In our modern reality it is easy to take for-granted the luxuries we are privy to in our every day life. But I ask you to take a step back, strip away everything. Remove the government, roads, schools, running water, clothing, weapons, cell phones, even take a step back from tribal realities (which still exist today). Envision yourself naked in a group, in nature, surrounded by dangerous predators, tigers (who have killed between 100-200,000 people in the Sunderbands in india in the last century), big or poisonous snakes, lions, crocs, sharks. You have no weapons but your bare hands. Go back before fire. You can’t cook, you can’t keep predators at bay, you have nothing to defend yourself. Where do you live? You live the only place big predators can’t get to you. The trees. You can’t eat meat because you can’t catch it or cook it. What do you eat? You eat anything that will allow you to survive, fruits, nuts, bugs. Your language revolves around warnings about predators and others infringing on your territory. You play with branches and start to peel off the bark to use them to collect ants and spear fruit to save or bring to a loved one. You are cold at night so you huddle together for warmth, but you live in a place that rarely gets anywhere near cold enough to worry about. You lose members of your society to predators, some of the more daring ones risk exposure for food, water, or trying to impress someone, and some of them don’t get back into the trees in time. Is this a clear enough picture for you. If you took away our thousands of years of advancements, our learning, our sacrifice and our luck, even after all that if you threw a modern human into the jungle with all their intelligence, wit, knowledge of space, ability to read, etc etc, 10-1 that person doesn’t survive even a few weeks in the wild. Why could we survive then, because we were prepared for it, we were monkeys. We found areas where predators were less frequent in search of food on the ground. We used rocks to open nuts. We were attacked and grabbed a stick or a rock and swung it towards are attacker. We showed our friends. We felt the heat from a lighting bolt, and as it continued we became curious, we saw fire spreading, we figured out that if we sectioned it off and contained it we could keep it going, it could be used to heat things, purify things, destroy things, and most importantly it could protect us. We couldn’t use it up in the trees so we put fire at the entrance to caves, predators wouldn’t come past the fire and we began to have the leisure time to draw, talk, figure out more efficient ways of getting food, and work together to understand our world. Evolution is not a theory in terms of uncertainty any more then gravity is a theory. It is very basic logic stretched over an amount of time that is very difficult to comprehend. But for those who deny it I ask you this. In a world where only 1-2% of everything that has ever existed still exists, that 98% of all beings are gone, how could anything have created the things that weren’t even there when the world started.
The partial birth abortion of america
For those of us who born in the US, and have lived here our entire lives, the American Dream is just a silly phrase. Most of us do not understand how radical and unprecedented the United States experiment with representative democracy truly was. I say was because baring some spectacular events in the coming years that experiment is over. For most of recorded history a very small percentage of people controlled everyone else. Slavery was accepted even by the slaves, though it went by various names including, caste system, feudal system, roman catholisism. Whatever your parents were, however they lived, however they were treated, that was your lot in life. There was a .00x percent chance that by some miracle you would not die exactly as you were born. The United States of America, started out in the parlance of the times borrowing heavily from the ancient Greeks. The wealthy land owning white men would get together and decide how to best improve the country and maintain control of the population. Unimaginably, this population rose in spectacular fashion. Through learning and discovery, education and physical social networking, it gathered around an idea and the populous demanded they be included in this incredible experiment. The result was an explosion of innovation, the harnessing of the willpower of millions who were working toward a more perfect society in which everyone born on our soil had a chance through education and determination to live a life of meaning and comfort, free from the shackles of tyranny and oppression, able to actually dare to dream. Not only did people have these dreams enmass, but these dreams became attainable, and upon seeing this, people from around the world risked their lives pouring into this country to have an opportunity to better themselves, to accomplish, to be able to participate, and to foster the next evolution of humanity.
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The opportunity to have a say in who shaped your world and how it was shaped was worth dying for. People were killed in droves by those who didn’t want them to have a say in the process. Yet they came, they voted, and they shaped America. today, on average, only about 54% of eligible votes in presidential elections. 37% in midterm federal elections, and a significantly smaller portion in state and local elections. Our country is shaped by the collective of all of the local elections. Those elections shape the state elections, which shape the federal elections, which shape the nominee for president. We as a people are at fault for the dream failing. 90% of us really have little or no impact on how this country is run, or who the people running it represent. The tragedy is not their actions, it is that they work for us and we haven’t fired them. The tragedy is that we are so dulled, so intellectually obtuse, so complacent, that we can’t even get off the couch to mobilize as we see the world our recent ancestors fought so hard to create crumble before our eyes. We see the rights that were so hard to attain be striped away, we see the constitution striped of meaning by monetarily driven people, many of whom don’t even know what it says. Our freedoms have been eliminated so gradually, so subtly and with so much posturing and misinformation that we didn’t even protest. We are so desensitised to it now that they just past a law allowing the indefinite detainment of American Citizens without trial and we didn’t even protest. We don’t even take the time to find out anything about any of the people who actually affect our day to day lives. We base our decisions on rehearsed talking points, and poorly made attack adds, or who’s signs we see more of on the highway, and thats only the less than 25% of us who vote in local elections. Money bought our democracy, a system that at its core can not be purchased. It doesn’t matter how much money is thrown at politicians if those who take it don’t get to come back. It doesn’t matter how much money a campaign has if people actually started picking people at a local level and actually paid attention. If the pool you pull from isn’t corrupted because they have been vetted by their record by all of the American people, then the result isn’t ineffectual every single time.
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The system isn’t broken because the banks broke it, not because congress isn’t doing their job. Its not because the FED counterfeits trillions of dollars of currency to pay off the interest on money it owes that the US should never have borrowed. Its not the president, its not moral bankruptcy, abortions, gays, or wars. The system isn’t broken because corporate interests are too powerful or because government officials are corrupt. In fact, the system isn’t even broken. We are. We are complacent, uneducated, and unparticipatory. We blame everything on everyone yet we don’t even vote. We the people of the United States of America have failed ourselves and each other, we have taken hundreds of years of the pursuit of a more perfect union and the most incredible time of innovation in human history and turned it into a testament to human ineptitude, greed, sloth, and defeatism. Instead of complaining about the failings of the system, the corruption of government, or evil corporate empires, why don’t we just participate in our democracy. If we do then it will actually reflect what we the people believe. This fact is astonishingly, beautifully, powerfully simple, and yet we have forgotten. Its time to remember.
The system isn’t broken because the banks broke it, not because congress isn’t doing their job. Its not because the FED counterfeits trillions of dollars of currency to pay off the interest on money it owes that the US should never have borrowed. Its not the president, its not moral bankruptcy, abortions, gays, or wars. The system isn’t broken because corporate interests are too powerful or because government officials are corrupt. In fact, the system isn’t even broken. We are. We are complacent, uneducated, and unparticipatory. We blame everything on everyone yet we don’t even vote. We the people of the United States of America have failed ourselves and each other, we have taken hundreds of years of the pursuit of a more perfect union and the most incredible time of innovation in human history and turned it into a testament to human ineptitude, greed, sloth, and defeatism. Instead of complaining about the failings of the system, the corruption of government, or evil corporate empires, why don’t we just participate in our democracy. If we do then it will actually reflect what we the people believe. This fact is astonishingly, beautifully, powerfully simple, and yet we have forgotten. Its time to remember.
