6. THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD CLAIMS IT CANNOT AFFORD UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL CITIZENS even though we are the only industrialized country not to do so. We are like 27th in infant mortality rate, many countries are ahead of us in average life span, and there are like 40 million people in the U.S. without health insurance at all. Strangely, those who scream the loudest about abortion, who claim to be the most legitimate Christians, who have the most affluence in our society, are the largest blocs of people who adamantly oppose universal health care. "Who is going to pay for all this?" they scream. Well, maybe it should be those with the most money, the most concerned about right to life, and those with the highest degree of Christian morality. You know, "Onward Christian soldiers"......Ooops, wrong hymn---that is for marching to war.
7. THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD CLAIMS IT CANNOT AFFORD TO SPEND THE SAME AMOUNT OF DOLLARS PER STUDENT TO EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN. I guess some kids just deserve bad schools, bad teachers, less books, etc. If they had chosen their parents with more care they wouldn't be in such dumps for schools. Meanwhile the reading and math scores for American students keep falling further behind the scores of dozens of other countries. Oh, what the hell difference does it make as long as the right kids inherit all the money. When is the last time any of us affluent ever even drove through the seedier portions of our community? Now let us all rise, open our hymnals and sing stoutly, "Onward Christian Soldiers........", wave a bible, family valuize ourselves, thank God for all our blessings, and vote for some sort of George Bushite.
Associated quotations:
"The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country." (John Adams)
"That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity ofr Knowledge, this I call tragedy." (Thomas Carlyle)
"On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated. 'As much,' said he, 'as the living are to the dead.' " (Diogenes Laertius)
"Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education." (Abraham Flexner) At least Bush is proving something.
"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness." (George Washington)
"The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people to ignorance." (Thomas Jefferson)
"Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in. That everyone may receive at least a moderate education...appears to be an object of vital importance." (Abraham Lincoln)
"Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men,----the balance wheel of the social machinery......It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich, it prevents being poor." (Horace Mann)
"I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not reach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming true man, master of this fate and captain of his soul. To attain this I would put priests to work, also, and turn the temples into schools." (Jawaharlal Nehru)
"But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easyk; that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly" (Plato)
"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" (Ronald Reagan)
8. THE USURPTION OF CONTROL OVER ALL 3 BRANCHES OF OUR GOVERNMENT BY CORPORATE LOBBYISTS AND SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS. If anyone wants to know who now controls all the branches of our government they just need examine what our government spends our money on (our priorities), the tax codes, the kinds of laws passed, the nature of court decisions, who our wealth is going to, the slipping status and protections of employees, world trade policies, etc. Democracy is such a vague word these days (or any other days) as to be almost meaningless. Democracy was the same word used when slavery existed, when women couldn't vote, when segregation existed etc. It is just the kind of word made for some dim witted President like George Bush to throw around as an excuse for his puppetiered behavior on behalf of his support base. The truth is that money now completely controls our elections with precious few exceptions, while the open primary system leaves the public completely under the control of money and sophisticated psychological ploys which prey upon prejudice and fear to manipulate a sufficient number of special interests groups to coalesce behind a single candidate who can win slightly more than 50% of the vote of the 50% of people who still bother to vote. George Bush rules America today with less than 25% of the votes of those of age to vote. As mentioned, democracy is a tricky word. When corporate monopolistic cabals like the oil, gas, and coal industries are given essentially free reign to exploit our environment and our pocketbooks en route to accumulating vast profits, just as monopolistic professional sport owners/player unions are given the same unmonitored freedom to exploit sport fans and taxpayers of the cities in which they play---when this kind of reality can be sold to the public as a healthy function of democracy, well----democracy is in need of emergency life support. Democracy, as I understand it, should not be a tool for the rich, the powerful, any religious group, any racial group, etc. in control of all three branches of government. As the Judicial branch falls, all protection against abuse by those who have seized the power is gone. Strangely, the current situation is not mob rule---not yet---since those in power get there with less than 25% of the votes of those eligible to vote. This is specifically special interest rule---a rule, which if allowed to continue, will lead to mob overthrow through domestic terrorism. Most empires in history have fallen due to foreign overreach of power and domestic accumulation of wealth in the hands of too few. Nervous? We should be.
Associated quotations:
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential cause of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars." (Will and Ariel Durant). Remind you of of any modern empire?
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." (Thomas Jefferson)
"I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute" (John Kennedy)
"The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting all working people of all nations and tongues, and kindreds." (Abraham Lincoln)
"We have no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy in politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as theocratic kings ruling in the name of god or aristocracy ruling by military power; and the forces represented by these twain, superseded by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power which took their place of pride. Religion and rank....are most often courtiers of Mammon and support him on his throne. ( George W. Russell)
" A liar lies to the nations.
A liar lies to the people.
A liar takes the blood of the people.
