Dear, dear Sarah… we all owe you so much and as noted in a previous comment I am I awe of your outstanding courage and deep empathy for this broken but exquisite world. The fact that I can’t protect you breaks my heart. I’m not religious but I pray for you. I don’t know what else to say.
Between the climate crisis -induced fires, floods, droughts, crop failures, tornadoes, hurricanes, and mutating diseases, pollution, genocides and cancer-stage capitalism it seems we are in the beginnings of a sixth mass extinction event and no one with power wants to confront it. In fact they choose to use and exploit it to let "undesirables" die off, confuse and frighten people and further feed their own greed.
Thank you for exposing and connecting the dots, Sarah. The first step of recovery is recognizing the real problem.
I'm currently reading _The Immortal Irishman_ by Timothy Egan and the parallels between the genocide in Gaza and the one The English Crown perpetuated during The Great Famine are astounding!
The famine was intentional and it was all "hiding in plain sight" but no one looked or cared to, and when those in power did, they blamed the victims, calling them lazy, ignorant, and unworthy. So one million Irish starved to death while tons (literally tonnage) of grain and meat, enough to feed the entire country, were exported to England, because the "free market" cannot be disrupted for fear the upper and merchant class be inconvenienced.
My wife is re-reading _Hiding in Plain Sight_ and I will after finishing Egan's book. Then we'll probably take turns reading aloud (more than once) _They Knew_ between now and the election to prepare ourselves. Thankfully, we have these periodic essays as well.
In the meantime, we carry on following your advice to be kind.
Is there something we boomers can do? A Million Boomer March? Your diagnosis is spot on, but can you help us develop a treatment? I'd sacrifice the rest of my life to help my grandchildren, but all I do is write postcards and read substacks 😮💨. I am willing to do much more, but I need a leader.
I sound like Dalton in Road House but "Be nice". That's my advice for everyone because so many people feel demoralized and beaten down from the constant cruelty. Even a small gesture of kindness goes a long way these days.
Of course the full quote is "Be nice until it's time not to be nice" so there's that...
I always appreciate hearing from Boomers who lived through previous tumultuous periods and can describe what they were really like. The 1960s get romanticized and people forget how hard it was to actually live through and how the battles that were won by the people were not won easily at all. On the same note, younger people appreciate being listened to, especially when the media and politicians demonize them or dismiss their concerns. The more people with different life experiences communicate, the more likely we will be to find solutions and a more expansive community -- for organizing for political change, but also for survival. I'm too much of a loner to be an organizer so I recommend Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba's book for activism tips.
I love you 💕 In a times of hatred and fear love is revolutionary. Kindness matters! And gentle reminder: Self defense is not violence. Read that again...
"The 60's, our decade of bereavement. How different this country might have been, ...except for a few ounces of lead".
The 60's was the real murder of the American Dream, "That this nation might live up to its true ideals". The part that is romanticized, (rightly so), was The Spirit".
As Hunter Thompson said, "but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . ."
He actually summed it all up perfectly in that small piece of writing.
Sage words again. This brings to mind a favourite quote from Moby Dick’ -such large virtue lurks in these small things’. As you’ve said if you can’t be brave be kind. Take care.
This reminds me of a American Story Core program called One Small Step, where you meet with someone opposite you politically or religiously or otherwise and you get together and come to common ground, it's great. Communication can bring understanding. Check it out: https://storycorps.org/discover/onesmallstep/
agree- we can not go wrong listening to those much younger than us (i am many years older than you lol). i always enjoy hearing what young kids, high schoolers, and those getting started in adult life think - often more creative. and we must change paths.
The most effective movements today seem to come from collective action, not the anointment of a single leader. Black Lives Matters; the successful union organizing at Amazon and Starbucks; the groundswell of antiZionist Jewish organizing -- all of those movement have issued from collectives of people. Looking for the "next RFK" or "next MLK Jr." feels like a holdover from the patriarchal "great man" model, which is so problematic, both because of the pitfalls of ceding power to idols, and because when those idols are killed or delegitimized, the movement tanks with them.
