by Carol Warner Christen
(Swans - September 22, 2008) On May 3, 2003, a letter I wrote to our main newspaper in Oregon, The Oregonian, was published. This is what it said:
President Clinton was impeached for lying to a grand jury and for sex. Why don't we impeach President Bush for lying to the entire country about the reasons for war in Iraq? Lying to the people and murder by war seem worse to me than sex.
Why don't we impeach the entire bunch in Washington, D.C., that gave over to a private group the plans for war (The Project for the New American Century) and have begun waging it for them?
And, why not recall most of our Congress for ignoring the needs of the citizens and replacing those needs with the needs of corporations, especially the weapons manufacturers?
I want our infrastructure rebuilt with our taxes. After we fix our country again, we can donate funds to help others.
Since that letter, the disintegration of our nation has been profound, inasmuch as we have lost our rights, spent over a trillion dollars bombing people in the Mid-East to smithereens, ostensibly for oil, and are building or have built more than 800 military bases. The facts show this is part of a plan to own the world for its resources while decimating populations in countries that hold those resources; that is, humans of the wrong religious persuasion, the wrong color, the wrong ideas about government, and the audacity to differ with our, actually, unelected "leaders."
For some reason, the slow removal of resources from We, the People here is barely noticeable, just as the heat was not noticeable to the fish being slowly boiled in the old story. A few laws unknown to us, many Executive Orders written in secret there in Washington, clandestine groups of corporations and lobbyists proposing behind our backs this or that as one way or another to get the last few drops of our lifeblood.
Without our consent or consultation, the current corporate state of our public life has moved all work overseas to the detriment of our livelihoods, and most of all, to our pocketbooks. Our states suffer, our infrastructure decays (roads, bridges, buildings, etc.), and we sicken, die, and suffer because the absurd medical insurance system for a supposedly civilized country, makes money without curing us of anything.
Our children are immunized to the point of overload and doctors never want to see us for more than fifteen minutes. We read about the benefits others have in some foreign countries. We don't have that here anymore. Something happened about thirty or forty years ago, although we aren't exactly sure what, to change the United States into a fiefdom for some, hell for the rest of us.
Since I wrote that letter five years ago, things are much worse. Impeachment has been presented to Congress. No one seems to care and the bill goes nowhere. The coming elections will solve it all, everyone seems to think. Yet both of the men hoping to be president are part of the problem, regardless of their personal campaigns. Both favor war. Wars kill human beings. One favors war in Iraq for "a hundred years" and the other favors war in Afghanistan. Neither of them will admit that the corporations backing them want the resources and the platform of the Middle East as a permanent U.S. base, maybe even another "state."
Three of the contenders for the offices of president and vice president are senators, the fourth is the governor of Alaska. The senators all voted for war in the Congress. The governor agrees with them in spite of her religion. All intend to continue such specious wars. War is always death for us and for others. Why? "What you do to the least of these, you do to Me," is a famous quote from one whom many think of as the Son of God, worshipping him once a week in their churches. We have killed innumerable children. It doesn't seem to matter, though, about death when the child is "foreign." Thus, the excessively religious contradict themselves. Which is it? Then we have the unexamined concept: For every action, there is an opposite but equal reaction. Is anyone paying attention?
Life is not a school, not a time of testing, nor is it an ordeal unless we make it so. Life, if we look around us at the unsophisticated animal and plant life, is to be lived to the fullest. Only humans slave for others (and some insects, but I'm not going into that now).
Fear, knowledge, power, and old age are the four enemies of man, (1) plus the coin of "good" and "bad." These are all systems. Now, a metasystem is a system which encompasses a system entirely and then some. The metasystem for the "enemies" and for good/bad is called "love." When we rise above daily problems and discord, we love and think in larger, universal terms. We live and let live. We cherish our lives and the lives of others. No one starves or goes without. Unfortunately, there are groups that wish just the opposite so that they can own everything because there are too many of the rest of us. I have written about them before, as have others.
Interestingly enough, Peter Chamberlin wrote in "The Revolution of the Meek," an excellent article:
Americans must reconcile themselves to the horrendous truth about what has been done to the world in our name. We must face the ugly truth that we have allowed our government to rampage through the world like some rabid beast, devouring the weak and wounding the strong. We have allowed our government to assume illegitimate powers to a level that rivals all predecessor progenitors of evil. (2)
We, the People, have been usurped as the bureaucracy has stolen our government from us with the collusion of the Congress, plus the scheming of the executive branch. Information is too easy to get today and too easy to debase for reasons not in the public interest. Just recently, the military held a practice over the city of Portland, Oregon, with black helicopters, unannounced, peering into private homes and offices, scaring the daylights out of residents. Does anyone know what the exercise is about? We do not station the military, as in United States Army, in our cities as a matter of course. Our Oregon National Guard is in Iraq for the umpteenth time, where all our state tax dollars lie irradiated and broken with the equipment we had (?) to send over there, too.
It is our duty as the People of the United States to establish justice, to insure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our children.
It has never been our duty to torture people and hold them prisoner for years without trial. It has never been in the interests of domestic tranquility to permit armed police or the army to stop the peaceable assembly of ourselves to point out injustices committed by "official" or elected persons. We all are innocent until proven guilty. Maybe the concept is too slow for our "rulers."
The common defense is not war to steal other people's resources nor is it to occupy other countries for our own specious reasons, such as corporate wealth by building weapons and equipment to do just that.
Promoting the general welfare is the opposite of promoting corporate or elite welfare using public monies and resources. It is also not general welfare to tax the poorer more and the rich less. It is not the general welfare to let infrastructure deteriorate without a care for the bridges that collapse or the people killed or injured by such neglect. It is not general welfare to send work and jobs overseas, causing hunger and poverty to grow among many communities.
With our ancient rights removed, we have nothing left but ourselves and our anger at this paradigm shift of power from all of us to a small number of self-appointed bettors. They bet they are better, know what's best, and will run the planet for profit rather than life. One writer put the ratio at 6000:300,000,000. Is that lopsided when freedom and civil rights and the future of our children are at stake? Or, are we happy to let the aristocratic legions come back from the Middle Ages to rule us with pomp and ceremony signifying nothing for us?
The Congress appears to worship power and money first, position second. We, the People, never seem to appear on their radar screens anymore. Perhaps I am naïve; but, after they gave away every ancient right of freedom for us and allowed a police state to begin growing, it seems to me that we are left in an untenable position vis-à-vis our lives and our futures. Agendas are being set by power, not by the People. Not only are we unsafe on our streets due to various gangs protecting themselves; we are attacked by the very people we hire to keep order: local police.
It may seem unfair to call the local police attackers, but they are and do. They have become enamored of military gear, strong-arm tactics of armies, instead of the men and women we hired to enforce the laws, local laws holding local trials and all open and above board. That is disappearing for us. If the victims live, there may or may not be a trial anymore. Local monies are disappearing.
This entire exercise diminishes the human being to a tool, a slave, someone to ride roughshod over if you have the power, the will, the minions, and the money. All this tells me is that our forefathers' principles are lost in the expedient clutter of today. The result will soon be chaos (entropy). Hopefully, the new civics, the Millennials, will rebuild to the best principles instead of the current shoddy impeachable ones.
John Adams would be appalled at our attitudes. I am. No one listens anymore unless it is corporate, creates huge wealth, and strips the planet of its final potential. Maybe when we can't breathe, we will understand. My poor, poor unborn great-grandchildren and yours.
Notes
1. Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming, 1993. (My grandson took all my Castaneda books; you can look up the set.) (back)
2. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20684.htm (back)
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