Now what?
by Walter I. Zeichner
11/22/2001

The world needs you! There is a lot of stuff going on which needs your attention!

The environment is ever more degraded. We all use too much in terms of natural resources. In 50 years, at this rate, the earth will not be able to support us the way it does now. We are creating our own eventual extinction by using resources the way we do now. The use of fossil fuels is polluting at an alarming rate and accelerating the destruction of the ozone layer. The danger of nuclear proliferation is still with us. Corporate centralized agricultural methods, which degrade the soil, as well as genetic tampering, are endangering the food supply.

The government is daily more blatantly fascist.

• A law, the USA Patriot Act, has been recently passed in Congress and signed by Bush, which is blatantly unconstitutional with regards to free speech, the freedom to assemble, and privacy.
• The government is operating our military which people pay for in blood, sweat and tears, to pave the way for oil companies to develop the oil and natural gas under the countries of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, all north of Afghanistan, and to bring those resources to market through Afghanistan.
  
• Our government blatantly discriminates against the Palestinians by supporting Israel in inhumane and undemocratic practices in order to maintain a strong ally in the oil-rich mid-east.
  
• Our government is committing the resources and lives of citizens to serve the interests of multinational corporations by choreographing a global economic hegemony which is designed to operate without regard to any participating country's duly created laws.
  
• The Bush government is illegal because Bush did not win the election. A rogue Supreme Court, with appointees from Bush's father's time and Reagan, made unconstitutional rulings which prevented the true vote to be counted. This means that the Supreme Court cannot be trusted to uphold the constitution against the aforementioned new law.
  
• Under the tutelage of Attorney General John Ashcroft, known for his blatant racism and classism while in the US Senate, Bush has decreed that there shall be military tribunals, which circumvent the justice system as laid out in the constitution. These courts are a necessary prerequisite to declaring martial law.

The media is ever more plainly deceptive.

The government and the media have openly collaborated on an agreement to censor the news reports, to spin the information presented to the public in a specific way. What isn't being reported to US citizens is that the rest of the world is not supporting the ongoing bombing of Afghanistan. There are protests happening all over the world and people are being killed by police at those protests; killed to protect the US's war. The media continues to whip people into a patriotic frenzy by manipulating the public through it's newscasts, newspapers, and magazines. This is by design. It's not an accident. You are being exploited. Your money, which comes from your life blood ­ your work, is being used to enslave you through spending for consumer goods made by slaves in other countries, and through taxation.

Religion is being employed by both sides of the conflict to drive people to violence. Fundamentalist Christian and Islamic ideologies are being presented, somewhat subtly, as part of the driving force behind the war. Part of the way that works is that the societies involved in this war generate religious and other intolerances at home in order to unify their citizens to make them more malleable when enforcing totalitarian policies. Scapegoating is as old as history itself.

We have it within our power to respond to these things. We can talk about this stuff with people we know. We can write to our local newspapers, contact our congressional representatives. These are all good and important things to do. But we can do more! We can each look at our own lifestyle and see where we can reduce consumption and where we can unplug from giving money into the corporate food chain. Money is life energy converted to currency through work. When we give money, whether by donation or in an exchange, we are putting our life energy into the hands of whomever we pay. We can take responsibility for where our money goes. We can stop buying things made by slave labor or through other forms of exploitation. We need to do even more, to think about what we each stand for, what we believe in. Now is the time and we, all of us, are the people who can choose our path, to bring our visions of a better world into focus, and to manifest them.

<--back