Jfc😕 It's always worse than I originally thought. I cannot tell you how much I hate that. The family names may change down through history but the fascist bloodlines remain the same.
American democracy is being sacrificed to the religion of "bipartisanship".
Aid for Israel is 'bipartisan' while aid for Ukraine, defending itself against Russian invasion is decidedly not 'bipartisan'.
Democrats just supported the odious Speaker of the House in a show of 'bipartisanship'.
Schumer just announced a 'bipartisan' coalition of unremarkable, basically unknown Senators (the Senate AI Working Group) who are responsible for the development of the Roadmap for AI Policy (read the Akin Gump press release to see a quick synopsis). When a vulture law firm like Akin extols your policy you should definitely rethink it).
So when I read this I shuddered for you and your family - “I’ve got another document on my laptop that’s called "Death Threats 2024.” That’s what happens when you make everyone mad at once. I believe this is what our legislature calls “bipartisanship.”
Bipartisanship is a cloak used to hide bad policy.
We need to be protected from bipartisanship - at the national level as well as at the personal level.
Please stay safe, Sarah, and keep doing what you do. We are all better off for it.
Thank you! And yes, the way you phrased it — “American democracy is being sacrificed to the religion of bipartisanship” — is perfect. I think Americans are conditioned to assume “bipartisanship” is positive because of the horrendous hyperpartisanship of the 1990s Gingrich era and especially the Tea Party years after Obama was elected. But a lot of that alleged feuding is WWE style theater, especially in the last six or so years. What they market as “bipartisanship” is often “corrupt collaboration against the public good.”
I cannot find the quote, but P J O’Rourke said something to this effect “A law can be both bad and evil. They call that bipartisan.” Bipartisanship gave us the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, and the war on drugs. All three were bad and evil.
From Seymour Hersh Substack: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to the October 7 attack by Hamas with months of devastating collective punishment for Gaza. It troubles me to report that he has emerged as a far more formidable leader than President Joe Biden, who, after months of indecision, has finally ordered a delay of delivery of US bombs to Israel. That delay has yet to take place and it will have no impact on the final stages of the Israeli army’s hunt for the Hamas leadership in Rafah.
There is so much I already know about the Russian Mafiya, and much, much more that I need to learn. There *is* one thing about it that is utterly consistent, though: The Russian Mafiya is like kudzu; it is very easy to open the front door of your house to let them inside, possibly even unintentionally and without knowledge of the danger, and impossible to get rid of them once they've taken over. Even a minor contact with them means that you're stuck in an eternal nightmare.
And it's hard for people like us to explain it to those who don't or can't follow it as closely as we do. For the Mafiya-naïve, it must sound like an outrageously impossible conspiracy theory instead of a real, concrete, threat not only to US national security, but to the security of the world. And the fact that it is interconnected with other current problems such as propaganda, nihilism (the abandonment of truth), climate change, racism, misogyny, greed, the devaluation of human life, scarcity, and the survival of democracy, makes it even more difficult to absorb.
At the moment I'm trying to finish a book (there are about 50 pages left; the long section I'm on now is about the Brezhnev years in which there were mass arrests of the Sixties Group in Ukraine), but starting tomorrow I'll start looking through all the links in this fine article.
Feeling guilty over my tax dollars being used to aid the slaughter of about 8,000 children in Gaza, I have made donations to ANERA, an organization that provides food and other necessities to people in Gaza and areas nearby. I have written to my representative about Gaza numerous times, without receiving any response. ( I did get a response on bad service from the USPS) If you work in the halls of congress, critical comments are not allowed about Israel. We are locked in , despite what popular sentiments there may be about the genocide/ ethnic cleansing going on over there.
Thank you, thank you, thank you... Standing in the face of all this and calling it out, in every way we can, with your words here again reminding and encouraging a lot of us I think not just me that we are not alone in these myriad ways we are clearly seeing, and how our seeing is also supporting each other... 🙏🌻
Thanks! And thank you and everyone else here for responding. It can be lonely when there are atrocities being committed by different groups of people, and instead of saying flat-out that the atrocity is *always* wrong, people prevaricate depending on which group is committing or attempting to justify the atrocity. It's both maddening and very sad.
