Our world has taken a definite turn for worse in recent years. The climate is becoming a runaway train heading toward an uncomfortable, hot and sticky disaster. Our little blue planet is becoming not only more polluted but more crowded every day. Global population will soon exceed the carrying capacity of our world, if it hasn’t already. The greed and excesses of big business and the influence and power that massive financial resources make possible are threatening the very survival of the human race.
Americans live in a society dominated by information overload. The multimedia circus that is cable television and the mindless online social networks keep most people lulled into complacency; easily manipulated. Huge corporations not only control our government and media outlets, but almost every other aspect of our lives as well: where we work and live, what we eat and drink, the words we read, even thoughts we should think.
I am not opposed to all facets of capitalism nor do I favor pure socialism. Either system alone is fatally flawed and doomed to failure. We need a more sustainable economic model, a monetary system controlled by government instead of private banks, a social democracy with a conscience and insulated from the corrupting influences of big money and corporate oligopolies, a society that rewards work, talent, and skill without leaving the less able among us to survive on leftovers and crumbs from a master’s table.
In this space I hope to explore ideas that might help point us, humanity in the direction of a more equitable, compassionate, and sustainable civilization. My views are often radical, 180 degrees out of sync with most conventional thinking about what the Untied States of America is, was, and should become.
I love my country, but I love my children and this Earth even more. It sometimes seems as if every noble thing that I was ever taught about my country turns out either to have been untrue for a very long time or just a blatant a lie. The America of my youth, the one in the text books is a mythological place, and if it ever existed, it long ago ceased to even pretend that it is not.
Most people just accept the status quo; that it’s just the way things are, but I refuse. The way things are is not the way they ought to be nor is it the way things should stay.
Let us not go quietly.
