[Photo: SPLC via MR Online]
By Robert C. Koehler
Supply: CommonWonders
Editor’s Note
Do we will need to get out of our heads and into our hearts? It seems to me that we people are possessing some severe mental difficulties and that we will need to phase again, consider a breath, and hear a moment. Listen to our breath, the breath of the individual up coming to us, the breath of the Earth in the sigh of the wind.
So animals react to these factors. Big offer. It has absolutely nothing to do with us. Definitely? What about the adjustments we simply cannot see, like the injury being accomplished at the mobile level? There is now nuclear particles (with many degrees of radioactivity) all over the place on our home (and in it). Tactical nukes nevertheless disperse nuclear substance, and nuclear plants continue to pose a world menace i.e. the Fukushima plant that was weakened by an earthquake. The injury caused by the broad range of loose nuclear particles is not only concealed (as in unseen) it is intentionally hidden. There are these scarce reviews of environmental toxic compounds (which include radioactive products) observed in polar bears – largely from their food sources. Harmful toxins contained in the course of the food stuff chain focus as they transfer up the chain. Just logically, what is at the prime of the foods chain? Supposedly people. That usually means that troubles any where in the foodstuff chain are in us… and have multiple effects. Of class, there are all sorts of incentives to distract us from simple biology to the complicated as we go on the hunt for the explanations we are having well being challenges, and why small children are obtaining diseases after assumed contained to (more mature) adults.
Why is it we can believe in specific factors we just cannot see – like angels, God, evil spirits, and vampires – but not imagine in other things we can not see – like viruses, air pollution, and mind-damaging limited waves? And then not believe that in matters that we can see like environmental destruction, and around-advancement, or superior housing expenditures and the selection of individuals living on the streets? I’d say that inquiring minds want to know, but there feel to be much less and fewer of people close to.
Involving what we decide on not to know (or think about) to conceptual ploys to shape our perceptions and attitudes, we shed sight of items correct in entrance of us. At times I feel we are far more conceptually constrained than we want to admit. We can cry in excess of the loss of just one baby – or perhaps a handful of – but hundreds of kids are just a human truth we simply cannot keep in our heads. How superior can we meaningfully rely? I question that most of us can grasp the wealth held by the major 1%. What do our brains do with the actuality that the leading 1% in the U.S. held $45.9 TRILLION at the conclusion of 2021? What is a trillion, or a billion, or for that make a difference a million? Can we genuinely believe past a couple of and numerous? I assume not, and so we come up with psychological shortcuts that blind us additional like people who have truly worth and all those who do not, and sadly that signifies that finally we are all worthy of much less in the significant plan of issues – and it would seem like all the strategies are significant these times.
Robert C. Koehler
The activity may perhaps be nearly around.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies put it this way:
“The irresolvable problem experiencing Western leaders is that this is a no-get scenario. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its army doctrine explicitly states that it will use them ahead of it will accept an existential armed service defeat?”
Neither facet is keen to let go of its determination: to safeguard, to grow, a piece of the full earth, no subject what the value. The video game of conquest — the activity of war, and all that arrives with it, e.g., the dehumanization of most of humanity, and the indifference to its toll on the world alone — has been going on for thousands of a long time. It is our “history.” In fact, history is taught from war to war to war.
Wars — who wins, who loses — are the making blocks of who we are, and they have managed to eat the several counter-philosophies that crop up, this kind of as spiritual belief in appreciate and interconnectedness, and change them into allies. Appreciate thy enemy? Nah, that’s silly. Enjoy isn’t doable right until you defeat the satan. And, oh yeah, violence is morally neutral, as per St. Augustine and the “just war theory” he arrived up with sixteen hundred years ago (as I wrote about past 7 days). This manufactured issues so practical for would-be conquerors.
And that philosophy has hardened into reality: We’re quantity a single! Our empire is much better than yours! And humanity’s weaponry — its means to combat and get rid of — has state-of-the-art, from golf equipment to spears to guns to . . . uh, nukes.
Slight difficulty! Nuclear weapons clarify a fact we have beforehand been able to ignore: The consequences of war and dehumanization normally, usually, usually arrive residence. There are no “nations,” apart from in our imagi-nations.
So are we caught with all this power we’ve aligned versus ourselves in protection of a falsehood? That looks to be the case, as the war in Ukraine proceeds and escalates, pushing by itself (and all of us) closer to Armageddon. A great deal of the globe is mindful of the threat of this falsehood we even have a global corporation, the United Nations, that keeps seeking to unite the globe, but it has no electric power to force unity (or sanity) on the earth. The fate of all of us seems to be in the hands of a few leaders who basically have nuclear weapons, and will use them if “necessary.”
And at times I anxiety the worst: that the only way these leaders will drop their electricity — to produce and maybe use their nukes — is for 1 or various of them also, oh my God, start a nuclear war. Women and gentlemen, we’re a split-next decision absent from this sort of an occurrence. Seemingly, in the wake of such a war — if human everyday living has survived and is equipped to begin rebuilding civilization — sanity and a perception of global wholeness might find their way to the core of the human social framework and our collective pondering, getting no other selection, will last but not least see past war and war preparation.
Permit me drop the narrative at this position. I have no idea what is likely to transpire, let alone what is likely to occur “next.” I can only reach into the depths of my soul and get started praying, you may possibly say, to each and every God on this world. Oh Lords, let humanity develop up in advance of it kills alone.
And as I pray, who displays up but the French thinker and political activist Simone Weil, who died in 1943, two yrs prior to the nuclear age birthed alone, but who realized something was deeply wrong? And of training course, a lot was now improper. The Nazis managed her region. She was able to flee France with her mother and father, but she died at age 34, seemingly of a combination of tuberculosis and self-starvation.
But what she still left powering in her creating is a valuable pearl of consciousness. Is it far too late? Here’s in which I fall to my knees.
“Weil,” wrote Christy Wampole in a New York Times op-ed three a long time back, “saw in her historical second a reduction of a sense of scale, a creeping ineptitude in judgment and conversation and, ultimately, a forfeiture of rational considered. She observed how political platforms remaining developed on words and phrases like ‘roots’ or ‘homeland’ could use much more abstractions — like ‘the foreigner,’ ‘the immigrant,’ ‘the minority’ and ‘the refugee’ — to flip flesh-and-blood folks into targets.”
No human being is an abstraction! Is this the place the rebuilding starts?
And then a tune commenced taking part in in my head, in my soul. The music is “Deportee,” penned and sung by Woody Guthrie 75 years back, soon after a airplane crashed above California’s Los Gatos Canyon, killing 32 people — typically Mexicans, getting sent back to Mexico simply because they were being possibly here “illegally” or their visitor worker contracts experienced expired. Initially, the media identified by name only the genuine People who died (pilot, copilot, stewardess). The relaxation were being merely deportees.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won’t have your names when you ride the huge plane,
All they will phone you will be “deportees.”
https://www.youtube.com/view?v=gtigp6DA314
What does this have to do with a Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, ongoing slaughter and nuclear powers at odds with just about every other in Ukraine, a environment in unlimited and bloody conflict almost in all places? I have no strategy.
Apart from, it’s possible, this: If a nuclear war occurs, absolutely everyone on the planet is no far more than a deportee.
Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-profitable journalist and editor. His ebook, Braveness Grows Solid at the Wound is available. Contact him at [email protected] or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
Tags: dehumanization, toxic electricity
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