Waking The Dead 2

First, full disclosure: I do not believe in re-education camps. I do believe in the importance of re-education. I do not believe in the arbitrary curtailment of freedoms and liberty. I do believe that most of us still don't have a clue about how to responsibly use our freedom and liberty. This creates a bit of a dilemma. It is the constant and flagrant abuse of freedom that has brought us into the mess we are currently in. I think this all reached its nadir when under the guidance of the Chicago School of Economics with the mentorship of Milton Friedman and his ilk, and under the leadership of neoliberal conservative politicians such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney, t was taken as an already given that markets should be completely deregulated and the generation and movement of capital given full rein, under the most misguided assumption that unrestrained and unregulated capitalism would save the day, there would be international peace and harmony because citizens had been turned into customers and human beings into consumers and what a lovely world of prosperity and economic freedom we would all be enjoying together. Except, they left out certain parts of the human equation. The breakneck capitalism that was unleashed has instead created a kind of creeping social Darwinism that is rapidly unravelling the social fabric and destroying civic and social infrastructures. The market has no conscience, and this makes the accruing of wealth the idea playing field or playground for psychopaths. It has already been explored and revealed that the wealthiest people in the world are also among the most psychopathic. How else could one person accumulate personal wealth that would equal or exceed the gross national product of a small nation, and I mean a small developed nation? So, who are those psychopaths? They head international banks and multinational corporations. Among them, are those who extract and refine fossil feels and weapons manufacturers, both industries of death. The blind greed of powerful competitors with a dead conscience is one of the most lethal weapons that have been unleashed against the planet and against humanity. We see now what the exploitation of fossil fuels and the machines of war have been doing to us, and how they threaten to put it all to a fairly abrupt and total conclusion. And most of us are either deaf and blind to this reality, or we are just indifferent. There re reasons for this, though I do not think that they could pass as legitimate excuses. The globalization of national economies has created a dynamic of uber-competitiveness and extreme anxiety and fear for most of us, as we have to train and retrain at our own expense in order to remain competitive in occupations where the social contract has been shredded and burned, and it is everyone out for themselves. With the huge growth of temporary, often poorly paid contract work that offers no protections, benefits or rights to workers, we have seen an explosion in household debt and a growing statistic of poverty and indigence in wealthy and prosperous nations such as our dear, progressive Canada, and this is not about to end. Even Prime Minister junior has been heard tut-tutting workers who think that we have a right to job and income security. And what adds insult to injury with such words of stop complaining and be glad that you have a job (my paraphrase), is that they come from the lips of someone who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who has never known anything but wealth, privilege and social status, and simply doesn't have a clue about what regular people have to cope with every day. Seeing how our governments capitulation and adoration of market deregulation has thrown the most vulnerable among us under the bus, which is to say, that now we have a crisis of homelessness and hunger not even matched by the Great Depression, everyone else, instead of coming to their aid and resisting these inhuman policies, has to work doubly hard not to find themselves also living on the sidewalk and lining up at food banks and soup kitchens,. Everyone is too scared trying to save their own sorry ass to be able to give much voice or concern to this manic death dance of greed that they are taking us on. We need to be re-educated. Big time. Deprogrammed and re-educated. We need to learn again the deep human and spiritual values that make us more than soulless consumers of goods and services. We need to learn again the value of caring, giving and sharing and of valuing others as the beautiful beings that they are and not simply as means to our own selfish ends. But we are going to have to work hard and make some riel and painful sacrifices for this to happen. And we are going to also have to start asking some very uncomfortable questions while challenging our governments and social and economic institutions. Let's just hope that it isn't too late yet.