Great FB post by Peter Coyote, if you haven't seen it, [View all]

[G_j]

Quieting the Canaries
There are some spectacles, like staring into the sun that are so overwhelming they become destabilizing. They strip our sense of norms and proportion which might buttress any conventional reality. As a Zen priest who has meditated for over 50 years, my own mind and its projections, I would like to share my perceptions of this current moment as a source of possible clarity.
An entire class of people, powerful because they are wealthy—conservative billionaires funding Christian Nationalists and other varieties of anti-democratic upheaval; tech billionaires who’ve concluded their mathematical talents should exempt them from social responsibilities and any consequences for the feral and deliberatively addictive Social media they’ve unleashed on the Natio. This list would include C-suite Executives so fixated on share price, corporate bottom lines and bonuses, that the disintegration of our National life is collateral damage.
This cabal has concluded they’ve reached the zenith of their possibilities and would like to freeze their advantages where they are. They have, successfully strategized how to loot the Nation of every form of its wealth, simultaneously exempting themselves from every social and legal responsibility to the majority of its citizens.
There is no other way to appreciate the self-benefit they’ve designed into the current Republican Administration budget— its tax-cuts for them alone, imposing on every citizen, business, and national event, the exorbitant interest costs of a $9 Trillion dollar National debt (about a Trillion a year). It’s an inconceivably large number. A thousand seconds is about 16 minutes. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years. 1,000 pennies would fit in a small jar. A trillion pennies would make a cube the size of a football field. $9 Billion dollars represents nearly 30% of our entire 2025 GDP of $30.34 Trillion. It’s an amount larger than our current military budget and will constrict economic possibilities and policies, public investment for research, innovation, public health services, Medicare and Social Security for generations.
The current abandoning of medical and scientific research, once among America’s greatestest contribution to the world; the cancellation of aid, food and medicine to the world’s poorest people, the decision to end the global detection and cure of pandemics for our own early warning, the refusal to acknowledge climate crisis or diminish the amount of oil, diesel and jet fuel that we burn, or to acknowledge our failures to protect our citizens of color and non-standard gender definitions from vastly unequal treatment is a public announcement by bullhorn from this class to the rest of us, that their value system includes nothing but their personal empowerment beyond which nothing is worth a moment of their consideration.
This is an entire class of people, the real enablers of the Trump Republican agenda. It includes every Republican official, State, Local or National who have surrendered their Constitutional right to legislate and control the spending of our revenues. They deny the Constitutional birthright of Congress itself and in this regard are equally culpable to the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6th.
Stories of brazen arrests and attacks on public officials advertise over mass media which people do and do not count to them, which ones are exempt from regulation and law and which are not. In the face of this daily insult to our body Politic, our news media takes delusional cheer celebrating unenforceable Court decisions , convincing ourselves that we are not in a “crisis” because “the judges are on our side.” This is the self-delusionary myopia that lulled thousands of Americans to their deaths and spilled our blood and treasure into the dirt, sand, and rice paddies of Vietnam, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
TV rakes in ad revenues from describing the chaos as the entire Nation is dismantled in front us by this lawless class, supported by a majority on the Supreme Court, whose flagrant public corruption would embarrass a hypocritical tele-evangelist.
The political class has sat idly by for decades allowing money unrestrained rule over our every political and cultural institution. They have pawned our public airwaves off to the corporate sector and the public never noticed it. Until we begin serious deliberations to curtail that power—Universal or Mandatory voting, prohibition of corporate contributions to politics, fully funded National elections—we will do nothing but continue to witness and chitter about the catastrophe amongst ourselves, like pet canaries, at day’s end as the night cloth is draped over the cage, stilling our song.