Human Decision Required!

Fear not! The following is NOT a carefully crafted political diatribe designed to manipulate weak minds, and affect the status-quo.The following are my views and beliefs regarding the current status of the human condition, as it stands now, here on planet Earth. To take my views outside the friendly confines of this website would be a political act, so remember, it is YOU who have come to THIS site.Unlike like Pontius Pilot, and more like Dr.Morbius in the movie « Forbidden Planet », as portrayed by the late great Walter Pidgeon, I echo his words when I say: « I wash my hands clean of all responsibility! »
We are experiencing a consolidation of power by hierarchical forces unprecedented in human history. Yes, our past is replete with examples of power consolidation by empires, and always ending with the same results; contraction or destruction.
As it stands now, the dominant empire of this lovely world has been the United States of America. I admire the U.S.A. For it’s innovation, it’s constitution, as well as the legacy of contributions it has made to the Arts and Sciences. However, in the past few decades, the process of consolidation of wealth to the highest, and smallest percentile of it’s socio-economic pyramid, has accelerated to a rate that, as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently stated in congress, has allowed the wealthiest one percent of Americans to acquire more wealth then the bottom fifty. He goes on to point out that the U.S.A. Is beginning to resemble the « banana republics » we were taught about in school, where the ruling class had all the power, and the common man had none. We have not yet reached this desperate state, but unless you’ve either been living under a rock, watching « Dancing with the Stars », or giving too much attention to the op-ed pundits in the corporate media, one can clearly see the precarious status of our civil liberties eroding before our very eyes.
The creation of the department of Homeland Securities, the dusting off of, and the institution of the Patriot Act, shortly after the terror strikes of 9/11, have facilitated the acceleration of abuses to civil liberties. The United States is a country who sent many soldiers to fight against the tyranny of socially controlled paranoid security states. Now we see a country that has lost its way, an underclass quite content to indulge in their « freedom » to recklessly consume all they can, detached from the suffering of the great bulk of humanity, yet leaving a bleak landscape behind them, thus further desecrating the land of its displaced indigenous peoples. At the top, we see a ruling class of oligarchs so terrified of its own brethren, that it seeks out, and pays, former K.G.B Czars like Yevgeni Primakov, to « assist » with the implementation of this security state.
The charade of democracy allows us to believe the narrative that our elected officials are running our country. However, as we know, politicians rarely keep their election promises, and once elected proceed to make laws that were never, and never will be voted on by the people. We can start with personal income tax for one, and go right down to the very minutiae that affects our daily lives. The problem is the result of creating economic states too large in scale for humans to properly manage. As a result, politicians have now become mere liaisons between the corporate interests and the people, ya, that’s right, US, those who actually make this world function!
The « elephant in the room » in all this is how oblivious we’ve become to the incredible power held by non-elected officials. For people like, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geitner, Bill Gates, George Soros, Henry Kissinger…and the list goes on, the bottom line is dollars and cents. People don’t seem to count anymore, from where I stand we seem to be viewed as expendable units to be sacrificed for some greater good, their perceived good, but in reality, nobody’s good! Here in Canada, I came across a roundtable discussion broadcast by the C.B.C. Host Evan Solomon interviewed a panel to discuss the recent Wikileaks document dump.To the horror of viewers and the host, an aid to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a professor named Tom Flanagan, called for the assassination of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The panel chuckled, it was said partly in jest, I’m sure, but conspiracy to commit murder is not humour as I understand it. If you want to know political satire that also happens to be funny, George Carlin has a few videos on youtube I can direct you to. This fool then goes on to say that this fatwa of his is an expression of « feeling manly ». There’s nothing manly about a coward trying to coax somebody to do his dirty work for him. He has proved to me what I suspected all along regarding Canada’s ruling « Conservative » minority government, that they are mostly just Reform Party, ultra-right wing, corporatists, with an agenda to advance the goals of what Scholar Chris Hedges describes as a state of inverted totalitarianism. Where politics, and morality, are subordinate to economics.
The same power consolidation is happening in Europe too. The European Union experiment has succeeded in doing the opposite of what it was set out to do. It’s intention, or so they say, was to unify that continent, economically and socially, under one flag, one currency, one parliament, and one anthem. Instead they have fragmented themselves, by imposing a « cookie cutter » order to proud peoples and cultures who have fought for hundreds of years to define their sovereignty and express their collective individuality in a global context. The autonomy of small countries like Greece, Ireland,and Portugal are being usurped my the I.M.F. And the World Bank, with the administrative assistance of the European Union. The democracy these countries have earned has now slipped into the control of people who are not necessarily indigenous to those countries, and have little interest in salvaging anything which does not feed the corporate interests at the heart of the Euro state.
This is not solely a European problem, really. This, is an American one too. The raping of the public treasury by a private company (The Federal Reserve) by virtue of the process of continued bank bailouts, is excising the gains made throughout the 20^th Century by its intrepid middle class.These freedoms and rights have been the template for, and the envy of, oppressed people the world over. This toxic dichotomy is a pattern that has long since been established in China, a country of 1.3 Billion people,1.1 of which live in abject poverty. In China, The « lucky ones » have earned the honour of working, in many cases, sixteen hour days, six days a week, in order to manufacture cheap products, consumed mostly by nations of overweight neurotic westerners.The Chinese people have no freedom to protest, their internet is controlled by the state, and have little ability to affect change in their society, except perhaps through insurrection, which is quite common there despite its own governments attempts at snuffing it out.
The good news is, that as the empires of greed continue their power grab, it is also hastening its own decline. More and more people like me, and perhaps you, are waking up to the injustices and perils of living in a world that justifies itself by pointing out the benefits of trickle down prosperity. Trickle down prosperity is always wonderful for those near the top of its pyramid, but as one travels further down that pyramid, the odour of desperation begins to permeate with the stench of exponential misery and sadness. The continuation of this paradigm is not in the best interest of our species, our planet, or our souls!

Humanity has had a bad habit of cutting the head off dysfunctional political hierarchies, and

supplanting them with new ones, thus creating Frankensteinian political structures. It is my

fear that the continuation of this foolishness will eventually lead to a repeat of the bloodlust

imposed during the French, and Russian, revolutions. Doing this will solve nothing, and accelerate humanity's decline into a new dark age. The only way out, I believe, is to declare the times we have been living in as a kind of spiritual "dark age" and forge ahead by transforming ourselves, and with this, human culture, into one that is compassionate, free from hierarchy, and self sustaining, effectively whole-archic in nature …a concept so radical, that it is not even recognized yet as a word. In order to affect the change necessary, human decision is required!

-Chris Taylor, house painter, December 2nd 2010