligation to their audience than to entertain them, just as I see it in their audience, who demand nothing more of art than distraction. I see it in everyone who goes to work doing a job that is harmful to society as a whole, because profit has taken the place of meaning. And I see it in the pundits and the journalists. God, do I see it in the pundits and the journalists. They are nothing but actors on a stage reciting the words written for them by anonymous authority. And finding it necessary to prove themselves worthy of the obscene wages they receive, they use all of their skill to project passion and conviction into the role they play. But there is no will in them. Whatever individuality is within them they cede to their paymasters. They are not adults but children eager to please those with power and authority.

The concept of being “woke” is not only not new, it is quite possibly as old as recorded human thought. It bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Upanishads, which date at least back to 6^th Century B.C. 

Plato spoke of the very thing in The Republic circa 300 B.C. It is nothing more than a transcendence of our more primitive/bestial/childish way of perceiving the world we live in and our relationship to it. The Book Of Genesis (circa 6^th Century B.C.) offers a similar vision as Erich Fromm’s in describing the fall of man. Man once lived in the Garden Of Eden, unaware of death, no different than the animals or a child. But by eating of the fruit of knowledge, he can no longer live like an animal or a child, and is evicted from the garden, can never return to that early state of innocence. In place of the Garden of Eden which he was forced to leave upon evolving, he cannot hope to revert but can only work towards evolving further still to a new relationship with the world in which he lives as an adult.

Humanity cannot hope to go back to how things were, as you now see Democrats and Republicans so fervently trying, each in their own ways. We can either confront the situation as it is or else deny it, as those within the primitive binary Republican/Democrat paradigm are attempting to do. We can either accept reality or rationalize everything until it fits within our outmoded model. We must struggle to understand truth or else retreat into fantasy. We can vainly endeavor to find our way back to the Garden, some imagined idyllic past not unlike Hitler imagined for the German people, or else work our way to a promised land that all our great thinkers—and evolution itself—push us towards. 

On it's surface, there is really nothing mystical at all about the idea of being "woke". It is merely becoming wise to a viewpoint that has limitations that have been pushed to their limits. It is merely recognizing that what is presented as solutions are not sufficient to help us create the world that needs to be. It is just accepting the facts at face value. But I do not wish to dismiss the deeper elements to the idea of being woke. Because there is a wonderful and immense depth to what can be unearthed once we transcend the limitations set for us by ourselves and others. Becoming an adult, tapping into our adult capacities for conviction and commitment does not do away with miracles, it makes them possible.

A New Greatest Generation

Tom Brokaw coined the expression “The Greatest Generation” to refer to those who were raised during the Great Depression only to end up having to fight in the Second World War. Though they did what was necessary, the individuals of that generation did not choose to be confronted with the kind of trials that would forge them into greatness but rather had such tests thrusts upon them. As the times make the man, so to do they make the generation.

Such a time is now upon the current generation. While they were raised at the tail end of prosperous times rather than a depression, a threat to democracy and the world itself has been building during the course of their lives. Indeed, it is no looming threat that sits outside our borders, it has already overwhelmed us, penetrated the depths of our nation into every corner of every community. The battle has already been fought and we are now a conquered people. We are living in an occupied nation and the battle we must fight will be a war of liberation.

The battle will be fought in the smallest of ways. It will be fought within each neighborhood, each small community. It will be fought in the schools and at the farmers markets. It will be fought wherever two or more people have an opportunity to discuss the situation in which we now find ourselves and discuss the ways in which our own emancipation is possible. As those before us had scrap drives and newspaper drives, so too will we have to work together to recycle and preserve our precious resources. That which is wasted might as well be given over to our enemy.

It will require the tactics of the guerilla, the same sort of resistance required of a people subjugated by a foreign power. It will require the unified action of a people who realize control of their nation has been taken from them. We must be clear that those who now rule over us do not do so with the informed consent of the people.

The enemy is immensely powerful, but it is clumsy and it is slow. It will be vulnerable to a disciplined resistance that is able to constantly shift tactics and choose its own battlegrounds. We cannot afford to fight our occupiers on their own terms, because they are too strong. We need to take them on at a very human level.

The conqueror I speak of is the corporate control of our nation and, indeed, our world. Corporations have utterly overtaken our country, replaced a government of the people with a government of the corporations.

