It?s Not My Fault!
by bobby jennings
The New Millennium, The Dawning of The Age of Aquarius, The
Age of New Thought, or just New Age all offer us much promise for a better
world and an improved human experience. And indeed we have made much progress towards
these goals. But with this upward evolution of the human experience has come
certain backsliding and that should be expected. For if there is one certainty,
it is that life is not upwardly linear but more like a stair step lighting bolt
sent by God to show us the way. Viewed in this manner, life can be seen as an ever-ascending
staircase with its steps up, its steps down, and its resting places.
There is another aspect to this staircase that must be
considered. It starts its ascent slowly and gradually increases its upward slope
ever quicker so that the higher we get the closer the steps and the more the
burden of our load weighs on our shoulders. Stuart Wilde has defined this speed
of change as? ?The Quickening?.
Certainly we can see and experience this ?Quickening? in our everyday lives. As we enter
into this new era, because of this ?Quickening? we must lessen our load to insure
that we make it to the top. Just what is some of this excess luggage we must
discard to continue our upward mobility? Consider the following.
Perhaps at no time since World War II has the world been so
close to the brink of war. Not just ?war war? but nuclear war.
The US has
served as the protector of Asia and has begun to stumble badly. Given our lax
control of nuclear secrets you can bet that any highly industrial power in Asia could go nuclear almost overnight. These include Australia, Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan, and soon Viet Nam.
The protective treaties that include the U.S.
have previously restrained them. As tensions continue to rise between China and
North Korea and ?these potential members
of the nuclear club, we must ask ourselves how long they will wait for us to
clean up our diplomatic act before they start their nuclear production lines.
How did we
get here? I am sure that it started before Clinton, but the ?Quickening?
started when he accepted those campaign contributions from the Chinese and then
put the contributors up in the Lincoln bedroom
But It?s Not My Fault.
In the early 1980?s, Nancy Reagan, with the help of her esteemed
husband declared the ?War On Drugs?. What did we get from this war? Much more
drugs than when we started.
And what did we lose? We have lost much of our
freedom, our rights to property, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, and
most of all our sense of fair play.
Building prisons is one of the fastest
growing industries in the US. The US has the largest per capita prison
population in the world. Not the free world, mind you, but the entire world.
And who is in jail? They include some criminals but also many poor, the black, the
disenfranchised, the mentally ill, and the innocent.?
The judges have lost the ability
through legislation to use ?common sense? sentencing
in drug related cases. The Courts have now ruled that prison crowding is unusual punishment;
thus, many of the violent criminals are being released early instead of the
non-violent drug-related prisoners.
Our private wireless, cellular, and internet
communications are being monitored by the NSA, and the FBI is making
preparations to monitor all of our phone lines. We are now systematically being
called in to surrender our DNA to government databases. Government and business
already have our photographs, social security numbers, health records, assets
and liabilities, family history, previous addresses, employment records, spending
patterns, and all of it available to anyone for only $39.99 on the internet.?
But It?s Not My Fault.
The 1980?s brought us ?Trickle Down Economics?. Lots of
money was generated in the last 20 years but true to its name only a trickle
made it to the bottom and a very small trickle indeed.
In 1980, 1% of the
population controlled 20% of the wealth in this country. Today, the same 1% of the
population controls 40% of the wealth in the US. It is estimated that 40% of
the population does not have adequate access to the health care system, 20% of
the population live in poverty, and 20% of the US?s children go hungry.
This trend is growing as more and more of the traditional manufacturing jobs
are being replaced by lower paying (and many
times benefit-free) service, part time, and contract jobs. The joke is ?Thank
God, the government policies ?have produced
more jobs and I now have three of them.??
But It's Not My Fault
The Industrial Age is heralded for bringing us much
improvement in our lifestyle. But it also punched a hole in our ozone layer,
brought us air and water pollution, carcinogens in our food and water supply, and
over-consumerism.
We were promised shorter and easier workweeks, but in fact
people work 10 hours a week more now than they did 25 years ago. And that?s
not the worst of it. Now in most families both adults must work and the children are hustled off to daycare. We are bombarded by advertisements
to buy products that we don?t need, have planned obsolesce, don?t deliver as
promised, and thank you is becoming an archaic expression.?
Henry Ford discovered that if
he paid his workers higher wages, they could then afford to buy his Model-T automobiles.
This now has been "refined"
to simply "don?t pay the workers more, just give them credit". Then they can?t
get up and drive away in the cars that they earned.
But It?s Not My Fault??Or Is It?
With all our evolution, progress, communities, and
technology, we still remain what we were in the beginning, an individual on a
personal journey. The quality of that journey is what makes a difference and
each of us alone must bear the responsibility for the fate of mankind as we enter
this ??Age of Cooperation? ?And cooperation it must be or certainly it
will be our last age to define.
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