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Work 4 Peace,Hold All Life Sacred,Eliminate Violence! I am on my mobile version of the door-to-door, going town-to-town holding readings/gatherings/discussions of my book "But What Can I Do?" This is my often neglected blog mostly about my travels since 9/11 as I engage in dialogue and actions. It is steaming with my opinions, insights, analyses toward that end of holding all life sacred, dismantling the empire and eliminating violence while creating the society we want ALL to thrive in

Monday, March 19, 2012

When the oppressed becomes the tool of the oppressor

I think one of the scariest most depressing things I see is when people who have been oppressed swallow heartily, even defiantly the goals and values of the oppressor and strive for that life in their own lives, irregardless of the fact that they now become the tool of the oppressor.

For example, swallowing the ‘american dream’, working for the status symbols of the ‘middle class’, from personal – the hair, the clothes, the proper language – to the environment – the single family house or apartment, the neighborhood (with an eye to the next ritziest neighborhood), the stuff to load the place up with – to the career, the job, the weekly paycheck that doesn’t matter what little bit of harm that person is doing as part of her/his job, as long as no one sees the blood, hears the screams, recognizes the pain.

For there is only one way anyone in this country has gotten anything – that is by accepting the bountiful goodies and therefore condoning the depriving, enslaving, murder of others in order to secure those goodies.

Right now, for example, we accept the murder of Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalians, and Libyans. We know our country no longer produces the oil we need to sustain our glutton needs and we are and have been content to rob other people, destroy the mother earth, all so we can own a car and drive wherever we want – and so we can send our military to the over 1000 bases we have around the world. Heaven forbid we live without electricity 24/7.

I know the outcry: I HAVE to pay rent, I HAVE to eat, I HAVE to HAVE to HAVE to…

No we don’t have to pay rent or eat the way we do or have what we have.

We can live communally. We can grow and share food. We can spend our days talking and talking and talking, figuring out what the hell we are doing to stop the destruction of our mother earth and all the life on this planet.

If it were just a matter of u.s.a. americans destroying each other – at least those that have & I’m not talking the 1%, I’m talking the top 60% who have way too much – I’d say knock yourselves out.

But the huge tragedy now – and always – has been that it is those greedy, powerful top & all the others who strive so diligently and mindlessly during our lives to reach as close to the top as possible – who are the ones that are doing the killing and destroying.

It is the innocent, the human lives that haven’t spent the majority of their energy & resources into figuring out how & how quickly to kill everyone else, the human beings who spend their lives in harmony with the mother earth, the human beings who spend their lives valuing and treasuring each other and the multitude of gifts we have to enhance and support all life on this planet, the human beings who merely want to exist with what they have – these are the lives that have rapidly disappeared, have been systematically hunted down and destroyed.

And the other forms of life on the land, in the oceans, the air that are suffering and going extinct.