What Will It Take?

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Inertia is a bitch. Ignorance, both willful and enforced, is pervasive. Repetition is boring.

But George Bush DID authorize torture. He has admitted to illegally spying on American citizens. He did invade a sovereign nation with no provocation. People will continue to suffer and die there, for no good reason He is still denying the powers of Congress to subpoena, and thus prosecute, anyone in his administration.

And Congress is still scared shitless to do anything about it.

Inertia is a bitch.

People wander through their lives, hurrying from task to task and wondering why things are so screwed up. They drive home alone in their big car at night to their McMansion in the middle of some faceless cookie cutter suburban development and sit in front of their big screen TeeVee and absorb the images and messages that Madison Avenue has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in psychological research to carefully craft to both keep them content and keep them wanting more! at the same time.

As the planet they have allowed themselves to be disconnected from in favor of this prepackaged consumer ‘heaven,’ steadily warms beneath their feet.

They bitch and whine about how bad things are, how unjust and unfair it all is… to them, even as they absorb the small daily humiliations and depersonalizations of The System that allow and perpetuate the system itself. And that through their capitulation and acceptance, climb the ladder up through the structure of the system that lead to the enabling of the greater macrocosmic humiliations and depersonalizations that they bemoan as they watch the spoonfed spin that masquerades as reality on TheEveningNews. And then eat the pablum and swallow the placebo of watching other people actually do things on their magic tube. Things that they might do if they weren’t busy being such essential cogs in the great machine….things that aren’t real either, but that look like more fun than the unreal things that they do.

All the while ignoring the central, essential lesson that the machine has taken infinite care NOT to teach them.

That the world is exactly what they choose to make it.

That there are other ways to live.

Other means and forms and realities that they could partake in, if they would stop choosing what is sold to them as safety, stop choosing to believe that safety actually exists, …outside of the magic box in their living room, that defines for them what safety is and how to achieve it, how long to set the microwave for to produce a warm and tasty dinner of safety that they have purchased, at such a high cost.

And who can condemn them/us? Not I.

From the time we can think, we are told what is Truth, and how to behave and what to do. Schools, churches, governments…and parents, who were taught by their parents, who were taught by their… We are told of the consequences of not doing what we are told and those consequences are reinforced and reinforced and reinforced until we don’t even consciously think about them anymore. We know they cause pain, and we are told that pain is a bad thing and we are told that we should fear pain, and we are told not to think about things we fear, lest we create them….so we do what we have been told to do. And part of what we are told to do is to not think about why we do what we are told to do….

All we know is what we are told, unless we go looking…and we are told looking is a bad thing.

But some of us do look.

And when we do, we find a world that could so easily be different.

But we also find a machine, a system, that has been in place for far longer than any individuals lifespan, that has learned and grown and has VERY powerful tools and that is, it must be said, VERY good at what it does.

It is this machine…and its inertia…that allows and even produces George Bush’s. If we wish to change the world…we have to change the system, the machine. We have to wake up and educate enough of our fellow humans to do that, or hope that they wake up on their own.

We have to keep pushing and yelling and ….repeating ourselves, until we start to break the loops and overcome the inertia and perhaps even shock people into waking up. That is what we can do. That, plus giving those who do wake up a community to support them, is what we are trying to do here. And what others are trying to do around the world. What we are doing is small, but vital. It doesn’t take much, relatively speaking, to change the machine, to alter its course. All it takes is all of us, here and around the world, to keep yelling, and to embrace those who do wake up and to help them to yell too.

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  1. Photobucket

    and an old favorite too!

    • Edger on March 3, 2008 at 20:41

    And it sucks the big weenie too… when you don’t have the f’ing votes.

    Right, Nancy?

  2. … edger and NL have been speaking about.

    We don’t need a big tsunami, even though it seems we do, the inertia seems so impossible, that we couldn’t possibly change course.

    But it’s not so … the changes are already there, folks are indeed waking up.

    And the ripples are going to travel far …

    Counter-intertia!

    • brobin on March 3, 2008 at 20:55

    in order to make it begin to move once again.  

