Posts Tagged ‘perspective’

There have been 2,929 terrorism-related deaths around the world since the attacks on New York and Washington. (Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5889435/). There are also 45,000 American deaths each year associated with the lack of insurance (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/09/18/deaths.health.insurance). Why do we spend BILLIONS in a war that kills so few? How does a fiscally suffering country find the money to fund such a war?

I have had this post for some time and never posted it but after seeing this article on Fast Company, I felt compelled to put it up.

It is February 2010 and we are still at war against “Terrorism”. Not a country, an evil dictator or alien invasion… terrorism. We are at war against terrorism because there is a very small group of people that scare us with their means of destruction but honestly, they are not very good at killing people. These small groups have been called terrorist because that is the tactic that they employ. Terror. A war against a tactic can never be won. When at war, there will always be the tactic of terror with which to cope. That is why a tactic, rather than a country, has been selected to fight. We will fight terror forever!

A war against anything intangible (like a tactic) will never be won and is not supposed to be won. That is why there has not been a war against anything but “situations and symptoms” in our country’s most recent history (i.e., war on drugs, war on obesity, war or illiteracy). A war against a person, a country or entity of some kind may be fought and even won. Such a war can be won by the removal of the person(s) in power, by killing them, assimilation of culture or other means that removes the ENTITY from being the cause of some threat. Terrorism has been deemed the enemy of our time because the people that profit from war understand that there is no other entity with which to go to war on earth. America will be at war against the tactic of terror until the last day there is an America.

If we are going to be terrorized by anything, be terrorized that while we fight a war against a tactic, we are held in its very grip. The American dollar is weak amongst sovereign nations and yet we find BILLIONS to fight against a small band of renegades in countries without running water and paved roads. American privacy and civil liberties are being eroded away to nearly nothing for the sake of banishing low-tech fanatics in places of the world our school children can not find on a globe. We have become the victims of the mere threat of terror and not entirely of terror itself.

If terror as a tactic is worthy of fighting because of the harm it can cause, there are far more scary things to think about when considering death and harm. Consider that most people die in America by way of our diet that our Government subsidizes and legalizes. Consider that more people die by heart disease, cancers and any number of illnesses than tactics of small extremist groups. Allergies, autism, cellular mutations and various forms of rampant disease are affecting more lives every day than terror ever will. Consider that symptoms are fought in America and never the cause. Consider that more people die in America as a result of insufficient health care than any number of terrorist attacks in the history of the world. Problems are always profitable for those that can perpetuate them. Consider for a moment that this perpetuation of the war on terror is done for the sake of profit and economic control by the richest people in the world.

If anything should scare the living daylights out of you it should be the greed that drives leaders to use fear against free people as a means to divert attention and accountability from positions of power and authority. If we are truly at war, why are laws enacted against the people of America? Should not our way of life and liberty remain intact while under attack from these “terrorist”? I am sorry to tell you this, but they are not. If America is worth protecting, why dismantle our way of life one new law and amendment at a time? Why are more laws and bigger Government needed to fight a small number of extremist in desolate places of the globe? If there really is a war, where is the tally of lives that represent even a fraction of a single-digit-percent of the lives taken by disease, abortion, accidents and the misuse of resources and technology for the sake of human beings? Take a moment and Google death statistics and you will be amazed how small of a problem terrorism is as a cause of death amongst human beings.

Killing people to stop people from killing is so primitive and backwards, words escape me in conveying my frustration. And isn’t that why we fight terror, because they might hurt someone? Wars are tools for profit and building governments, not taking care of the actual causes of human suffering. There is no terrorism beyond the fear we have that someone is going to hurt us or our family. The good news is, terrorism is the least of our worries. You will most likely die of heart disease or cancer.

It really is easy to see the worst in people. It doesn’t take any talent or discipline. Just look and the darkest part of humanity is played out plainly in front of our earthly senses. From the tone of our voices, to the clothes we wear or even the smell of our skin, we draw mental conclusions about one another. One has only to be aware of their own self to see others at surface value. And like thinking that ice bergs float upon the water, we only get a small part of the entire individual. Every single “sensing” of another person casts an unfair judgment upon them and in sliding scales of personal and silent criticism. Mostly we see each other through the lens of our own set of preferences, no matter how smart or spiritual we become. We do this through our senses and we relate with our surroundings through the mirror of memory. For instance, my sister thinks I am a saint and my Mom thinks I’m still a kid. One friend thinks I’m a wild rocker while another thinks I’m some computer guru. Some people know that Brooks and Dunn is my favorite group but others would say KISS or Motley Crue. Some clients called me genius, others called me useless. True? Or just partially true?

The fact is that life, (consciousness) does not just happen. The stuff that makes up the cosmos and the billions of stars of the universe does not just become aware of itself without some real God-like love occurring somewhere beyond our ability to sense things. And in this way everyone is truly sacred! Every time a judgment about another person arises in my mind (good or bad), I have to remind myself that I am just like them, we come from the same stuff. Hell, I might even be them if any of the Copenhagen Interpretation holds a drop of accuracy as to what is going on in the unseen world of physics. Everyone is scared. Every single person, no matter where they came from, what they did or what they have achieved, is sacred and valuable to someone (or something) who loves them enough to make them aware of creation.

Every human is a potential miracle for amazing goodness in this world and is a living, breathing monument of the miracle of life. Every human is a earthly product of our environment, social conditioning and merely an image trapped in time (Dio, anyone?). We are the fleshy puppets of fear in some corner of the human genome trying to come to grips with the cycle of life and death. Call it the “Golden Rule”, “Karma”, “What Goes Around, Comes Around” or “Reaping What You Sow”, it appears that the earth and all of us on it, are subject to perception. Let us deem everyone sacred and look for the very best in one another.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” – Martin Muther King, Jr.