Keats wasn't referring to the exposure of awful, dangerous truths about a transnational crime syndicate, of course, but his famous lines apply in this sense: no matter how horrifying, ugly, and ominous the truths you speak, your willingness to speak them is a form of moral beauty and courage. Thank you again, Sarah, and may the love of your mother and your children and all of us grateful readers bear you up as you bear such crucial witness.
Sarah speaks to truth and that is what is so horrible. My question always is where are the people with courage? I am so discouraged that things are like this. There is no one coming to save us. Our entire government is rotten. All the lies spewed at school about equality and freedom. It truly is a sham and a joke.
I feel your disillusionment. A lot of my energy these days is aimed at figuring out how to coexist with the knowledge that absolutely no one is coming to save us, and that there's no "going back." We will never live in a time when 34,000 Palestinians weren't slaughtered with US complicity; or when the years between 2016-2024 didn't expose the bipartisan rot that will stymie every effort to repair our government. This doesn't mean things won't change, but they definitely won't change via the channels we were trained to look to.
As the war in Gaza goes on, it’s pretty obvious that keeping Israel safe and getting rid of Hamas is not the intention. Just outright mass murder of Palestinians, and they want to normalize. How horrific!
And I suspect a lot of the pro-Israel politicians in our government want it to keep happening because they do want to see innocent people (especially Jewish people) be on the receiving end of antisemitism. I see how mass murders of the 20th Century could happen after all because we’re reliving it. But what our country’s diverse cohort young people are doing to keep this issue as top of mind while people in power try to encourage the rest of us to look away is admirable.
I can’t bring myself to vote for either Biden or Trump in November, sorry. There are just certain red lines, like genocide, that I won’t cross.
There is an impulse to excess in the human animal that, it seems, very few other animals share. The impulse to take more than needed, no matter the negative impact on others. GREED is naturally frowned upon within trusted units like families but is sadly seen by our dominant culture as both right, proper and an acceptable means towards success - the "Nature, tooth and claw", "Survival of the fittest" meme now proven an over simplification: altruism exists even in animals. In the heady trajectory of comprehensive American dominance of a post-war world, The "American Dream", itself a self-obsessed dream of personal GREED, has become the dominant narrative within Western and, increasingly, global cultures. The endless search for MORE wealth and power is seen as SUCCESS while any facet of human endeavour that can't be "Monetized" into profit is discarded as worthless. We have become a planet that, to paraphrase Wilde: "Knows the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing". It's why we're STILL not acting on Climate change because the Oil Industry wants even more profit, no matter the global consequences and so buys politicians for pennies to ensure nothing moves beyond placating words and "good intentions".
It is within this Greed-centric context that Trump and his ilk have so thrived and been essentially beyond consequences. Almost all heads of large Corporations are now greedy sociopaths because the humane ones have been replaced.
To be fait, the Greedy have always been with us as a small but virulent minority, but other societies kept them in check by emphasising a more sharing and caring philosophy, with varying amounts of success. Since the cruel trick played on the World when Nixon floated the US$ in Aug 15th, 1971 leading to endlessly printable, so essentially "Free Money", the signals have been in support of Gordon Gecko's "Greed Is Good" ever since. The inevitable result: 8 men own as much as the poorest $4 Billion on the planet.
The motivation of all Big Business is now, entirely, GREED. No other considerations need be entertained. Like the final, painful moves of a game of Monopoly, the world nears the logical culmination of GREED - One totally nasty, totally selfish person owning EVERYTHING - is now rapidly approaching. Consider the successes of Blackrock, Vanguard & State Street. Things have NEVER been better for them, even though their amassing of control impoverishes us all.
