by Don Hynes
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| Vantage Point | Culture and Politics by Don Hynes |
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"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.
He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so,
the prejudice will be gone." - Tom Paine
April 24, 2005 “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” -William O. Douglas, judge (1898-1980) "The American way of life is not negotiable." George H.W. Bush, Earth Summit, 1992 Two major issues of the 21st century, the availability and control of oil and the rise of fundamentalism, are dominant in their global impact and inextricably interwoven in their application and effect. The drive to insure access to the world’s remaining petroleum resources is the driver behind American foreign policy and the raison d’etre for the industrial world’s economic and political reactions to United States military dominance, particularly by China, India, the G-7 countries (that includes Japan) and the second and third world countries that have petroleum resources in Latin America, East Asia and West Africa. The drive to dominate and control the remaining oil resources is backed by the political fundamentalism in the United States that poses government as the enemy of individual freedom, a misleading and destructive direction first promulgated by then President Ronald Regan to excuse and justify the dismantling of governmental control of corporate opportunism, environmental protection, and eventually to marginalize the science behind global warming. Religious fundamentalism and its denial of genuine scientific inquiry in turn supports political fundamentalism and gives credence to the rising cultural regression that supports public display over private conscience, just one example being the political and media circus over Terry Schiavo’s sad death while the bombing of the city of Fallujah in Iraq into virtual non-existence barely caught a headline in the mainstream press. One response to global warming in the United States has been a well funded corporate effort to make the issue appear to be radical, unfounded, specious, or whatever the adjective du jour through the corporate controlled public media and government sponsored infomercials masking as news commentary and/or science. The interwoven nature of flat earth science concerning global warming with the World Resource War whose historic beginning was marked with the invasion of Iraq, is again supported by the most recent and overt expression of US political fundamentalism with the nomination of right wing ideologue John Bolton to the UN ambassadorship, a man overtly hostile to the UN mission and existence. The Earth will not be mocked and despite corporate and US governmental protestations peak oil is a widely acknowledged phenomenon, industry leader the Bank of Montreal described the major Saudi oilfield at Gharwar in decline, Goldman Sachs predicted coming price spikes to $105 per barrel, and in China the rise of the environmentally oppressed found public expression in unprecedented protest. The value of the US dollar is increasingly precarious with US corporate giant GM stock plummeting in the face of weak performance and an even weaker US dollar. There is another way, and although it isn’t prominent during this interwoven time of aggression and ignorance, it is present and relevant because it is the nature of the Earth herself. The fire is no longer on its way according to commentator Mike Ruppert who has been long connecting the dots between peak oil and US foreign policy, and we won’t collectively find a way through this global impasse without willingly, thoughtfully, prayerfully looking into the jade stone of the problems our fixed determinations on material acquisition are causing the planet and the Earth’s people, for ultimately we are all one within the great matrix of Life. As James Kunstler writes in The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century: “we will have to cultivate a religion of hope, that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on… that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations." Kunstler’s words are a compass pointing in a progressive and evolutionary direction for the Earth that is our home, and in the end, isn't that the authentic spirituality? *** |
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