We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, March 26, 2018

What happened to the West I was born in?!

Click here to access article by "The Saker", a Russian-American from his blog A bird's eye view of the Vineyard.

The author is aghast at the likely direction we are headed in--a nuclear war with Russia, and baffled by the indifference of the people living in the USA.  He argues that the situation is much worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember that--I was terrified!
The truth is that the situation today is infinitely worse than the Cuban missile crisis. First, during the Cuban missile crisis there were rational people on both side.  Today there is NOT ONE SINGLE RATIONAL PERSON LEFT IN A POSITION OF POWER IN THE USA.  Not ONE!  Second, during the Cuban missile crisis all the new was reporting on was the crisis, the entire planet felt like we were standing at the edge of the abyss.

Today nobody seems to be aware that we are about to go to war, possibly a thermonuclear war, where casualties will be counted in the hundreds of millions.
I'm not so terrified today because I have seen this coming for a long time. I have been fortunate to live a full life. I, and many other independent voices, have done everything we could to alert our fellow Americans to this danger and the longer term danger of catastrophic climate destabilization. But capitalist/fascist sociopaths rule the Empire, and it appears that no one or nothing will stop them. The people are like sheep going down the ramp into the nuclear-war slaughterhouse.