If cash in the pocket or our people is any indication of prosperity, our country is in a pretty sorry state. While good, common people burn through savings, lose investments and face foreclosure, our Government continues to focus the extent of its attention on Wall Street. While bankers fund our ruin by way of the Federal Reserve to the tune of Billions of dollars in profit, social security and medicare wither away like dusty promissory notes in an empty vault. Young people are coming out of higher education with no place “higher” to go unless it is with the Government or its contractors. If fact, if it is not government funded and run , its a risky endeavor. Government just can not get Americans to act right towards the corporations that they keep helping so Government gets bigger and the dollar gets weaker. Wall Street has become the measure of the economy.

America was NEVER Wall Street. It used to be Main Street, filled with people that had belief. The belief that they could do anything, have anything and accomplish anything. America was once a place run not by entertainers and personalities, but a place of workers and problem solvers of necessity. Many great men stood in the way of greed and the human tendency to be fat and happy over our history. Mostly dead and their words forgotten, like Kennedy and King. Gradually, our leaders forgot that it was America’s people that was her greatest asset, not Cadillacs. They forgot that families made a country great, not financing. The American people were exploited to buy things and we did. We went from human beings in the minds of our leaders with a Bill of Rights to being merely consumers represented on a projection grid somewhere on Madison Avenue. When we could no longer buy another thing or pay the interest that climbed higher than the original loan, our Government’s allegiance crept from serving the people to serving the products.

There used to be Mom and Pop dreams standing on Main Street but not anymore. There isn’t even a Main Street anymore. There is a Wal-mart or two in every town. There used to be family run drugstores and service stations. Gone. There are Walgreens on every corner because we are all on drugs we can’t afford. There are energy company run conglomerates where we can get gas but no service. Look around or better yet, look back twenty years. You do not even see flags on houses anymore unless things blow up somewhere. No flags but wi-fi in every house and 500 HD channels. Today, we can not find a human answering a phone to assist with any of the things for which we have to pay. Why should they talk to people that have to pay? If you are going to make a purchase though, talking to someone and being treated well is almost guaranteed. Kindness is easy to find when we are paying, harder to find when we can not. For most of America an e-mail address is only a means to sell something to a faceless consumer.

But we did this. We let this become the norm. We had to go faster, be more efficient, mulit-task and automate so we could get more (fill in the blank). The American dream used to be something we did together but it became a contest of how high we could climb stepping on heads and breaking each others back. We played the game and the corporate sponsors cashed in on the show. All this is SO ironic considering communism, so long fought as an evil force on the earth, wins a long and silent war without firing a single shot. Hong Kong is boom town and Main Street is a freaking ghost town. I wonder if the dead veterans would like the idea of dying for our “chicken fried” and consumer slavery.

I always knew I would live to see the end of America. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, America often seemed like the fat, spoiled kid down the street. He was big enough to kick your ass and would if you crossed him but mostly he was content filling his face and looking at his Dad’s Playboys. The rules were easy on the block and at the bus stop, don’t mess with “his”. And if “his” was “yours”, so be it. If you were his “friend”, life was good even if he was a bully. Not only was he a bit of a thug, he was scared. Scared of everything. You could see it on his face. He was afraid people were not doing right, living right or agreeing with him. He would fight you just for thinking wrong. If history is any teacher at all, I knew that kind of control could not last for long. One day someone would beat his ass or he would be too stupid to change and just fade away. America, at least in my lifetime has been like that guy, fighting wars in he smallest, poorest places on the globe and scare to death. Fear like that has produced little over the past twenty years but eating disorders, new illnesses, lots of prescriptions and addictions to everything.

Somehow America never got big enough to exist without fear. This is the story of the end of our country. We are watching it happening right now nearly powerless in our fear that we may not be able to afford a latte one day. Perhaps we will live to see society evolve yet again. Maybe the cup of human want will be filled to the extent that humans will want for something else. Like the use of all that humanity has to offer, to serve all of humanity. A single brotherhood, without fear.

The worst thing about rising to greatness in any area is that all of your flaws have to be remain hidden in order to get there. Why? Because people can not accept that you just might be human and thus, imperfect. If you are great at ONE thing… you must be perfect at ALL things. I believe Tiger Woods is the victim of character assassination and just like Michael Jackson, you helped bring him down. You set Tiger up because you took your eyes (focus) off the ball and put them on his balls.

Here are some questions to ask when considering my above allegation.

1. Why does it bother so many people what Tiger Woods is/was doing off the golf course?
2. What does his private life have to do with how well he plays golf (a talent for which he is a star)?
3. Can you enjoy watching any other golfer play NOT knowing who he/she is poking?
4. Did he really “fall”? Do you think he might have been “not-so-honest” leading up to his greatness?
5. Is your sex life any of my business?
6. Why is sex the number one killer of character in the collective conscious of the public?

If you think someone is perfect because they hold office, play football, play the guitar or preach, you really need to get over yourself.  Most likely, all great people are as jacked up as you may be in some area of life. Oh, but you’re perfect. That’s right.  “Let he who is without sin…” is something we say in church or when we ourselves are “not so clean”.

I admire people like Michael Jackson, Tracy Lords, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee, Britney Spears, Bill Clinton and Michael Vick for being imperfect and rising to greatness in some area of life. It takes a lot of commitment to be great in spite of ourselves. History will remember Tiger Woods for the great things that he did on the golf course with those little white balls. Oddly, that is the only reason people even cared about him in the first place.

Remember, famous people are smart. Lady GaGa, Marilyn Manson, Gene Simmons, Alice Cooper and the Kardashians all use our self righteousness to their benefit. Without them most of us would have nothing to talk about. That is the real commodity for which we are all paying for in giving credibility without grace to a member of our human family.