Understand that I do not talk about a resistance that involves violence. Nor can or should we attempt to work in secrecy, since the enemy is in control of most every means of communication, has their spies in every home and in every public space in the form of the electronic devices they have convinced us we need. I speak of a resistance the likes of which Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated to the world. I speak of a resistance that rises up from the deepest and noblest aspects of us.

This struggle is not merely a struggle for independence but quite possibly a struggle for the existence of life on our planet. The corporate mentality is not a human one. It does not jibe with the most basic human needs beyond the physical, and as it is said, “Man does not live on bread alone.” It seeks to make all human interactions into economic ones, seeks to make us all nothing more than cogs in a corporate machine, cogs that are to be thrown away once they no longer function as the machine requires.

In a corporate reality, the environment, the Earth itself, has no intrinsic worth. If it so serves the short-term goal of making more money, forests are to be torn down and bombs dropped on children in order to insure corporations' need for profit. In a strictly corporate mindset, nothing matters except increasing power and profit for the corporation. Clean water, your child’s survival, the extinction of species, are all secondary considerations, potentially profitable but also potential barriers to the primary goals of profit and power. In such a world, money, not man, is the measure of all things.

To combat this will require great sacrifice from us, from all of us. Sacrifice sounds like a terrible thing. But anyone who has loved enough to sacrifice for another human being, a goal, or an idea, will understand how lightly sacrifice may be born when done for love and in hope of a better future. A parent sacrifices in countless ways for the love of a child, but the sacrifice is easily borne when done with love and hope. The sacrifices someone makes to start a business or finish a degree are many, but the achievement of that goal, both in aspiration and in reality, makes us happier people even as we give up small comforts.

But such sacrifices in the end are small things. As Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” We will find that mere material possessions mean nothing in the long term. Indeed, such trinkets can as easily be taken from us as they were given. A government of the corporations will insure you no rights or property. They wish to keep you poor so that you are so busy in scratching out a living you have no will to reflect or resist. We are daily switching from an ownership society to one of monthly payments, becoming renters instead of owners. Where once we owned physical copies of movies, we now have access to them only so long as we pay our Netflix bill. Our access to knowledge is not through a set of books we own but dependent upon our monthly payment to our internet providers. And who now can say they truly own the house they live in or the car they drive?

What we must give up in the short term are mere conveniences, plastic spoons and plastic bags. Unnecessary trips to Walmart to buy things we don’t need. The newest iteration of cell phone or video game. We must disconnect as much as possible from the corporate way of doing things and find new (and old) ways of connecting with our environment and our fellow humans, ones that bypass profits for corporations. We must dismiss out of hand any corporate source of information or art as being fundamentally flawed by corporate intentions. We must view laws passed by corporate-owned politicians as tools intended to suppress true democracy and self-determination for the people. We as human beings must find a way of defining who we are and what we want without being molded by corporate interests, which in their essence are contrary to our own.

And when we begin to make the necessary sacrifices we will experience a joy we have forgotten existed. We will feel the very real (and some may describe as spiritual or sacred) connection to our fellow humans and the world we inhabit. We will even experience our sacred connection to ourselves, recognize ourselves perhaps for the first time as something other than producers and consumers of product and services, as competitors in a battle that none of us can ever win. We will realize once again that our primary connections are not economic ones but bonds of love and interdependence. If we are able to win this battle, I assure you no sacrifice we make will seem too great in light of this. And future generations will look back at the struggle we undertook and use the word “great” to describe it. The Greatest Generation knew sacrifice and was able to win the largest war the world has yet seen. We owe it to both them and those who are to come to win the battle that is now before us.

P.S. Found this looking for a picture to add to my essay.

Betsy's Boat

I rode my bike to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy yesterday, and it left me feeling rather good about myself. I felt good that I didn’t waste gas. I felt good that I bought from an independent pharmacy, even though I spent a few more dollars than I would have if I had given my business to Walmart. And I helped in some small way to keep the local downtown alive amid the onslaught of corporate chains that crowd around the highway offramp. I try as much as possible to have my actions correspond with my values. It is a battle I fight in a thousand ways, making small decisions and sacrifices that I believe will be beneficial to my fellow man and the environment that sustains life on Earth.

And then I thought of Betsy DeVos and her $40 million yacht. I can’t imagine her worrying about the fuel such a behemoth wastes, nor all the people who pay the costs to have it wasted by her. And there is no doubt in my mind she has never scrupled to do the right thing if it cost her a dime more.

