Press Action ::: Blaming America First, Part 3

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Blaming America First, Part 3

By Tracy McLellan

In this mixed up world, up is down, down is up, right is wrong and wrong is right. Henry Miller said that a “moneyless society is the only hope.” Isn’t that a beautiful thought? What happened to beautiful thoughts in beautiful minds in this dismal world? Miller’s apothegm is as true today, more so, than it was three-quarters of a century ago. It’s a principle I should like to see lived up to more often. Of course it’s a dream next to the brutal realities of the real world. But look at where they’ve gotten us.

Need a shirt? Go into Sears and pick one off the rack. Say “have a nice day” to the serene clerk who looks out over your well-being in the store with a beaming smile, and walk out the door into the sunshine. No need for money. Money soils and corrupts anything and everything it touches. Where is the justice in a sliver of an economic elite wasting that which would constitute abundance for the destitute multitudes?

The world we live in is a prison of shackles and incarceration masquerading as freedom and democracy. At every turn it totters obliviously on the brink of apocalypse.

I have been asked, “Hasn’t it always been this way?” I don’t believe it has. Today’s problems threaten the very existence of humanity as a species and the planet itself. Worse, rather than focus on solving these problems, we live and move and have our being in a fog of distractions of TV, making money, Christian delusion, the candidates the corporations permit us to vote on in the periodic farce of our elections, the constant and ubiquitous advertising and commercialism, consumerism as a way of life, the lies, subterfuge and propaganda masquerading as media.

In the consumerist society and economy too much is never enough. Is there ever a hunger satisfied that will finally bring contentment? A billion people exist on the equivalent of U.S.$1 day and don’t even have access to safe drinking water or basic sanitation. Two billion more, half the world’s population, survive on less than $2 a day. Twenty-five thousand children die every day from hunger and related easily preventable causes, while Bill Gates alone is worth $38 billion. Where’s the justice in that? Portraying Bill Gates giving a couple hundred million to combat AIDS in India as charity when Bates only did that as a public relations stunt to crack the computer market in India takes cynicism that if canned and sold would cost its weight in gold—literally, just as a B-52 bomber, at $2.2 billion, does. Any cause in those circumstances and the effect of U.S. computer tech jobs offshoring to India? Nah, charity!

When will this world orient itself toward the justice that would make it the highest priority to bring a decent standard of living to the impoverished masses? This is the precondition for any peace in the world. The reality of capitalism it is too grim to look at. Today’s weaponry is too deadly to even consider using. Yet the U.S. is bound and determined to adhere even more to its big military stick to enforce the prerogatives of corporate multinationalism. Where has been U.S. leadership in nuclear disarmament? Entirely lacking, precisely because one of the world’s masters is the arms manufacturers. The U.S. has failed miserably to pursue nuclear disarmament as it is required to do by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory. It takes incredible chutzpah to condemn North Korea and Iran for as much as pursuing the weapons it has in overwhelming majority. Raising the living standards of the world’s hungry would surely be the most efficacious way to stand down “terrorism”; incredibly not terrorism when the United States does it.

Our society accepts what is most harmful for it as most salubrious and vice-versa. Look at the so-called virtue of a strong work ethic. As if working the preponderance of one’s life were some act of liberation—producing, manufacturing, packaging, bar-coding and consuming all of our world. All the while the endless stress and strain we make the earth endure, threaten the very biosphere that sustains us.

The media only at its rarest moments apprise us of the information critical to our survival. The rest is distraction, disinformation, innuendo, but disgustingly more often still, outright complicity with the power brokers that are arranging this society and world for the sliver of the fatcat elite who live lives of fabulous wealth and opulence. And still not content, have the unmitigated gall to label those who would bring these facts to light as being the liberal intelligentsia elite, engaging in class warfare.

Tracy McLellan is an activist living in the Chicago area. You may contact him at tracymacL@yahoo.com.

More from Tracy McLellan