Whether our 2016 American elections or global commitment to saving the very nature that sustains us, our strength is in numbers, for only strength of character is a solo. Unity of purpose is our best hope for a future we can believe in, for nevermore will tomorrow be a distant horizon.
Life is either evolution or stagnation; a seat at the Banquet or placemat with Factory Farms assembly line pawns slaughtering herds of steroidal hormone cancerous Red or Pink Slime.
Our greatest advisories remain individual incivility, gender & racial inequality, climate & sexual injustice and our history of a penchant for, overwhelming application of a self-serving Military Industrial Complex.
Is it not now necessary to, as author John D. Rachel suggests, require signed contracts from all political candidates, or are we resigned to the breach of the Trickle-Down Peace Dividend promised with the demise of the Soviet Union? Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin down. Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and our Olympic Ice Hockey team performing a drug free miracle, up!
Yet witnessing the Soviet Union divide and conquer itself, we failed to learn the lesson. So Corporate America, yearning to keep the free, goggled for whose war munitions to out produce with our weapons of mass destruction.
Our grandparents were schooled to think such wars at home and abroad were essential acts of patriotic Capitalism Defeating Communism -- then, as in 1945, there you go again, world peace. President Reagan, in the name of, We the People, proclaimed a Peace Dividend for all American citizens, because we'd be saving so many tax dollars by -- living in peace.
Wall Street shuddered but, shaking off the Cold War ashes from its new world order manual, it beamed at the prospect of civilization without civility, food without nutrition, and polluted water without the freedom to drink it, for free.
Middle Class employment replaced by Wall Street bonuses transformed the working class into angry government denouncing mobs, blaming everyone, save the new Koch stained Red Coats of the Republican Party.
Over time, life replaces old careers with new opportunities: cave art with museums, Riverboats with Vegas, coal with oil, oil with gas, typewriters with smart phones, gasoline with battery operated cars -- elevator operators, disappeared -- but trading in Exceptionalism for Imperialism and lying to ourselves about it!?!
Life erupts from liquid assets and mutually beneficial alliances. But when blind-sided by too many selfies, we fail to recognize the importance of nature to our survival -- whether the cooperative work ethic of ants, the comradery and community service of bees, humming birds sharing the essence of life's nectar, family ties that bind all mammals together: water is the asset of life and Nestle wants to own it.
Sadly, some mark their freedom by defecating on the right for others to have a room to squat or not, to urinate, but that doesn't make America strong , any more than kneeling at a Pinocchio altar believing food stamp slashing Speaker has any more soul than Donald Duck.
If we are to be the masters of our fate, our only hope is to vote, from Estcourt Station to San Diego: Justice for All.
Whether blue collar or Blue State; business suits or kinky boots, if we choose whining in our beer or wailing for the non-establishment pied piper d' jour, know this, the Captains Courageous inside us, deserts those who choose to follow the soulless.
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