And drinks this blood with a laugh and a lie." (Carl Sandburg)
"It is not man's fault but the malice and imposture of priests and kings which have everywhere destroyed truth." ( Charles De Talleyrand-Perigord)
"It may, however, be foreseen even now, that when the Americans lose their republican institutions, they will speedily arrive at a despotic Government, without a long interval of limited monarchy." (Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel De Tocqueville)
"We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." (George Bernard Shaw)
9. THE INSIDIOUS MONOPOLIZATION OF MEDIA CONTROL BY A FEW CORPORATE MONGOLS WITH ACCESS TO MODERN PROFESSIONAL METHODS OF PUBLIC PROPAGANDIZING SO EFFECTIVE AS TO MAKE THE METHODS, NOT THE MESSAGES, THE MEANS TO LEAD THE PUBLIC. The monopolization is being offset, to a large degree, by the increase in popularity of the internet as the source of news by the public. Major newspapers, TV networks, etc. are all in decline. The problem is that the internet becomes the major means of social interaction for more and more people. People don't hang on the front porch or the neighborhood anymore, they hang on the internet. What this all really means is beyond my grasp. What the constant imbecilic babble on cell phones to a few family or close friends every place all the time over trifling mundane matters of existence does to the ability of people to ponder the bigger questions of life, community, and public policies is more clear to me. Modern communication and means of travel have certainly shrunk the world. Whether shrinking an overpopulated globe is a good thing seems dubious, at best. If there is such a thing as information overload we may have achieved it. While it all provides someone like me a zillion things to muse about, it also dulls my sense of exactly what to think or do about a maze of
seemingly unlimited tunnels of oncoming and outgoing trains of thoughts, actions, and events.
If ever the world was too much with us, it is now. If there is light at the end of any tunnel, it seems less hopeful considering how many tunnels in our view. We all begin to feel like the little Dutch boy trying to plug the leaks in the dam with his fingers. Perhaps, in defense, people select a handful of others and babble incessantly with them on cell phones about matters of such minor importance simply to fend off the realities of what is really out there, bearing down on all of us with vengeance of an angry Mother Nature. For many of us we live in the best of all possible worlds in the worst of all possible worlds for most others. A massive implosion seems inevitable and yet, from a mental health point, unthinkable. If ever there were a time when to see things unclearly is a blessing, this may be the time. Perhaps the most popular prayer these days, in one subtle form or another is: "Please God, stall all this till I am dead." To hell with the next generation.
Associated quotations:
"The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not on the doctrine taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious---it makes little or no difference....under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything." (Aldous Huxley)
"The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining...and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations." (Andrew Jackson)
"The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and mighty are selected and formed by means of power, their sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity which prevail in our society." (C. Wright Mills)
"The press of this country is now and always has been so thoroughly dominated by the wealthy few of the country that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people that correct information concerning political, economical, and social subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people shall have, in order that they shall vote and in all ways act in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and the chicanery of the ruling and employing class." (Edward Scripps)
10. VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE----From the frontier days onward America has always been a violent culture. Guns, lynchings, murder, assassination, war, riots----whatever the nature of conflict, Americans more often than not sought solutions via the barrel of a gun. Might makes right has been the prevailing American foreign policy for decades now. Bush has given violence a new wrinkle----preventive warfare. According to this policy, if we think someone might cause us trouble down the road it is ok to attack them now, sort of cut them off at the pass.
It is not at all clear how much the tax cuts to the rich trickle down in our society, but the penchant to solve conflict through violence certainly does. We may give the appropriate ceremonial lip service to historical moral leaders like Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, etc. but, for all practical purposes as it relates to our government policies---they are fools, idealistic wimps lacking the necessary patriotic fortitude or strength of character to really teach domestic and global dissidents a few lessons, or preferably bomb them off the face of the earth. I guess we call it tough love, albeit places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam must by now, after centuries of tough love by militarily powerful countries hell bent on realigning their politics, religion, or economic priorities----certainly by now they might be weary of so much 'tough love'. If there are any better examples of countries who have been repeatedly bombed back into the stone age, I can't think of any off hand. What is new, lets say in the last 50 years, is the entrance of the U.S. as a participant in this sort of venture. Once violence, as a national policy to solve conflict, becomes acceptable, it tends to become acceptable at all levels of our society. Whether it is our government using violence to solve conflict, some kid blasting other school kids, gang members killing each other, spouses assaulting or killing each other, torture of prisoners, police brutality, dog fighting for entertainment, sexual violence, violent music, violent movies, or whatever the scene of the violence-----it all proceeds from the top down. If we cannot denounce violence as the national policy means to stop conflict, there is no way to curb the violence at any other level in our society. Bush is on TV practically every day defending violence to achieve his objectives. And he has the support of the weapons manufacturers, professional soldiers, gun owners, the religious right, and I guess most of those eager to teach this or that group of people a lesson or two. When people are in the mood to teach others a lesson or two, Christ, King Jr, etc. are not attractive role models. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not compatible with any mood to kick the shit out of this or that group of people. That alternative approach is ok with the next door neighbor, at least as long as the neighbor has his religious and political priorities in order. Like Bush preaches----we can all get along if everyone learns to do things his way, or at least 'their way' if you want to include his clones.