I contend for every ill we try, as societies, to correct; for every brave, hopeful measure we dare suggest, The power of GREED will render it useless. The challenge of addressing Greed's excesses is, therefore, a prerequisite to addressing any other issues. I have ideas as to how Greed could be addressed but that's for another day. Thank you so much Sarah for your light on the hill. I know it's lonely and I feel your pain - but you are right and they are wrong and history will eventually show that to be true :-)
Human animal, or descendants of "Western civilization?" Other models for organizing human life exist; and many more existed before colonialism and enslavement erased them. We should not be despondent about people, just about the systems that shape how we live today.
I'd argue the ability to embrace greed is within all humans. Some civilisations suppress it, others encourage it. Much suppression is thinly-disguised class-morality (Don't reach beyond your "station"). Western civilisations range from democratic socialism in the Scandinavian examples, through slightly less socialistic systems elsewhere in Europe to the overt, fully individualistic encouragement of greed as the path to the "success" in the US, as exemplified by the tenets implicit in the "American Dream" - personal wealth and power regardless of the impact on others. So I don't think "Western Civilisation" can be pigeon-holed into a single solution to the individual vs the collective problem
As President Jimmy Carter told Thom Hartmann eight years ago:
“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org. Very important to check your status, as purges happen often.
Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”
The Last Time Oligarchs Tried to Take Over America It Led to Civil War
Dear, dear Sarah… we all owe you so much and as noted in a previous comment I am I awe of your outstanding courage and deep empathy for this broken but exquisite world. The fact that I can’t protect you breaks my heart. I’m not religious but I pray for you. I don’t know what else to say.
Thank you, I really appreciate that
Yes. She at least expresses the sentiments of, "Sarah helps everyone. Who helps Sarah?"
This exactly dovetails with what I was telling you. And so I always say, "Love Ya",
...and mean it.
The truth is so goddamned ….unfortunate.
But please don’t ever stop telling us.
So hard to believe how so much has been normalized while we sit on the sidelines with our jaws dragging the floor
Between the climate crisis -induced fires, floods, droughts, crop failures, tornadoes, hurricanes, and mutating diseases, pollution, genocides and cancer-stage capitalism it seems we are in the beginnings of a sixth mass extinction event and no one with power wants to confront it. In fact they choose to use and exploit it to let "undesirables" die off, confuse and frighten people and further feed their own greed.
Thank you for exposing and connecting the dots, Sarah. The first step of recovery is recognizing the real problem.
I'm currently reading _The Immortal Irishman_ by Timothy Egan and the parallels between the genocide in Gaza and the one The English Crown perpetuated during The Great Famine are astounding!
The famine was intentional and it was all "hiding in plain sight" but no one looked or cared to, and when those in power did, they blamed the victims, calling them lazy, ignorant, and unworthy. So one million Irish starved to death while tons (literally tonnage) of grain and meat, enough to feed the entire country, were exported to England, because the "free market" cannot be disrupted for fear the upper and merchant class be inconvenienced.
My wife is re-reading _Hiding in Plain Sight_ and I will after finishing Egan's book. Then we'll probably take turns reading aloud (more than once) _They Knew_ between now and the election to prepare ourselves. Thankfully, we have these periodic essays as well.
In the meantime, we carry on following your advice to be kind.
Is there something we boomers can do? A Million Boomer March? Your diagnosis is spot on, but can you help us develop a treatment? I'd sacrifice the rest of my life to help my grandchildren, but all I do is write postcards and read substacks 😮💨. I am willing to do much more, but I need a leader.
I sound like Dalton in Road House but "Be nice". That's my advice for everyone because so many people feel demoralized and beaten down from the constant cruelty. Even a small gesture of kindness goes a long way these days.
Of course the full quote is "Be nice until it's time not to be nice" so there's that...
I always appreciate hearing from Boomers who lived through previous tumultuous periods and can describe what they were really like. The 1960s get romanticized and people forget how hard it was to actually live through and how the battles that were won by the people were not won easily at all. On the same note, younger people appreciate being listened to, especially when the media and politicians demonize them or dismiss their concerns. The more people with different life experiences communicate, the more likely we will be to find solutions and a more expansive community -- for organizing for political change, but also for survival. I'm too much of a loner to be an organizer so I recommend Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba's book for activism tips.
