Brother & Sister Truth-Telling: The Age of Catastrophic Distraction

How many people here own their house - and how many have a mortgage, or live in a rental? How many people own their cars, and how many have a car payment, and trade in the car for a new one with it's fresh and probably larger car payment?

How many grow their own food, make their own clothing, and how many have to shop for them every week or season? How many of us, if we lost or left our jobs, would be on the street, bereft, hungry, penniless, or have to depend on a government program which is under continuous attack, or the charity and kindness of family, friends and strangers, a church or social organization? 

Why is it that we buy food from companies that refuse to tell us what that food contains, and this is allowed to go on? 

Why is it that we hemorrhage our national treasure on wars that resolve nothing, save no one, kill our young men and women and the people of distant lands, expend resources and consume ingenuity, crowding out education, repairs to our bridges, roads, and other vital infrastructure? How can we placidly continue to rape and ravage the earth, seas and sky, displacing the nature we view with such pleasure on pictures, TV and on brief vacations?

How have we become so removed from perception of our common humanity that we can easily hate and despise and destroy people who we have never met? Why is it that we can continue to channel ever-slenderer resources toward researching more ingenious and impersonal methods for murder and war, while neglecting and forgetting research and work on the things that enhance and enrich life? How can we not notice that those inventions are INEVITABLY turned against us to ensure our continued compliance with the world-destroying system that espouses them?

Why is it that if the government ordered all men to begin wearing purple dresses, there would be a revolution overnight, but when we are dragged into war we go so willingly and give our children so open-handedly to the meat grinder?

Why is it that we fall reflexively back on resentment and prejudice to justify our collective inhumanity? Why do we continue to insist on dealing with things in ways that have proven not work? Why do we permit our government to place its colossal foot upon us and lean ever more heavily upon and meekly pay for the privilege of having our liberty shredded in exchange for security that never arrives? 

Why do we pay lip service to those who have died for freedom and then meekly surrender it at the first opportunity? Why are we so proud of ignorance and intolerance?

How can people believe in God and completely ignore everything we are told He wants us to do? Take care of the poor, the sick, the children - yet complain every time someone suggests that we have to spend money or time or attention to do so?

I am not aware of any country which has ever refused a war.

I see us following, inexplicably, the foul road to annihilation every other empire in history has ever trod.

How can we be so involved in our gladiatorial contests, our little self-serving feelings of superiority, our gadgets and disastrous distractions and be unwilling to spend an hour a day keeping ourselves informed on the workings of our government? A nation built by immigrants has become utterly hostile to immigration. A country based on freedom seems to long for the firm hand of any tyrant which promises safety from a world stimulated to hostility against us by our own policies.

How can we blindly ignore the brutal suppression of choice and self-determination forced upon our mothers and daughters and sisters? How can we wink at the dehumanization and even murder of women everywhere including in our own beloved country? Honor killings, wife-beatings, exhaustion through repeated child-bearing, but contraceptives are evil? 

Why is it permitted that women be bullied, cowed, murdered and manipulated by a few men who laugh at us from behind their pillared and walled compounds? How did we get to the point that we no longer believe our children will have a better life than we do - but most people would violently attack anyone who suggests a different course than the road to poverty and servility we are so obviously embarked upon?

Why do we meekly acquiesce or actually aggressively enable the theft of our national and global resources, the singling out of small groups, one by one who are stripped of the right to vote, or eat, or even live?

Facing up to the situation in which we find ourselves is terribly hard - but ignoring it will be harder still.

Why do we so easily swallow lies when a modicum of education would expose the lie for what it is - a cynical program to keep us divided and content with a pittance?

We developed drones for warfare abroad, because this impersonal method of warfare spares our lives, and soon those drones will be everywhere in our own skies.

Everywhere you look, peoples who are as alike as two flowers growing in the same field are turned implacably against each other, while the owners of munitions factories take profits from both sides, impartially, caring nothing for anything, no country, no ideal, no religion except profits, continuous and ever-increasing?

How can people think our government is marxist or socialist when Wall Street is fatter than ever - the great recession wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth for retirees, workers, small investors, but there is more wealth than ever now - and in the hands of fewer and fewer people?

Haliburton can lie, and steal and kill and undermine the governments of countries our people are dying to establish - wars are started based on lies and we turn away and tune into our favorite shows.
Why would people adore the hand that strikes them but reject their own children for trying to realize their own natures?

Why are we content to play games and refuse to do something to change the world for the better?
We consume poison and thank our poisoners, we watch our share of the country's wealth vanish and snarl savagely at those who try to warn us, we cling to the idea that we are different and better, yet refuse to take a responsible portion of our governance, content to let the thieves run everything. We lost control over our own money long ago with the establishment of the Federal reserve, and now another chunk of our sovereignty is being negotiated away in the Trans Pacific Partnership and not 10 of my HUNDREDS of FB friends bothered to learn anything about it.

We squabble with persons of different ethnic backgrounds, religion, party or skin color, while the people who care for nothing except having more of everything stoke the fires and keep us divided and proud of our divisions.

America can never be defeated by a foreign enemy, it will be betrayed from within by those who care nothing for country - only their own wealth and privileges while stripping us of all of both.
We are so busy determining what is good for each other we have lost sight of our own self interests. Why should anyone care what I smoke, or have sex with, or read or believe or who I marry.
The Romans at least had bread and circuses, we are busy denying each other the bread while we throng the circuses.

