Stop Playing Their Game
The powerful know Truth. Speaking to them about it is a waste of breath.
Jessica Wildfire nailed a great big rough oak plank up for everyone to read.
“The rich have a plan, but it doesn’t include you.”
I’ll start with an apology because I posted three comments on one story. I try not to do that. My biggest craw-sticker is this one:
We have conditioned humans to be consumptionists.
I don’t mean the bunker boys: I mean all of us. Our systems are colonialism writ large: humans conditioned to only be extractors and purchasers of goods(and each other), rather than contributors to their own future via the future of a place.
I’ll expand the rest and attempt to fill in some gaps of logic.
Working stiffs are just the teeth at the tip of this machine:
The economy and the rich are the profits embedded in the machine from the teeth all of the way back to the smiley logo tape on the overnight Amazon delivery of your special sugar-free antacid tablets. How much do you think the teeth are going to convince the whole system to pay them in the long run?
Deadly Competition for a place on the extraction digging wheel is not fixed by punishing a few people at the power end of the drive chain with taxes and fines. We think that it would be sensible to tax the rich so that The Economy is more ‘fair’ to the people at the dirty end of the digger, but the rich have a button for that, too. The button shocks the teeth to dig faster or shuts down that isolated wheel until it rusts.
Digging ourselves to death can only get fixed by people who stop digging, climb out and walk away from the entrenched powers that be, and start growing and nurturing each other and our children’s places.
We have convinced most of humanity that the Purpose in life is to serve offerings up to imaginary sky masters or Fate (and all of the middlemen alongside the conveyor of a hero-worshiping sycophantic process we don’t even know we are performing). Only a small percentage of people in so-called “developed” countries actually are growing food and connecting to their environment. Many people in less wealthy nations still connect to each other, though. They must do, because electricity, gasoline and security are unreliable without expensive “infrastructure”. Hardships give them enough random clarity to know that they should take what they can get from anyone professing a ‘better’ world, but never really trust them with one’s actual life.
The vast majority of consumptionism’s combatants are trying to kill each other for no fracking reason at all except the profitability of prophets.
Fanatical fetishisms and competing fanaticisms keep ‘citizens’ following the path of constant conditioning. Animals that are being fattened for slaughter are domesticated this way. They don’t even remember how long it’s been since their gonads were cut off as long as they get slop to eat on time and don’t get attacked by wolves (yes, the wolves that don’t actually have access anymore).
What have we complied with, lately? Was it in the best interest of ourselves or someone we love? Or was it just a Pavlovian response to ‘Authority’ and Money (Invisible Hand authority)? Far too many of us are under the constant thumb of various authorities and bullies (PMC). The pseudo-saviors will jump up and down and chant protests against all of the “-isms”, but in the end, they’ll go back to their jobs and their houses (Can you call it a “home” if you don’t contribute to the people in its future?), collect their wages and buy some more gasoline to drive to the next protest. The powerful will let them continue to do so. It’s their game plan to meter out enough freedoms (at “always low prices/taxes” of course) to prevent actual Change.
“Well, the government and their pals are not going to stop using and abusing us. They’re not going to stop preying on us. They cannot stop! Republican or Democrat, they are rich and powerful precisely because they prey on us. They are rich because they rob us. They’re robbing us right this minute.”
Don’t be convinced that a majority will vote in their best interest.
“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?” -Robert Heinlein
I submit that only the local and the land (environment) have the right to determine the future rights of humans. Money and distance make everyone a murderer by proxy, but proximity and usefulness make them a community.
“We are what we repetitively do.” -Aristotle/Durant
“Be the Change you wish to see in the world.” -Mahatma Gandhi
“Do Be Do Be Do.” -Frank Sinatra
