Memorial Day
a time to remember what war is
This is not human nature. This is not nature at all. People who already have enough don’t knock on their neighbor’s door and beat them senseless until they surrender what they have. Animals will hunt when they’re hungry and they will defend their territory if encroached. But territorial disputes are almost always settled with symbolic displays of strength, never with fights to the death. Animals don’t kill their own kind wantonly.
War is made out to be glorious and heroic in our culture only because the culture is dominated by sociopaths and megalomaniacs. The worst humans rise to the highest ranks of the power elite, and it is these pathetic few who lead the rest of us into war.
Memorial Day is a time to remember the bloodiest war in American history, when families were divided and brothers killed brothers on the battlefield. Don’t give me this shit about the necessity of ending slavery. England peacefully ended slavery 50 years before our Civil War and Mexico followed in 1829, Canada in 1834, Brazil in 1850.
After the American Civil War, the trend continued. 1876 in Turkiye, 1886 in Cuba. In 1928, Iran abolished slavery. None of these countries needed a civil war to do it.
War is an abomination. It is mass murder, normalized.
Our country is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine and bombing Iran. We are shipping arms to Israel so they can exterminate the people of Gaza. Economic warfare is slower but more deadly. Our “sanctions” have caused death and misery in Cuba, Iran, Russia, and dozens of countries historically.
I won’t tolerate it, and I encourage you to do the same.
Our global human-dominated ecosystem is managed byourapex-predators upon us, who used to be apex-predators when we were hunter-gatherers, but became grazing-animals when we tookup agriculture.
"We" need to make their extermination-services unnecessary and their genetic-suite of talents, "sociopathy", "the lines of kings and nobles", might no longer be carefully selected for in their "exclusive club".
They perform an ecosystem-service. That's why they persist.
;-(
You've heard the parable about people living by a river who see drowning children float by. While many focus on pulling children out of the water, some people go up the river to find out how they fall into the river in the first place .
Perhaps we should look upstream to see what's causing so many anti-life policies that operate in our modern world.
The majority of Americans' top priorities for government (Peace, Justice, Fair Taxes, Wise Spending of tax dollars, Sensible Regulations for Toxins) are ignored, while the 1% almost always get what they want (wars, poisons in ag and food, tax breaks for the rich, junk food in school cafeterias, EMFs everywhere, bans on and barriers to holistic therapies).
Trend is not destiny! Change is possible. Ways to accomplish reform that Americans have never heard about are clearly described in: THE MECHANICS OF CHANGING THE WORLD — POLITICAL ARCHITECTURE TO ROLL BACK STATE AND CORPORATE POWER.
This book explains that regaining our republic would be “easier than we assume, it’s been done many times, here are step-by-step directions.”
It took 8 years for an Aussie named John Macgregor to write it. He distilled more than 1300 sources into 400 pages and starts the story all the way back in prehistoric times with hunter gatherers’ egalitarian self-governance. Then we read about the first documented democracy – the 65 years of Athens’ Golden Age. After a mere 2400-year interlude of empires, we witness the second flowering of democracy in Philadelphia, at a closed-door meeting during May and June of 1787, which produced a constitution that was adopted a year later, and, keeping a promise to the states, the Bill of Rights was written during the first session of Congress and ratified by in 1791.
Despite the flaws in that constitution, we ended slavery, reduced oppression of first nations, and extricated ourselves from wars that the majority didn’t want. Women got the vote, Jim Crow was made illegal, hungry children were fed. Yes, looking back in time, we might be surprised at how long these corrections all took to finally occur, but they did occur.
It was impossible, as Macgregor explains, for the Founding Parents to foresee the 4 modern obstacles to a well-functioning constitutional republic:
• Corporate money runs DC and state capitals
• Centralized media doesn’t tolerate dissent
• Americans have no clue about the transformative effect of Citizens Assemblies (which already work well for many nations, such as the Swiss), and we never learned why the parliamentary system is more balanced than our current presidential system
• Voters in democracies around the world are discouraged because our attempts to influence our electeds (demonstrations, letters to the editor, and voting) hardly change anything
Here are 2 ways to see how some nations have solved these problems that stump us Americans:
1. Mike Muntisov provides an excellent overview of CHANGING THE WORLD here:
https://courtofthegrandchildren.com/democracy-3-0/
2. Or read Macgregor’s more detailed Introduction – and subscribe to his Substack – here:
https://johnmacgregor.substack.com/p/introduction-to-the-mechanics-of
Like so many of us, John Macgregor isn't in this for the money; he set the price of the book (available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon) as low as possible, thus earning the magnificent return of 28¢ per hard copy that's sold (probably about the same for the digital version).
To sum up, we CAN regain our constitutional democracy, with ripple effects for the other nations on this small, blue marble called Earth.