DEAD INSIDE

I know that none of you who read this blog drive a gas guzzler........in fact you ride your bike regularly and walk whenever possible to lessen the amount of gasoline you use. You turn off the bathroom light when you brush your teeth and you don't let the water keep running when you brush up or shave. So of course I am not talking to you......I'm talking to someone else.

We all at times feel like all is lost. Global warming is overwhelming....the dolphins committing suicide by the hundreds by beaching themselves is probably happening because they are telling us the ocean is polluted and they can't stand it any longer.....humans just rush down to the beach and try to shove them back into the water thinking they are doing something noble....or maybe it is the Navy's underwater sonar that is literally blowing the minds of the dolphins.....but we need the Navy, right? We've got to have the big advanced, high tech Navy to protect us from the Chinese.......

Or how about the polar bears that are now drowning because as the icebergs melt they have to swim farther from one iceberg to the next to find their food? We are all complicit in this destruction of life and yet we just go on like nothing is happening....some feel powerless and some just don't really care anymore.

Some of us are already dead inside....we've given up feeling responsible....oh well we say, it was nice while we were here....let the cockroaches take over. And forget about getting upset that Bush is thinking of using a nuclear weapon to hit Iran....”nothing I can do about that” we say to ourselves.

This is what happens when your culture has become militarized....our minds become colonized by the militarists and we just turn everything over to them.....we just give up, the fight goes out of us, and we turn dead inside.....dead people walking around.

We might be dead on the inside but on the outside we can still consume though. We can still eat more than our fair share, drink more than our fair share.....in fact food and drink help deaden the pain inside....what little left we might be able to feel. The goal is to kill all the feelings inside.

Bush and his regime of corporate global fascists counts on this. Remember right after 9-11 Bush told us all to go shopping and to fly down to Florida to go to Disney World. The message was "Hey, don't worry...we are going to war....just keep paying your taxes and we'll take it from there. Just go kill your pain and your conscience with some shopping." And we did.

To be alive would require that we feel the hurt....that we actually allow the pain and suffering of drowning polar bears to reach into our insides and rip our hearts out...that it would motivate us to skip the car for just one day and hop on the bike...that we might begin to talk with others about creating community housing where we share a home with others, that we share our washing machines, our vacuum cleaners, our cars....that we begin to try to figure out a new way to live on this very fragile Earth......

Maybe by killing the illusions that we live in a democracy, that America is a free and honest country, that technology will save us from the oil crisis, maybe if we allowed those illusions to die we could live again.

Maybe we would become free again if we killed the American dream that the mental colonizers planted in our hearts and brains from our first days in school.

What does it mean to be human? How can I be a real person again? What do I do now?