I love you 💕 In a times of hatred and fear love is revolutionary. Kindness matters! And gentle reminder: Self defense is not violence. Read that again...
"The 60's, our decade of bereavement. How different this country might have been, ...except for a few ounces of lead".
The 60's was the real murder of the American Dream, "That this nation might live up to its true ideals". The part that is romanticized, (rightly so), was The Spirit".
As Hunter Thompson said, "but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . ."
He actually summed it all up perfectly in that small piece of writing.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074-strange-memories-on-this-nervous-night-in-las-vegas-five
Sage words again. This brings to mind a favourite quote from Moby Dick’ -such large virtue lurks in these small things’. As you’ve said if you can’t be brave be kind. Take care.
I thought you'd be taller.
This reminds me of a American Story Core program called One Small Step, where you meet with someone opposite you politically or religiously or otherwise and you get together and come to common ground, it's great. Communication can bring understanding. Check it out: https://storycorps.org/discover/onesmallstep/
agree- we can not go wrong listening to those much younger than us (i am many years older than you lol). i always enjoy hearing what young kids, high schoolers, and those getting started in adult life think - often more creative. and we must change paths.
I feel exactly the same way...Thank you for asking this question...
We definitely need an organizer/ leader. I've asked Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Any other leaders come to mind?🤔 We should do this.
The most effective movements today seem to come from collective action, not the anointment of a single leader. Black Lives Matters; the successful union organizing at Amazon and Starbucks; the groundswell of antiZionist Jewish organizing -- all of those movement have issued from collectives of people. Looking for the "next RFK" or "next MLK Jr." feels like a holdover from the patriarchal "great man" model, which is so problematic, both because of the pitfalls of ceding power to idols, and because when those idols are killed or delegitimized, the movement tanks with them.
Jfc😕 It's always worse than I originally thought. I cannot tell you how much I hate that. The family names may change down through history but the fascist bloodlines remain the same.
Yes exactly
Their time is going to come...
Thank you for keeping me sane in this fucked up reality 🫂
so true as i am learning. and agree - so much worse than i thought
That always seems to be the case😕
American democracy is being sacrificed to the religion of "bipartisanship".
Aid for Israel is 'bipartisan' while aid for Ukraine, defending itself against Russian invasion is decidedly not 'bipartisan'.
Democrats just supported the odious Speaker of the House in a show of 'bipartisanship'.
Schumer just announced a 'bipartisan' coalition of unremarkable, basically unknown Senators (the Senate AI Working Group) who are responsible for the development of the Roadmap for AI Policy (read the Akin Gump press release to see a quick synopsis). When a vulture law firm like Akin extols your policy you should definitely rethink it).
So when I read this I shuddered for you and your family - “I’ve got another document on my laptop that’s called "Death Threats 2024.” That’s what happens when you make everyone mad at once. I believe this is what our legislature calls “bipartisanship.”
Bipartisanship is a cloak used to hide bad policy.
We need to be protected from bipartisanship - at the national level as well as at the personal level.
Please stay safe, Sarah, and keep doing what you do. We are all better off for it.
Thank you! And yes, the way you phrased it — “American democracy is being sacrificed to the religion of bipartisanship” — is perfect. I think Americans are conditioned to assume “bipartisanship” is positive because of the horrendous hyperpartisanship of the 1990s Gingrich era and especially the Tea Party years after Obama was elected. But a lot of that alleged feuding is WWE style theater, especially in the last six or so years. What they market as “bipartisanship” is often “corrupt collaboration against the public good.”
George Carlin : “ The word bipartisan means some larger than usual deception is being carried out.”
I cannot find the quote, but P J O’Rourke said something to this effect “A law can be both bad and evil. They call that bipartisan.” Bipartisanship gave us the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, and the war on drugs. All three were bad and evil.
Yes!
From Seymour Hersh Substack: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to the October 7 attack by Hamas with months of devastating collective punishment for Gaza. It troubles me to report that he has emerged as a far more formidable leader than President Joe Biden, who, after months of indecision, has finally ordered a delay of delivery of US bombs to Israel. That delay has yet to take place and it will have no impact on the final stages of the Israeli army’s hunt for the Hamas leadership in Rafah.
