Peace Patriot
Peace Patriot's JournalGo deeper! Are you not responding to "the Dream" born in the 1960s...
...in millions and millions of brains--a dream that only a few had dreamt before but that quite suddenly, it seems, "went viral"--that humankind could create its own future of social justice, equitable wealth, compassion and high scientific and intellectual and artistic achievement in which all of us, without exception, can participate?
NASA was part of that Dream. It is quite wrong to say that NASA and especially its program of putting men on the moon was created to defeat the Russian communists in space. That was the motive of the war profiteers for going along with it but it was NOT the motive of the engineers who pulled it off nor the motive of the millions of people who supported the effort and the billions who were inspired by it. CURIOSITY and WONDER were the REAL motives of those who did it and those who appreciated it as the most important event of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.
Suddenly, our viewpoint changed from an ant's point of view to the point of view of the great Cosmos, almost overnight. To compare it, say, to Europe's discovery of America, is the right idea but doesn't come near to grasping the magnitude of this human achievement of stepping off our own planet!--and furthermore, doing it as a collective effort! (The movie "Apollo 13" got that right!) (Many brilliant minds, putting their own egos aside, can solve insoluble problems by collective effort, that individuals cannot solve alone.)
We now could see the Earth as "one" and the necessity of including all of humankind in the social justice, equitable wealth, compassion and high achievement that millions were now dreaming of.
The bigger your Dream, the harder it is to see the "big picture," ironically. It is painful--so painful!--to see backsliding, to see war as a money sport return, to see the corruption of the rich and powerful get worse, far worse, to see democracy blockaded with items like corporate-run, 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, to see youngsters imitating the incredibly ugly leaders who are inflicted upon us--trying to get rich with a gun and drugs, or just going blewy and shooting people at random (how different is the Colorado shooting from the war on Iraq?). The lack of leadership. The lack of vision. The moral decrepitude. The evil. The demoralization and disempowerment of a great people--a people who did that, who put men on the moon and, at the same time, determined to end poverty and racism.
Painful, painful, painful!
But, I'll tell you, that torch--the torch of "the Dream"--has passed to a new generation elsewhere--in the unlikeliest of places, given its history. Latin America.
That is the "big picture" that is hard to see. We in the U.S. are not alone on this planet and those of us touched by "the Dream" in the 1960s are not the only dreamers. U.S. democracy may go down--we may have lost the opportunity ourselves to advance humankind to its next giant steps--of both social justice and achievement. But humankind itself will never lose those dreams. They will be reborn again and again, in inconspicuous places, and seem suddenly to burst upon humankind to renew and refresh human society and move it forward along its inevitable progressive path.
Those of us who have dreamt of peace find war so intolerable that we are almost paralyzed with anger that our "Dream" has been so violated. Those of us who have dreamt of social justice and high human achievement find the current repeat of the crimes that brought on the Great Depression so intolerable that we can barely speak for our anger and don't know where to begin to undo it. (Begin with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, is my advice!) Those of us who also perceive the catastrophe of global warming and its cause, industrial society, and see the suicidal failure of our country to address it--or even to admit it!--feel paroxysms of despair and rage. We can hardly believe the stupidity of our national discussions.
Why? Because we expect better of ourselves and our country. Why? Because we saw "the Dream" born here!--the dream of the best of humanity throughout the Ages, formulated in fits and starts, through many struggles and "dark nights" over many centuries, then blossoming, suddenly, here, for reasons unknown, in a new generation of Americans, the inheritors of the post WW II world. Widespread; shared by many--and quite unprecedented in that respect. We saw the world in a new way at the same time that our friends at Caltech and M.I.T. were putting a camera on the earth from the moon!
And if you were not born at the time--are too young to have lived through it--you certainly hear its echoes in the background of the current horrors.
The JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and the Vietnam War ended that awakening of "the Dream" quite a few decades before Bush Jr. was inflicted upon us. But "the Dream" is alive and well in Latin America--just being born--and, if the truth were known, it is still alive here in places and among people whom the corporate news monsters quite deliberately ignore. Whether we can recover our democracy--and all our hopes and dreams--I do not know. It would be unusual as an historical precedent. Once a society goes in this bad, bad direction--of rule by the few for the profit of the few--swift decline is pretty much inevitable. But then, democracy--which is still alive here at least as an idea--is designed to do just that: to correct the wrong and disastrous courses of the rulers. (Thomas Jefferson said that we would need a revolution every twenty years--boy, was he right!) Given the mechanisms designed to defeat democracy here, it will be an uphill battle to restore it--but hey, if the Latin Americans can do it--given their history--so can we!
Don't despair! Go deeper!
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"If a more intelligent life form has been watching what is going on here, they just may decide to stop our disease from spreading beyond our planet...".
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That "more intelligent life form" is YOU. And the "disease" you speak of is something that YOU can help cure but NOT ALONE. And the glory of human life on Earth is that that collective "cure" is dreamable and therefore...maybe..we can never be sure...possible.
Why do hunters and self-defenders need assault rifles and fast-action clips that...
...can shoot dozens of bullets in seconds?
The lethality of the weapons that this shooter legally purchased gave the victims--a packed theater audience--little chance to escape or evade, and of course, no chance for those who died and will die from their injuries. His ability to kill many people quickly is why there are so many dead and injured.
