By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn’t matter whether its been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades. The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn’t see before.”
— Sharon Salzburg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
If we read the unvarnished news of the day, it seems apparent that we live in a dangerous world. As Eric has pointed out, speculative remedies to defuse the meltdown at Fukishima illustrate the inadvisability of humankind playing with nuclear fire. You truly CAN’T fool Mother Nature, who makes the effect of our carelessness obvious: the for-profit agenda that has given us destructive factory farming and genetically modified food, ruinous oil leaks as a matter of course, floating islands of trash creating dead zones in our oceans and a fragile water table exploited by corporate thugs. Throw in sinkholes and super-storms and threats of pandemics and no one can deny that we’ve got a planet in emergency and a species (ours) in trouble.
Except we do deny it, don’t we? The majority may agree on climate change but we turn our heads when it comes to how we got here. Each of the effects listed above are consequences of some human interference with natural order. Each might have been avoided to a large extent if we’d been good stewards of the land, respectful of all life and aware of our responsibility to future generations. The irony here is that many of us are unaware that we ARE responsible for much of what’s gone wrong, not just because our educational systems failed to give us an understanding of the consequences of unfettered capitalism, but also because the corporate entities responsible for these offenses operate in secret.
The secrets we keep define us. Some we keep from others, some we keep from ourselves. Those kept by our business class and government are particularly toxic to the social order, twisting rational thought and allowing for the distractions used to cover the trail of cookie crumbs leading back to truth. I was amused by the ledeline on an article dealing with animal rights activists and the Freedom of Information Act this week, titled “The FBI Doesn’t Want You To Know Why It Won’t Tell You Its Secrets.” It appears that there are secrets about these secrets that are — you guessed it — secret, and all in the name of national security, which is the mysterious black hole in which all secret-keeping resides.