Wednesday, June 23, 2010

A Letter to America During the Summer of Shame: Imagining the 4th of July, 2010

Is everyone afraid?
You should be ashamed
Apocalyptic screams
Mean nothing to the dead.
Kiss your little son
To know all there is.
Come on, last call
You should want it all.
- Doomsday Clock, Smashing Pumpkins


One could compare America’s response to the greatest environmental disaster in history to the stages of grief. First there was rampant denial, and the denial continues with the deliberate withholding of facts and imagery. There’s bargaining too, but anger and despair are taking root across great swaths of America. This is a toxic emotional mix. The question on this 4th of July will be, what does America have left to celebrate? What does it stand for?

A new revolution must be at hand, a revolution of the mind, guided by a dream of an utterly new sort of independence. We are only as good as the future we imagine and set out to create. As it stands, mired in blame and business as usual, America is merely fulfilling the vilest visions of its fraudulent and amoral ruling class, which has apparently been salivating for apocalypse ever since Ronald Reagan assured a televangelist that “We may well be the generation that sees Armageddon.”

But America should stop and ask itself: Is it really your purpose to create Hell on Earth? Is that what American children deserve – to have their health and hopes for the future snuffed out on the altar of greed and self-loathing? America, did your forefathers strive and sacrifice so you could turn the Promised Land beneath your feet into a wasteland in the blink of an eye?

Trashing Nature, turning Creation into waste, has been profitable for America until now. But reckoning has literally come to its shores. With the yawning fountain of eternal filth now unleashed, as Nature’s fury unfolds, American minds must also tip over a precipice into new and revelatory territory. To create Hell on Earth is the worst atrocity. America must reveal and accept reality for what it is, not for what it’s wished to be. Truth must be told.

“Only a people whose minds are twisted beyond an ability to perceive truth could act in ways which will threaten future generations of humanity.”
- Declaration of the Iroquois


All of America, and the American paradigm that dominates the world and fuels civilization, is complicit in this atrocity. To blame just BP is myopic. When an addict overdoses, is only the dealer to blame? This is America’s bleed-out.

On the most basic level, we need truth-tellers, independent scientists and journalists, to document what is really happening in the Gulf and to its people. Once truth is flowing as freely as the oil and gas that it’s up against, sober plans based on reality, not wishful thinking, must be made by the people whose lives are actually hanging in the balance. But I wonder who can imagine, or hold in their mind all at once, the vast matrix of prosperity that is now dying and spiraling out of control?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats


Even if America’s stagecraft government seized the corporation and liquidated it (which would accelerate international financial collapse), this would yield next to nothing. All that money can only forestall suffering by a few weeks or months, but certainly not for decades. America’s reckoning, the first reckoning, will begin with the dawning horror that money cannot solve anything of this magnitude. No human invention, money included, can solve this problem, only a change of mind.

The refugees of the Gulf coast – imagine the families who shared the ocean with their children, who spread the ashes of their loved ones on its eternal surface, who spent their lives working on it – they are suffering without any means to survive and they will swamp the American economy. Nothing can compensate for the destruction of Nature. Money truly is the root of evil in this story. As the Deepwater Horizon installation manager allegedly screamed over the phone to his headquarters in Houston: “Are you fucking happy now? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire. I told you this was going to happen.” Before the rig sank, the fire burned so brightly that no eyes could look directly at it and the heat peeled the paint off the rescue boats. This is the true cost of the fuel that runs America.

But new waves of economic refugees are only a part of this awful picture. Consider the implications of port closures in the Mississippi River, plummeting state and federal revenue, crippled national trade, rising oil prices, and the ripple effects of these and all the other terrible consequences unraveling all at once. America’s federal system will be impotent to stop the hemorrhage of its own prosperity.

When things start to go sour, when the Obama administration is exposed as a group of mortals waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social and political instability.
- from The Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges


The second reckoning for America will happen when its mortality is revealed under the weight of these blows. The old America is collapsing. What will rise from the ashes – the fascism of a total corporate order? Or a renewal and rebirth, as all spiritual traditions counsel us? America, if you are really a Christian nation, you should read and read again your supposed teachings on love, mercy, compassion, humility and grace.

The third reckoning will take hold once the old America is understood as a corrupt and fraudulent stain that should not be saved, because it cannot be saved. Nature, God, gravity will not allow it.

America, you must wake up and remake yourselves. Learn what timeless priorities you have left to salvage, and discern what should be left in the past, as everyone must do in the transition to maturity.

If the tides are going to turn, the fourth reckoning must be one of gratitude. Gratitude for existence. Every adult, every town and city, should be grateful for its existence and do whatever is necessary to protect its life and encourage it to flourish again. Only then can the fifth reckoning be one of purpose. Americans must defy manufactured hatreds and stand together once more in the knowledge that prosperity comes from a healthy and democratic land. That alone is what makes healthy, happy people. Dismantling the old tools of destruction and rehabilitating Nature is your purpose. If you cannot do it for yourselves, do it for everyone’s children, and for every spark of life that strives to exist on Earth.

America, on this 4th of July all you have left to celebrate is the land beneath your feet and the waters that bring it to life. What you must stand for is a new vision to protect your endowment at all costs, from this day forward.

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