I have seen some awful sights in my life, but Bush or Condalesa Rice on the TV insisting that others stop using violence to resolve their conflicts has to be the all time winner of awful sights. Others should stop the violence but Bush, by his own repeated insistence, is going to win conflicts by military slaughter no matter how many hundreds of thousands need to be killed, or how many millions need to be left homeless, or how many communities need be leveled into the Stone Age, or how many guilty or innocent need to be tortured, or how many billions of dollars need to be diverted or borrowed to fund massive wars on several fronts. I suspect this might be true: over the past 50 years no country in the world can match the United States in number of countries invaded---out right or via guerrilla armies financed by the United States-----or number of people rendered homeless by our military actions, or number of communities bombed into the stone age with our planes, or number of our own military dead via military ventures, or in money spent on guns, bombs, delivery systems or have as many military bases in foreign countries as the United States. Let's face it: 750 military bases in 130 countries is the all time world record. But as Bush amazingly insists, with the proper contorted look of moral turpitude, if "other countries would cease sending men and arms into sovereign countries, these military and terrorist activities would cease". Yet most Americans cannot understand why Bin Laden is more popular globally than George Bush. How far down the ladder of morality and ethics have we slipped as a country to earn such widespread disdain by others across the globe? Of course it doesn't mean other countries are so righteous, but we like to think we are. Maybe we once were, up until the end of World War II, but like other advanced civilizations, time takes it's toll, and the same factors which have toppled every past civilization are now present in our own advanced empire Time goes, it is often said. Wrong, time stays, we go.
Associated Quotations:
"Force---that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever erected for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts. You will find yourself hating and dreading all other men who differ from you; you will find yourself obliged by the law of conflict into which you have plunged, to use every means in your power to crush them before they are able to crush you; you will find yourself day by day growing more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more compelled by the fear of those opposed to you to commit harsh and violent action." (Auberon Herbert)
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children. This is not a way of life....Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging itself on a cross of iron." (Dwight Eisenhower)
"We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die." (Wystan Auden)
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love." (George Santayana)
"It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior." (George Santayana)
"When the rich wage war it is the poor who die." (John-Paul Sarte)
"I have known war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes." (Douglas MacArthur)
"There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the war of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority (political or religious), long standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge." (Roger Bacon)
"Think of the dull functioning of dogma, age after age. How many millions have been led shunted along dogmatic runways from the dark into the dark again.....endless billions, and at the gates, dogma, ignorance, vice, cruelty, seize them and clamp this or that band upon their brains." (Theodore Dreiser)
"Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on the Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics." (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." (Blaise Pascal)
To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals." (William Penn)
"It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies." ( Bertrand Russell)
"Birth control, family planning and population limitation are most important in any effort to bring real peace into the world." (Margaret Sanger)
"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God..... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire." (George Santayana)
Violence proceeds from fear and "Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth---more than death. Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive, and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid....thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. But if thought is to become the possession of the many, and the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back---fear that their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves prove less worthy to the respect then they have supposed themselves to be." (Bertrand Russell)
"The greatest power in the world today is the power to change........The most reckless irresponsible thing we could do in the future would be to go on exactly as we have in the past ten or twenty years. I can imagine no more dangerous policy than the conservatism that exists today." (Karl Dutsch)
"(Violence) has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel. When she moves it is in wrath; when she pauses it is amid ruin. Her prayers are curses, her god is a demon, her communion is death, her vengeance is eternity,, her decalogue written in the blood of her victims, and if she stops for moment in her infernal flight it is upon a kindred rock to whet her vulture fang for a more sanguinary desolation." (Daniel O'Connell)
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.....A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions......A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.---"Ah, so you are sure to be misunderstood."-----is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton and (Terrell Owens), and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall lean nothing".
(Thomas Huxley)
"Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it." (Howard Mumford Jones)
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie---deliberate, contrived and dishonest---but the myth---persistent, persuasive and realistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears." (John Kennedy)
"Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate". (John Kennedy)
"Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable." (John Kennedy)
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common." (John Locke)
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection, is a poverty stricken day, and a succession of such days is fatal to human life." (Lewis Mumford)
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (Issac Newton)
"A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory." (John Steinbeck)
"Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.....violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. (Rollo May)
"A devotion to humanity...is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously blood-thirsty." (James Baldwin)
"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him." (James Baldwin)
"I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to one, may appear to be error to the other." (Gandhi)
"Aggressiveness is taught, as are all forms of violence which human beings exhibit.....Aggression is the expression of frustrated expectation of love." (Ashley Montagu)
" Women's rights, men's rights, ---human rights---all are threatened by the ever-present spectre of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat." Rosika Schwimmer
