The End of the World as We Know it Will Suck Big Time

 [Resposted from The Conflicted Doomer]

Posted on November 23, 2013    by theozarker

This has been one of those weeks when I felt like banging my head against the wall until all the pain stopped. The gloom, rain and cold set the stage for it, I suppose. But it went so far beyond mere physical discomfort, I couldn’t seem to put it into words.

Maybe it was the week-long buildup to the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination and the sense, looking back, that the assassination was the first blow in the long and merciless death of youthful idealism in this country, the first ratcheting down of the thumb screws on the belief that a nation which could send a man to the moon could also guarantee civil rights and a way out of poverty for all its citizens – indeed, for all citizens of this global community – and that we were, indeed, our brothers’ keepers.

Maybe it’s the slow rot of the “greed is good, I’ve got mine, get yours while you can and to hell with those that can’t” mentality that has taken the place of those ideals over the last fifty years and let the wants of a few run roughshod over the needs of the many.

Perhaps it is the stream of stories about melting starfish, dead dolphins, poisoned bees, fungus-infected bats, over-heating oceans, dying forests, melting ice sheets, stripped soil – the constant hacking away at the chain of life by the one species which promised to be cognizant of his place in that chain, but turned out to be too stupid to understand that breaking free from that chain of life heralds his own death as a species.

Perhaps it’s the juxtaposition of the pictures from the battered Philippines with the “same old, same old” attitudes at the latest climate change conference, in Warsaw, topped off by Secretary of Defense Hagel’s obscene speech in Halifax, Nova Scotia, this week  where he outlined the Military’s new Arctic policy – ending with, “We remember the words of explorer Frederick Cook. After many attempts to discover the North Pole – and after believing he had found it – he wrote: “It occurred to me … that, after all, the only work worthwhile, the only value of a human being’s efforts, lie in deeds whereby humanity benefits.” That is why we look to the Arctic – this new frontier – to help make a better world for all mankind.”

Perhaps it’s the juxtaposition of all of the above with my turning seventy-three, yesterday, that makes me want to grab the nearest numb-nuts by the lapels, smack him across the face a couple of time and scream until his ears ring, “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? WAKE UP!”

The sun comes out for a moment. Though I am still aware, as always, that the end of the world as we know it will suck big time, I am not ready to close the door, draw the shades and turn out the lights on this one, known grand experiment of the universe. I take my joys where I can. We may bring about our own extinction, but Life? I don’t think so.

Life has always lived at the edges of chaos, fragile, yet surprisingly strong.  If we survive, our lives will change drastically, but Life, I think, will not go gentle into that good night; neither would It rage, I suspect, against the dying of our light.

The Monsters in the Basement

[365 Toy Project: 050/365] The Humans Are Dead (Photo credit: nhussein)

[Reposted from:  The Conflicted Doomer]

 August 17, 2013

This week, in Egypt, the Military turned against a segment of the Egyptian populace and killed or wounded hundreds of people in the name of protecting democracy.


Last February, Senator Lindsey Graham said, the US drone program had killed 4,700 people across the various MENA countries in the name of our war on terrorism.


In the last two years of civil war in Syria and what increasingly looks like civil war in Iraq, thousands of Sunni and Shia Muslims have killed each other, in the name of what I’m still not sure.


Twelve years ago next month, a handful of Islamists murdered 3000 people, mostly Americans, in the name of bringing down the financial and military empire of the United States.


In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup against the duly elected government of Iran and helped install the dictatorship of the Shah in the name of oil security.


The list of grievances against various monsters throughout the world could go back through the history of civilization.


Years ago, in therapy dealing with the effects of the rape and other abuses of my childhood, I once described the process to my therapist as, crouching against the wall of a room with glass floors over a basement full of monsters and realizing the only door out was on the other side of the room. I spent a good deal of the first year or two trying to figure out a way to get across that fragile floor without falling through and waking the monsters.


It didn’t work, of course. At some point in all that tiptoeing around, the glass broke and, bruised and bleeding, I had to confront those monsters in the basement. After all, I had created them.


By that, I don’t mean the things done to me by the man who ran the Children’s Home or, later, the physical and emotional abuses by my stepmother were not monstrous and dehumanizing. Abuse of power is monstrous because it is so dehumanizing. But long after both were out of my life, the monsters I had created as a child held sway over my life as an adult, leaving me in grave danger of abusing others over whom I held power and so, repeating the cycle.


Perhaps it is different for others who’ve embarked on that journey, but for me, the only way to defang those dehumanizing monsters I’d created was to reverse the process and humanize them again. I did not do that to excuse their behavior; it was inexcusable and, in the eyes of the law, some of it was criminal. I did it to regain my own humanity, my own power. It is as close as I have been able to come to what Christians call forgiveness. I suppose that is what is meant by “reconciliation”. And seeing them as humans who did monstrous things to gain or retain a power they didn’t believe they had, reconciling myself to the fact that justice is not always served because justice is meted out by humans who are not always just, I could commence the struggle to maintain my own humanity and find the power that comes with that humanity.


We cannot reconcile with monsters; monsters must be destroyed. And that, it seems to me, is where we find ourselves, today - living in a world full of monsters, abusers against whom we are powerless, with whom we cannot reconcile, who must be utterly destroyed even if it means destroying ourselves.


The monsters have many names. The Government. The Church. The Military. Bankers. Corporations. Oil Companies. Christians, Muslims, Democrats, Republicans, terrorists, drug addicts, criminals, him, her, you, me …


But in truth, the monsters have only one name – human being. And human beings who abuse other human beings do so to maintain the illusion of power against the monsters in their own basement. Whether you’re running a government or just trying to stay afloat in a world in decline, we cannot tiptoe across the glass floors in our own selves in hopes of avoiding the monsters in our basement.


All human beings do stupid, cruel and, sometimes, inhumane things. Sometimes human beings are brought to justice for what they do; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes the monsters are of our own making; sometimes they’re forced on us to prop up someone else’s need for power; sometimes we just accept the monsters others create because they serve our own fears of powerlessness. But in a world where everyone becomes a monster to service someone’s fears, no one remains a human being.


We live in a world of huge perils, but they are perils created by humans, not monsters. If we have a hope of navigating those perils, we each have to fight for our humanity and the power that comes from that struggle. Lest we all become the monsters in someone's basement.

Dying Veteran Writes On Behalf Of Thousands As He Tears Into Bush And Cheney In An Open Letter

This is honest. This is important. This is going viral.

Via truthdig.

"A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens,along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness."

Organizations to Consider Joining . . .