These are photos taken in about 1939-1943. At the end of the Great Depression and the start of World War II, a terrifying and horrific war in which 80 million people were murdered. Yet look how beautiful our country was, how decent our people.
(Lousiana)
Despite the nationwide depression and poverty, we can look at these photos and see something fundamental and decent about our country, some shared belief in a future. I don't see that anymore.
(Washington, D.C.)
Instead of enemy planes flying over Pearl Harbor to bomb us, or enemy tanks in Germany knocking down borders to destroy the world, our enemies today are inside our country. Wall Street. The World Trade Organization, the corporate front group. U.S. Corporations. The politicians which they own.
(Washington, D.C.)
The Republicans and Democrats have done more in the past 25 years to destroy this country than Japan or Germany ever dreamed of doing during World War II.
(Chicago)
The rich, the corporations, Wall Street have stolen our money, given our jobs to other people, crushed the citizens, destroyed our industry, turned our farms into chemical sewers churning out foodstuff with chemically-manufactured seeds which we then spread throughout the world to crush small farmers and increase the hunger and starvation of the poor. All for the profits of the corporations and the rich people who hide behind them. Our corporations have turned on us and are destroying us.
(Chicago)
We are no longer on the same team. It is them against us. And we're losing.
(Nebraska)
We can go back and start over. Shut down Wall Street. Have local businesses, grow our own food, build homes locally not mass-produced. Bake bread locally. Make clothes and furniture, cars. Build mass transit. We can go back and rebuild our own country. We just need the will to do it.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Yesterday, All Our Troubles Seemed So Far Away.
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Better days lie ahead. Now five years beyond the world oil peak, the days of economic growth are behind us. When empires cease to grow, they die. Soon enough, we'll be living close to our neighbors and close to the land that sustains us. Soon enough, there will be no fuel at the filling station, no food at the grocery store, and no water coming out the municipal taps. Soon enough, we will be forced to stop destroying non-industrial cultures and the living planet on which we depend for our very lives. Soon enough, the ecological overshoot of Homo sapiens will be corrected. At least, I hope it's soon enough -- soon enough to save the remaining shards of the living planet, and also soon enough to allow humanity to squeeze through the global-change bottleneck.
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