There is so much I already know about the Russian Mafiya, and much, much more that I need to learn. There *is* one thing about it that is utterly consistent, though: The Russian Mafiya is like kudzu; it is very easy to open the front door of your house to let them inside, possibly even unintentionally and without knowledge of the danger, and impossible to get rid of them once they've taken over. Even a minor contact with them means that you're stuck in an eternal nightmare.
And it's hard for people like us to explain it to those who don't or can't follow it as closely as we do. For the Mafiya-naïve, it must sound like an outrageously impossible conspiracy theory instead of a real, concrete, threat not only to US national security, but to the security of the world. And the fact that it is interconnected with other current problems such as propaganda, nihilism (the abandonment of truth), climate change, racism, misogyny, greed, the devaluation of human life, scarcity, and the survival of democracy, makes it even more difficult to absorb.
At the moment I'm trying to finish a book (there are about 50 pages left; the long section I'm on now is about the Brezhnev years in which there were mass arrests of the Sixties Group in Ukraine), but starting tomorrow I'll start looking through all the links in this fine article.
Take care!
This mama, who is old enough to be your mama, says you are awesomely, incredibly, brave. Keep safe, Sarah.
Thank you!
Feeling guilty over my tax dollars being used to aid the slaughter of about 8,000 children in Gaza, I have made donations to ANERA, an organization that provides food and other necessities to people in Gaza and areas nearby. I have written to my representative about Gaza numerous times, without receiving any response. ( I did get a response on bad service from the USPS) If you work in the halls of congress, critical comments are not allowed about Israel. We are locked in , despite what popular sentiments there may be about the genocide/ ethnic cleansing going on over there.
Thank you, thank you, thank you... Standing in the face of all this and calling it out, in every way we can, with your words here again reminding and encouraging a lot of us I think not just me that we are not alone in these myriad ways we are clearly seeing, and how our seeing is also supporting each other... 🙏🌻
Thanks! And thank you and everyone else here for responding. It can be lonely when there are atrocities being committed by different groups of people, and instead of saying flat-out that the atrocity is *always* wrong, people prevaricate depending on which group is committing or attempting to justify the atrocity. It's both maddening and very sad.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Keats wasn't referring to the exposure of awful, dangerous truths about a transnational crime syndicate, of course, but his famous lines apply in this sense: no matter how horrifying, ugly, and ominous the truths you speak, your willingness to speak them is a form of moral beauty and courage. Thank you again, Sarah, and may the love of your mother and your children and all of us grateful readers bear you up as you bear such crucial witness.
Sarah speaks to truth and that is what is so horrible. My question always is where are the people with courage? I am so discouraged that things are like this. There is no one coming to save us. Our entire government is rotten. All the lies spewed at school about equality and freedom. It truly is a sham and a joke.
I feel your disillusionment. A lot of my energy these days is aimed at figuring out how to coexist with the knowledge that absolutely no one is coming to save us, and that there's no "going back." We will never live in a time when 34,000 Palestinians weren't slaughtered with US complicity; or when the years between 2016-2024 didn't expose the bipartisan rot that will stymie every effort to repair our government. This doesn't mean things won't change, but they definitely won't change via the channels we were trained to look to.
As the war in Gaza goes on, it’s pretty obvious that keeping Israel safe and getting rid of Hamas is not the intention. Just outright mass murder of Palestinians, and they want to normalize. How horrific!
And I suspect a lot of the pro-Israel politicians in our government want it to keep happening because they do want to see innocent people (especially Jewish people) be on the receiving end of antisemitism. I see how mass murders of the 20th Century could happen after all because we’re reliving it. But what our country’s diverse cohort young people are doing to keep this issue as top of mind while people in power try to encourage the rest of us to look away is admirable.
I can’t bring myself to vote for either Biden or Trump in November, sorry. There are just certain red lines, like genocide, that I won’t cross.
