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.
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