We live in a universal casino. Our leaders have left us to cope with greed and gun violence. Policy wonks throw a dice to make decisions on what needs to be done as we shall watch our institutions fail, fall apart, dissolve into the meanest most base outcomes.
Climate change is happening and we are selling oil mining opportunities to other nations. Provinces are giving up on health care. Everything has been corrupted except for the people who have brought children into the world, the people who are parents, teachers, nurses, health practitioners, and the philosophers who are anxious about the well-being of people.
Options for our shared future have been sold today as they are often sold by those we trust to use their power responsibly, and the fifth estate scraping by with whatever stories they can get to print, often giving up on real journalism while fascist nations penalize reporters who are trying to do a good job.
The mood now suggests that to care about the world is naive and dangerous, better to make a quick buck if you can then hide in your basement, castle or another planet. Virtue is dead. Soon we shall all have guns and trucks. We shall forget music and art, nature, comfort and warmth.
Scenes of fear, greed, hunger and spite as shown in Les Miserables, The Handmaids Tale, 1984, dominate our entertainment. Those brave souls who attempt to save lives cannot cope forever with the storms of public fear and rage. When we run away to somewhere safe we find there is no safe place. Everything becomes open territory after civil society has been destroyed in our imaginations.
The usefulness of life will capitalize the streets. Pornography will be the public commons. Torture becomes live entertainment. Children kidnapped as slave labour or left to starve on the streets.
Why? Because the public imagination has been co-opted into the authority of the market and every generation is fed with contempt for any idea that suggests we should care for one another. That each one of us is responsible for the moral guidance of our society. That doesn't mean control, it means influence. How can you and I influence a society when kindness is replaced with a gun?
It's a problem of astronomical proportions. All our power begins in the imagination. If we cannot believe that we have something good to offer the world it's because we have been brainwashed with fear and hatred. Contempt for life.
Institutions that once protected us have become redundant and the only noise a contest on how to get control, to win, get powerful. Do you think this is an accident that we came to this? Be hopeless or find the "enemy" and kill them.
And while we feel like we are fighting for our lives, we seek scapegoats, our sentiments become more fixated on the enemy, we (yes we because these are sold to us as solutions) have chosen.
The endgame becomes the war. Our passions which might have loved and helped those who are at risk are funnelled into killing. This has been the pattern since the Roman empire. Hate and torture are the "answers" to fix that which is our humanity - fragile feelings, lovingkindness, empathy, critical thinking and feeling.
Sentiments that build community, the village, the family, our cousins and our elders are ridiculed as soft while guns and bombs wipe the slate of our senses, so that all we see and seek is power.
Then we are shocked when a teenage boy brings a gun into an elementary school and kills twenty children!
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