There is an impulse to excess in the human animal that, it seems, very few other animals share. The impulse to take more than needed, no matter the negative impact on others. GREED is naturally frowned upon within trusted units like families but is sadly seen by our dominant culture as both right, proper and an acceptable means towards success - the "Nature, tooth and claw", "Survival of the fittest" meme now proven an over simplification: altruism exists even in animals. In the heady trajectory of comprehensive American dominance of a post-war world, The "American Dream", itself a self-obsessed dream of personal GREED, has become the dominant narrative within Western and, increasingly, global cultures. The endless search for MORE wealth and power is seen as SUCCESS while any facet of human endeavour that can't be "Monetized" into profit is discarded as worthless. We have become a planet that, to paraphrase Wilde: "Knows the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing". It's why we're STILL not acting on Climate change because the Oil Industry wants even more profit, no matter the global consequences and so buys politicians for pennies to ensure nothing moves beyond placating words and "good intentions".
It is within this Greed-centric context that Trump and his ilk have so thrived and been essentially beyond consequences. Almost all heads of large Corporations are now greedy sociopaths because the humane ones have been replaced.
To be fait, the Greedy have always been with us as a small but virulent minority, but other societies kept them in check by emphasising a more sharing and caring philosophy, with varying amounts of success. Since the cruel trick played on the World when Nixon floated the US$ in Aug 15th, 1971 leading to endlessly printable, so essentially "Free Money", the signals have been in support of Gordon Gecko's "Greed Is Good" ever since. The inevitable result: 8 men own as much as the poorest $4 Billion on the planet.
The motivation of all Big Business is now, entirely, GREED. No other considerations need be entertained. Like the final, painful moves of a game of Monopoly, the world nears the logical culmination of GREED - One totally nasty, totally selfish person owning EVERYTHING - is now rapidly approaching. Consider the successes of Blackrock, Vanguard & State Street. Things have NEVER been better for them, even though their amassing of control impoverishes us all.
I contend for every ill we try, as societies, to correct; for every brave, hopeful measure we dare suggest, The power of GREED will render it useless. The challenge of addressing Greed's excesses is, therefore, a prerequisite to addressing any other issues. I have ideas as to how Greed could be addressed but that's for another day. Thank you so much Sarah for your light on the hill. I know it's lonely and I feel your pain - but you are right and they are wrong and history will eventually show that to be true :-)
Human animal, or descendants of "Western civilization?" Other models for organizing human life exist; and many more existed before colonialism and enslavement erased them. We should not be despondent about people, just about the systems that shape how we live today.
I'd argue the ability to embrace greed is within all humans. Some civilisations suppress it, others encourage it. Much suppression is thinly-disguised class-morality (Don't reach beyond your "station"). Western civilisations range from democratic socialism in the Scandinavian examples, through slightly less socialistic systems elsewhere in Europe to the overt, fully individualistic encouragement of greed as the path to the "success" in the US, as exemplified by the tenets implicit in the "American Dream" - personal wealth and power regardless of the impact on others. So I don't think "Western Civilisation" can be pigeon-holed into a single solution to the individual vs the collective problem
As President Jimmy Carter told Thom Hartmann eight years ago:
“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org. Very important to check your status, as purges happen often.
Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”
The Last Time Oligarchs Tried to Take Over America It Led to Civil War
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-last-time-oligarchs-tried-to-f57?r=1eqjf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2ExJhRkbV3Jyt03d81G5sHkvgI-gA8iJfmU5wkC79Qxfo8mlPja8GJ_W0_aem_AdRnGQDopTl5Abbg9gYOtGEc_T2kUc85sA1ITZzbUrkOztX-JWSeBwIeDKL4DxrO8fi0HsRPXlwRmrqVD36J_d9M
Would be super cool if Sarah and Thom got together and conversed. Would be must see/listen to event.
We did a few times!
Some videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2z1PCKIvEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB_GTH6aJuA
Thank you. Though 2 and 3 years ago, still relevant today. May he invite you again sooner than later as your conversations are smart and enlightening.
Edwin, thanks for this Thom Hartmann post. Just clicked on it and am going to read it as soon as I hit POST here. Cheers!
You're welcome.