Wars and Rumors of War
How time flies. The NRA recently sponsored a national competition meant to elevate the most convincing "killer cop". Increasingly there is an open season for murdering black male teenagers, sometimes on deadly impulse, sometimes with hateful feral intent. The exuberance with which SWAT teams indulge themselves in brutish behavior - at times with at best a flimsy rationale and certainly with military force majeur - is an ominous development. Foolish notions of nullification and secession are given uncritical notice in many media outlets as if the War between the States had been nothing but a bad dream. The well-nigh seditious excesses indulged in by conservative Republicans in the Congress who are determined to undermine the authority of our Executive Branch of Government and, for that matter, to destabilize the rank and file of the Judicial Branch of our national tripartite system of checks and balances are a relentless and odious abuse of legislative responsibility.
The concept of gentrification has become a rococo trend at the expense of the great bulk of the American population. Nativism and the notion of Christian Dominion have made a mockery of the
sentiments enshrined in our Statue of Liberty and the express intent of the nation's founders concerning the separation of church and state laid out in no uncertain language in our country's constitution. The wanton behavior of surreptitious agents who routinely ignore the seminal stipulations in the Bill of Rights appended to our Constitution is a clear and present danger far more insidious than the general public seems willing to grasp.
Right-wing gerrymandering, restrictions newly invented regarding access to the franchise, and lavish and untraceable financial intervention in the election process - to say nothing of the systematic bribing that now determines legislative behavior in large measure - are all evidence pointing to a conscious and formidable movement toward fascism in these United States.
There are "wars" abroad that serve corporate interests - nothing new there. That's been the case in various incarnations since this nation came to be.
The new wrinkle has to do with the capacities and limitations of global digital information management and one can readily find anti-establishment activities in play all across the planet.
I agree with Sun Tse's assertion that rule by force alone inevitably carries the seeds of its own destruction. I'm also convinced that the mechanisms of irregular warfare are a significant if not determinative response to authoritarian excesses. I also must observe that large populations of non-combatants will pay dearly for futile attempts at disengagement. This isn't rocket science.
What remains to be noted in this brief laundry list of structural tensions is that the costs to global ecological systems are already in a sort of hyperinflation and if left unchecked will destroy the species - homo sapiens sapiens may very well become a mere unsavory blip in the long history of this planet.
Were I filling in a report card, "takes direction poorly" would surely have pride of place.
One need only take note of the effort in Texas to eliminate information about evolution in their instructional materials to reach the conclusion that there is an incipient deathwish in this crowd.
"You snooze, you lose" can apply to an entire species, including our own!