No one with any capacity for honesty can say Betsy DeVos cares about children or education. The time she will spend in government is strictly a business opportunity for her. She will leave her position in government richer than when she entered, and society will be the poorer for it. She will spend her time in government fighting for the special interests of herself, her friends, and her class. She is a taker, not a giver. Anyone with a 40 million dollar boat is a taker, it’s that simple. 40 million dollars could pay for a hell of a lot of school supplies.

Yet Betsy DeVos is the kind of person our society is set up to serve. We have a media that sweeps away all the unpleasantness that results from the actions of such individuals. It holds them up as role models to the average citizen. Our corporations are set up to funnel the wealth they create to an elite few who had enough money to invest large sums of money to begin with. Governments from the local to the federal level have been bought and constructed to conform to the whims of such people. We have built a society that exists to support sociopaths.

This may anger many who have until this point agreed with me, but it doesn’t matter whether it is a Democrat or a Republican who is in office: sociopaths will be served. Betsy Devos did not become a dangerous sociopath with the election of Trump, nor was she stripped of her obscene wealth and undue influence when Barack Obama was elected. The Democrats are merely better at disguising their supplication to sociopaths: they are more likely to allow an African American or a woman act as their servant.

They are sociopaths, let us not fall to the false politeness insisted upon by the media that is owned by and serves their kind. They are sociopaths and they have been doing a very good job of convincing the rest of us that sociopathic values are normal. They have normalized greed and selfishness, turning them into supposed virtues rather than the sins and character flaws that any healthy culture would view them as.

This is a profoundly sick society set up and run by sociopaths incapable of seeing past their own selfish interests. How can you tell who they are? Well, a 40 million dollar yacht is a big red flag. Anyone with more than one yacht or a private island is likely one of them. Anyone buying up a sizeable chunk of Hawaii or any other state because they believe it to be their just reward for their contribution to society is another tell. 

The degree to which they feel the need to place themselves above and apart from the average person is a good gauge of what they think of their fellow humans. They are the ones who have amassed obscene amounts of wealth by serving the machine. They have names like Zuckerburg, Bezos, DeVos.

They are really little different than the sociopaths of profoundly sick societies of the past: give them powdered wigs and snuff and you could mistake them for the royalty of the French Revolution. Their chief differences from those who lost their heads to the guillotine are that bloodlines are de-emphasized somewhat and they are more active in their quest for personal wealth. But their indifference to the suffering of others, their contribution to moral decline, and their unquestioned subservience to the power structure in order to advance their own interests are identical.

A society cannot long function in this manner. It can’t. Corruption always exists in any society, but too great a degree of it is deadly, just as too much rot on a tree or cancer in a human is deadly. A society needs leaders who have values that to some degree line up with the average person’s. We are almost completely lacking in such leaders. Those who are now in charge serve the values of the powerful, and the average individual is powerless.

I am not suggesting bringing out the guillotine, as they did during the French Revolution. Nor do I say we need re-education camps for the Betsy DeVos’s of the world, as was done during the Vietnam Revolution. What I am saying is we need to have a very serious discussion about how we can keep such obvious sociopaths away from the levers of power before they destroy the very planet we need for our survival. We need to keep them from defining the way we see ourselves and our relationships with each other and our planet, because the narrative they set forth is growing increasingly distant from reality. I would say the narrative pushed by the sociopathic power structure is currently the single greatest threat to our species 

Such a conversation will need to take place outside the parameters that have been set for us. We will need to include everyone from both sides of the political aisle. This conversation will need to take place outside of the mainstream media and outside of our conventional political settings, because they have been set up to create divisions among us. Raychell Maddow and Sean Hannity will never lead us towards a consensus. The media and the political process is owned by the sociopaths and will not permit sane and healthy discussion. The internet and social media have been powerful tools in permitting us such conversations, but the sociopaths have become aware of this and are looking to silence opposing voices. We must continue to find new avenues of open and honest. discussion. Not yelling, discussing. We must remember that when we speak in anger that it is an anger fomented by those who wish to keep us from finding common purpose.

We must find ways to communicate and find common purpose outside of the parameters set by the sociopaths and those who serve them. If we don’t find practical and humane ways of doing so, and doing it soon, then the Robespierres of the world will have their say. As tempting as their leadership may appeal to some, it will not lead to a better tomorrow.