I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers.
–Ymber Delecto
What a sorry lot we humans are, particularly those of us immersed in the “American Way of Life.” Killing is indeed our business. And business has never been better.
According to the World Resources Institute, 4 species go extinct every hour “due to tropical deforestation alone.”
More than half the tropical rainforests are gone and at the rate we’re going, we will have reduced chopped, hacked, sawed, dozed, and burned our way to the virtual eradication of the “lungs of the planet” by the year 2030.
Kids, get ready to start suffocating because we’re NOT giving up our meat habit! Patrick Henry was prepared to die for liberty, but we have a nobler agenda: Give us more grazing land or give us death!
Reflecting the spiritually perverse beings we are here in America (don’t be fooled by our carefully polished veneer of civility and humanity—we’re the most savage murderers of all) is the fact that we are considering replacing our “commander-in-chief,” (the most heinous war criminal since Hitler) with a senile war-mongering septuagenarian and his recently anointed reactionary sidekick who never met a non-human animal she wouldn’t slaughter or an ecosystem she wouldn’t decimate in the name of “hunting,” “free enterprise,” or “resource acquisition.”
Or we may occupy the impending vacancy in the White House with a pseudo-progressive who has sworn his allegiance to the genocidal “state” of Israel and to corporate America whilst surrounding himself with a depraved and ruthless entourage, most of whom sold their souls to Wall Street and the military industrial complex years ago.
McCain at the helm? Obama on the throne? Who cares? Either way we party on here in America, oblivious to the devastation and suffering our obscene existence is causing. Our factory farms will continue torturing and slaughtering billions of animals each year to satiate our meat addiction, McDonald’s will keep our arteries clogged and our ascent to obesity intact, Big Pharma will inundate us with soothing and sedating “happy pills” to ensure our guilt-free participation in the murder of the planet, Big Oil will gleefully continue meeting our gluttonous demand for its “black gold,” and the corporate media will keep our wretched and vile hologram intact by constantly re-enforcing rabid nationalism, ahistorical thinking, consumerism, narcissism, alienation, rugged individualism, “free” markets, the virtues of wealth, and the “superiority” of the American Way.
While numerous complex entities and dynamics enable the power elite to maintain their strangle-hold on wealth and power, military might remains their principal means of dominating, extorting, exploiting, stealing, and annihilating with impunity. While we outspend the rest of the world (that’s all other countries combined, mind you) maintaining and expanding the war machine we revere with religious fervor, it is not money alone that gives our lords and masters the capacity to keep the world safe for capitalism and corporate plunder.
Our dirty little secret here in the US is that we built and buttressed our crumbling empire by unleashing a force so potent and so capable of rendering life on Earth extinct that it makes capitalism’s “slow motion” ecocide look like candy-striping. In 1945 we became the first and only country to harness the power of nuclear fission and utilize it as a weapon of mass destruction. Our cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians cemented our position as global hegemon.
When the uber-capitalist ruling elite of the US saw a socioeconomic system that was a potential threat to their supremacy, they successfully convinced most of their wage slaves that they were well off under a system of the rich, by the rich and for the rich and that the “communist threat” in Russia must be extinguished. What was their solution? They forced the Russians (who were moving with amazing rapidity to industrialize an agrarian economy which was dwarfed by that of the US) into a pissing contest over who could manufacture the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Their strategy was of course successful. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed. Country-clubbing white men with snow on the roof-top and fog on the brain maintained their “right” to clench their billion dollar net worth statements in one decrepit claw and the deeds and titles of their myriad precious possessions in the other. And the rest of us could breathe easy knowing that the “American Way of Life” was no longer in jeopardy. But at what cost to the Earth and the rest of its inhabitants?
Nuclear non-proliferation is a joke. Treaties, vows, resolutions, good intentions, and promises involving crossing hearts, hoping to die and sticking needles into eyes have resulted in even more nukes brandished by more nations. Meanwhile, we US Americans continue dictating who gets “nuclear privileges” AND we still possess more WMD’s than any other nation. When is another country going to invade us, depose the evil junta in DC, and hold a public lynching like our puppets did in Iraq?
Thankfully sanity (or perhaps just sheer luck) has prevailed and we have been the only nation brutal and stupid enough to employ nuclear weapons. And we have put our nuclear knowledge to constructive use by harnessing the power of the atom to create electricity. Yet when Prometheus brought us the “fire of the Twentieth Century” and told us we could use it for peaceful purposes, he failed to warn us that if this “fire” gets out of control we’re all cooked.
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