It seems to me that--given a real democracy, not this "TRADE SECRET" code-in-all-the-voting-machines, corporate-run sham we're looking at--this could be the basis of a compromise as to regulating guns. You don't need an assault rifle to kill a deer. And you don't need multiple, high-powered weapons to defend yourself.
I've been in despair about this issue since I lost a loved one in the first such "senseless" mass shooting in this country--the Texas Tower sniper in 1966. NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE to prevent such horrors happening again and again--not as to the availability of mass murder weapons, nor as to health care especially for the young, nor on any other front including government/corporate fostering of a climate of fear, alienation, militarism and war, with the war on Iraq the most obvious example but perhaps the "war on drugs" the most sneaky--and yet more socially destructive--aspect of this propaganda.
Anyway, I put this forward as a basis for discussion, and--if we ever get our democracy back--a basis for serious, anti-mass murder regulation, between gun advocates and gun haters. I am in the latter camp. I want all guns and all weapons--and of course war--banned worldwide. But I have had at least one family member who disagrees (he lived in a violent urban area) and I live in a rural area where hunting is part of the culture for some and I cannot say that hunting with bullets is immoral and leads to mass murder although I wish they would use bows and arrows and other skilled means that give their game a chance. Why assault rifles? Why high-powered, mass killing cartridges? Why multiple, high-powered guns and rifles? Why scopes and other sophisticated technology that give the hunted no chance?
I also have some sympathy with 2nd Amendment arguments, although I think that our Founders would be absolutely appalled at what their approval of a "citizen militia" has turned into--the loss of civilization itself. They did not intend THIS.
The "framing" of this article's argument is odd.
Here is where it begins to go...strange.
"The specter of fraud looms especially large this year because the party that perfected the buying of votes and rigging of elections...," the PRI, "...is favored to return to the presidency...".
I expected the sentence to read, "The specter of fraud looms especially large this year because" millions of Mexicans protested the vote rigging of the last presidential election, when leftist Lopez Obrado was denied the presidency by only 0.05% of the vote. Indeed, the country almost came apart because of that fraud, which apparently was engineered at the top with electronic tabulators that were brought in allegedly with the help of the Bush Junta (which desperately wanted an administration in Mexico that would welcome the ruination of Mexico--an overly democratic people who have stubbornly resisted 'privatization' of their oil--by the corrupt, failed, murderous U.S. "war on drugs."
Uh, it ain't the PRI's "old ways" (corruption, cronyism) that is the main problem in Mexico these days--the problem is NEW; it is ELECTRONIC; and, just as here, control of the electronic tabulation makes it EASY, not only to steal elections but also to write pre-election "narratives" that fit the fraudulent results.
"Narratives" like this one--alleged news articles that slip in the corporate editors/owners view of leftist Lopez Obrador as "an unreformed erratic" by attributing this opinion to "numerous Mexicans" as follows:
"Numerous Mexicans have expressed near-existential dismay over the choices they have in this election; they chafe at the prospect of the PRI's return, can't stomach more of the current, discredited government, and see Lopez Obrador as an unreformed erratic." --from the OP
These are the 1%-ers having cocktails in their villas--these so-called "numerous Mexicans" in their "near-existential dismay." They (the rich, the corporate) have no candidate. PAN/Calderon (the Bush Junta's choice) has been discredited and was a disaster for Mexico on many fronts. The vast majority of Mexicans (the real "numerous Mexicans" nominated the two candidates that THEY wanted to choose between--the PRI representing the old system that was corrupt but worked versus the Left (Lopez Obrador) representing the new leftist democracy movement that has swept through South America into Central America and avows social justice and independence from the U.S. and its corporate/war profiteer masters.
What is odd is that the L.A. Times would dwell on election fiddling of long ago and ignore much more recent, massive and massively disruptive election theft--against Lopez Obrador! They describe Lopez Obrador's (and multi-millions of Mexicans') objection to that fraudulent count as "political grandstanding." But, by God, if those millions of people had been able to get their votes counted, Mexico would never have allowed the Bushification of the "war on drugs" and the horrible, bloody disaster that it has been and would be making progress on social justice to catch up with Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua and other countries with leftist governments.*
And this is the problem with this article. The rich and the corporate have no candidate and they are going through paroxysms of no doubt drunken "existential" angst at the parties that corporate reporters attend. These parties are crammed with Mexicans of a particular type (thus, "numerous Mexicans" (was it at the embassy in L.A.?) And the corporate reporters SHARE their "near-existential dismay." The old corrupt regime or good leftist government on behalf of the 99%. Such a regrettable choice!
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*(This list would include two more countries with leftist governments--Honduras and Paraguay--but for the U.S.-supported rightwing coups in those countries--Honduras in 2008, Paraguay recently. Though the U.S. has not been nailed yet on the coup in Paraguay, I think we can be sure that it will be. It's what the U.S. does--supports 1%-er rule in Latin America by whatever means--election fraud, USAID funding of rightwing causes and candidates, CIA dirty tricks, vast propaganda and/or outright coup d'etats. The U.S. even personally conducts rigged elections, as in Honduras and Haiti. And when it can't bust a democracy, it sends in the DEA to smash up and bloody the society and make it more malleable.)
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Member since: Sat Nov 13, 2004, 01:56 AMNumber of posts: 24,010