Our real masters could not be more pleased with us - we are doing their work for them and paying for the privilege, paying with our liberty, our small wealth, our very lives.
If you care about your own children, your neighbors or even YOURSELF, I beg you to wake up and look at what is happening, put aside meaningless differences and demand that we move toward a more sustainable and equitable world - I fear we’re in the last hours of mankind as a rational species.
If you took the time to read this- thank you - if not - good luck.—Ralph Smith

ADDED: by Nancy J. Bell, his sister and partner in TRUTH TELLING
About Nancy J. Bell: 
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nancy-bell/30/231/855

While we are on the topic, I/we still have your attention, if you have not turned away muttering some silly excuse about how uncomfortable these ideas make you feel or accuse us of being too controversial, think about these questions, too!

How can we watch, captivated by the news on every channel, every media outlet, the story of a young teen-aged boy who was walking back to his father’s one night who was hunted down and murdered, and then watch as his murderer not only was released, but became celebrated among throngs of hateful people who claim legal justification for such an act. We watch the news about a Black woman who defended herself from her vicious attacker by getting a restraining order and when he entered her house anyway, fired a single shot into the air being sent to jail for decades, and see our own judicial system call it “justice?” We watch the news about the man who shot up a car of young black males for playing their own music and use the excuse of self-defense in an attempt to be the next George Zimmerman-free man. We watch ourselves stockpile ammunition and increase our guns to protect ourselves from danger as we seek to kill indiscriminately, such as the 19 year old Black woman who sought help after a car accident in the middle of the night and was shot in the back of her head by the homeowner as she left the unanswered door, seeing the police even refuse to press charges because he claims she “scared him.”

While we’re at it, how do we watch the drone attack news against the innocent civilians of Pakistan, and the Israel blanket shooting of innocent children in Gaza and the West Bank, and hear stories about the cannibalistic terrorists of Liberia and think that it’s not our problem to worry about what happens to others, even when our country plays a hand in much of it? Who is providing the weapons and why? When does FREE ENTERPRISE become a tool against our freedom, and WHY do we defend the stripping down of our own rights and protections? 

Why don’t people read the public documents of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Acts that have caused us to release pharmaceutical companies from any accountability because they also happen to provide drugs of any kind to our military? Why do we allow our military to experiment on our soldiers or deny the illnesses that plague them from the chemical warfare they are exposed to by wars we send them to without even understanding why we are fighting? Why do we accept the refusal to count or show the returning dead, our children-fathers-brothers and sisters? Why do we let the crazy religious cults picket our military funerals and call it freedom of speech and defend the shame of it?

Why do we allow eugenics programs to exist in this country, sterilizing inmates in California using tax payers’ money? Or, sterilizing women for being poor, without knowledge or consent? Why doesn’t  our higher education even allow its students to discuss the eugenics programs for fear of its controversial nature? If these topics are taboo in academia, where is it to be discussed?  Why do we allow the bloated insurance companies to make the decisions about WHO is viable and to whom necessary medical resources should go based on a caste system that no one is willing to admit even exists in America?

Why do we sell more plastic tigers, elephants, wolves and dolphins than we ever lift a finger to save in real life? Why do we allow the polluting of our waters with Extreme Toxic Waste releases by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and deny the testing of children who are being directly impacted by it, and still refuse to admit there is any credible association between the increase in cancer, birth-defects and a host of other health issues?

Why do we care more about what Kim Kardashian is wearing than how many people were recently killed in the Super-Storm of the Philippines, and care more about whether or not Sarah Palin can see Russia from her front porch than the melting of the poles and an increase in adverse weather patterns that many in power say is not related to real climate change patterns caused by MAN? 

Why do Americans continue to call ourselves the GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH when so many people in America can only really identify America correctly on a world map? What do we know of the world that makes us so great, that we are willing to continue to erase cultures, people, and all their knowledge when they represent  something that is simply NOT US? Why do we continue to find ways to screw over the Native Americans, after breaking every single treaty we have ever made with them, but blame them for their own poverty and suffering, and call on the defense of the American Way of Life as our sole excuse for doing so?

How did we become so dependent on the Internet, and yet threaten our own satellites to maintain the system upon which World Business is conducted by leaving over 100,000 pieces of space junk in our orbit just waiting to collide and bring the whole system down? Why are we still contributing to our gluttonous use of plastic, and continue to grow waste dumps in the Pacific Ocean that is already bigger than the state of Texas? Why do we not attempt to recycle, at the very least, because we resent the couple of minutes it would take to do so, to rush into a vice, a distraction, or a blanking of our minds in a false solace of ignorance that will surely kill us by our willingness to fail to act?

Why will MOST PEOPLE who start to read this blog, fail to finish reading it, hurrying along their way to superciliousness and new and improved ways to splinter our attention from the painful truths that we have become?

WAKE UP, the dream you are having is the nightmare we are all having, in this AGE OF CATASTROPHIC DISTRACTION!

You can fool some of the people some of the time, even many people many times, but the truth is still buried in the muck of partisan politics, the voracious appetite of exploitive capitalism, and social-stratifications that were also (unfortunately) built into America’s darkest tapestries a long time ago.