    What is the leverage we have and how do we put it into place to begin moving the world back into place?  That is the question we have to ask and hope we can, together, find the answer.

    • ANKOSS on March 3, 2008 at 21:06

    Everything is cool. Yes, we can continue to believe we are special. Yes, we can print money to get out of debt. Yes, we can wash the Iraqi bood off our hands. Yes, we can pay the insurance companies to give us affordable health care. Yes, we can increase the defense budget. Yes, we can run a crooked investment casino. Yes, we can keep sucking the oil out of the Mideast.

    Yes, we can keep dreaming. Yes, we can.

  3. But I really like your rooster!

    Alright, I have just set myself up for something…..

  4. if we shop hard enough, everything will work itself out…

    everyone has their own personal ‘tipping point’…and right now most of them have too much to lose to take any risks…

    complicated by the fact that they have to WANT to see the truth before they can ever begin to see the truth…if they knew the truth, they wouldnt feel so secure in what they think they stand to lose…cause its probably ‘lost’ either way.  or devalued, for sure.  arent you glad you didnt buy a million-dollar home?  yeah, me too…

    but ill stick to your ‘matrix’ theme….”there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path”….”fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony”…morpheus?  he just gets it, y’know..

  5. I just finished getting my hair cut and streaked, going to the post office, dry cleaners, and grocery store. Tomorrow: pap smear, mammogram, car repair. The shitty part about working 12 hour shifts is on your days off your spend all your time doing depressing consumerist chores.

  6. like the Matrix vid says… anything is possible. that always sounds soooooo good until you realize it means ANYTHING… like bad shit too.

    i think sometimes we think change is in itself what we need. yet, we have no real idea about where we are going. we aren’t far enough from “normal” in most places in the USA to really grasp it i think. unless maybe you’ve come back from an extended tour in the Middle East. or live in gang-ridden cities or other war-torn places. then maybe you get an idea. of what the fuck. the world could look like when you stand up to those in power now. because isn’t that really what’s going on in Iraq? Saddam didn’t want to play with BushCo and OPEC. Terrorists type cast as extras. Funny thing is maybe the real insurgents are getting away from the big studios.

    i’ve been offline, on a vacation. and i can’t help it. it strikes me ODD. a vacation. when the world is supposedly falling apart. what the fuck am i doing living like it’s the latter part of the 20th century????

    when we disassemble the machine, do we know what we want? do we really understand what is in front of us? once we rip off the veneer. once we expose it… are we ready for the way things will change?

  7. is pass along Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff. Its 20 minutes long and covers the extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal of stuff. Here’s the section on consumption:

  8. the machine it’s self has lost meaning as the shit hits the fan pragmatically. The McMansions lose monetary value and are now coming up as what they are slums of the future. The machine itself is proving untenable to even the greediest, the rest are left holding a empty bag of dreams.

    The cars I see the big jacked up monsters, are they the future? I think not. The cries for Shock and Awe are these what the future hold or the delusional cries of those who would take us back to chest thumbing monkeys, no offense to monkeys.

    Here we stand why dwell in the land of nightmares. Why not let go of these false dreams? So scary if you have bought into them. Forget them! Your children have for the most part. The universe does not care about your version of acquisition. So sad to watch my children fall for the folly of greed and the believe that this is the dream which we all share. It’s not.            

    • sharon on March 3, 2008 at 23:53

    one of his clients just declared bankruptcy and owes him about $30k.  even though he made about $200k more last year than the previous year, has sent him into orbit.  his drama?  trying to decide whether to go to italy for a week.  he told me he was going to throw himself on the mercy of the client to see what he is going to do, or should i say what the client’s rich boyfriend will do.  (he hasn’t been listed as one of the creditors because the client has told him he intends to pay him.)  i couldn’t help but respond by mocking the client saying to his boyfriend, “oh, no poor D can’t go to italy, we must do something.”  really, get a grip.  people are losing their homes and he is concerned that he is going to have to go on a month-to-month basis which might not include a trip to italy.  oy gevalt.

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