If we're going to live, it will be together.
Humanity has become so powerful that we can no longer practice
vicious and spiteful enmity based on slogans and dogma.
Pursuit of power, wealth and fame by casual verbal abuse and
back-stabbing criticism of one's opponents and obstacles to one's
material and political dominance has been a common practice.
Although a profound analysis of the critic might often reveal an
infantile obsession with irresponsible gratification in the cause of
political or material gain, adolescent debating points or neurotic control issues, personal quirks are only a side issue in the overall process of
enabling human and terrestrial life to endure.
Indeed, such playful, yet vicious, attacks on one's political, religious,
military or economic adversaries reveal personal weaknesses that
discredit almost any criticism one might assert. Yet the act of destructive
and dismissive calumnies against one's opposition may have effects
that hurt not only the target, but life, itself.
The time has passed when we can afford to misdirect policy for personal
gain. We are manufacturing new life forms that have the power to kill.
Corporations are patenting life forms and promoting seed stocks that
grow one crop and die in sterility while infecting other organisms with
the "Terminator" genes. Newly engineered crops are killing the honeybees
that pollinate all our food. Peoples' own DNA has been patented and its use denied them.
We are dumping unprecedented poisons into our water, hundreds of
thousands of tons of nuclear wastes into the oceans, where the fish are
already contaminated with heavy metals, and ninety per cent of major food stocks like cod and salmon are gone. We threaten great masses of people,
and all living creatures with nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change.
Fish are being harvested to the point of extinction and denied
their ancient breeding grounds, the water critical to their lives used to sustain golf courses and factory farms.
The oceans are being scraped bare of any foothold for life and their waters are turning too acidic to sustain plankton and coral, the lowest common denominator of our own sustenance. We are killing and maiming the largest animals on Earth with blasts of sound generated for military uses.
Our fortunes have been stolen by wars fought on credit and our commerce has usurped the rights of persons without any of the responsibilities.
Billions of us are illiterate and billions more go without medicine or food.
We have reached the illogical extreme of casual character assassination
or any other kind. We have become so powerful in our niche that only the
most serious approach can enable us to overcome the limitations and pitfalls
of our rituals of theft, pollution, corruption, traditional business practices, egoistic economic imperatives that poison our world and eliminate wildlife, and our murderous military adventures.
We can no longer afford the habit of irresponsible criticism. Thoughtful and far-sighted counsel has become critical not only to our own survival,
but to the existence of life on our planet. Words wasted on infantile resentment, grudges against people or trends, and attacks on people and ideas, once so fashionably germane, have no place in any serious discussion of our present or future.
Criticism of "Liberals" and "Conservatives" is left to the narcisissists and the sadists who place their own fleeting childish triumph above all else and the propagandists who, while counseling fear, imply that the prison factory we have built is a fine place to live.
"Frankly and unashamedly hoping Obama will fail," as Rush has said, is an embarrasing admission of his own infantile obsessions and self-destructive impulses. Respectable political opinion is now reserved for serious and conscientious people. Not only our economy, but industrial civilization is at stake-- along with life, itself.
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