It is clear our society brutally ignores the essential needs of most of its citizens (hence, the appeal of “99%”), engendering widespread reciprocal disrespect.
This is what I think was on display last Saturday at the Keene Pumpkin Festival: Disrespect, giving rise to gratuitous violence; showing that people don’t necessarily mind dying as long as it’s for a good reason like the greater good of humankind (quickness and painlessness preferred, of course).
So then for people so fundamentally valorous to be used commercially, slowly ground down into a pale shell from some combination of purposeless boredom, stress, routine, financial burden and physical deterioration — is insulting to the potential magnificence that lies within each of us.
Even worse to be ground down into an insipid gel just so someone can have a bigger yacht who suffers from the toxic delusion that selfishness is awesome.
And yet another layer of insult is the implication that the reflected value of our lives is limited to a crass spectrum of materialism based on what we own, wear and do; this alongside the fact that the stuff most of us can afford is getting smaller, lousier and more toxic by the day.
Meanwhile each one of us feels deeply within something that really matters; as if the meaning of the universe itself were being determined by our quality of life; as if the glory of heaven must be just around the corner if we could just … get around that one last obstacle.
How infuriating, then, to vote for people promising to address the obstacles, and discover the measures taken only obstruct us more while we have such an inward majesty waiting to unfold.
The same majesty, incidentally, as that within the elites themselves, who keep such an unfair portion of our joint resources in their futile attempt to realize it. Little do they realize that human majesty cannot be fully realized under an engine of greed.
The bigger the yacht, the further away they drift — from their own truth and beauty.
So, that all sucks so bad it’s gotten time to try to change it. Ya think? But the kind of rebellion that happened on Saturday was not productive.
For one thing, that kind of aimless, impulsive, civilly destructive and numbly inebriated violence alienates and frightens the home population that is too old to want to party like that and makes them think they need more professional security.
And that just plays right into the hands of the predatory elites. As recently reported, humanity is cresting into yet another breakthrough wave of technology, driven by artificial intelligence.
A key example is the driverless car pioneered by Google. Goodbye limo, taxi and trucking jobs! And that’s just the employment related to one invention.
No doubt the fast food industry is drooling at the idea of more robots, since they’re under so much pressure for wage reform.
These jobs all sucked anyway, but the alternative to employment is just more people — and maybe you and me — put in prison by police and security called for because of riots like at Pumpkin Fest.
Homelessness, for all its poor lustre as an option, is increasingly illegal anyway — more and more indigents now go to jail.
The for-profit prison industry is very profitable already, and growing, and they are paying lobbyists and congressmen to criminalize any kind of behavior by the less fortunate or anyone else trying to do anything about the situation.
A judge was even convicted recently of taking bribes to send kids to juvenile detention who might have deserved and responded better to other programs.
For the elites, the more the better. Any pretext is a good one to dispense with the obligation to provide decent wages and infrastructure while continuing to take advantage of labor.
So how does this fit into a vision of an America where everyone gets a fair shake and most people are doing well?
You know — that vision of an America that’s so good it’s our duty to share it all around the world?
Anyone who thinks our elites aren’t ruthless enough to have plans like this hasn’t been paying attention.
In the last 50 years, the United States has destroyed Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Libya, killing at least 5 million between them, while bombing, invading or overthrowing over 25 countries altogether.
Propaganda says we’re a superpower with world obligations who just makes a few mistakes, but the real message is that only money and power matter, and if you don’t have it, you don’t matter.
In the ‘50s, the famous Stanley Milgram psychology experiments purportedly showed that experimental subjects were willing to commit great harm at the simple instruction of an authority figure.
These were the “banality of evil” experiments, which were originally thought to mean that pasty-faced office workers will press a button to annihilate nearly anyone just because they were told to do it.
But that doesn’t seem to fit what’s really going on in our lives, does it? Why have American people been willing to tolerate such long abuse to others abroad and ourselves here at home?
This is because there was another important reason people were willing to injure another innocent person in the experiments — they had a sense of mission in the name of science, that great while elephant of progress.
Due to Milgram’s experimental environment of labcoated technicians and industrial equipment, the subjects thought if they pressed the button to electrocute someone, the service to science was worth their own anxiety and the obvious (secretly dramatized) agony of the electrocution victim.
This is very revealing concerning the staggering violence and exploitation both by the elites and by We their Enablers, although in different ways. the veils have been coming off our eyes.
The brutal manipulations of the rich guys whose children never get handcuffed or shot have been revealed for what they are by the shining light of the Internet, alongside the heroic truth telling of historians, journalists and whistleblowers like Chomsky, Poitras, N. Klein, Snowden, and many others who remain obscure.
-Wat