I don't know if ever before in history has this statement had more validity than in the United States under George W Bush.
Okay...for over a year now, I've been writing about things that are "out of this world" or "beyond reality". However, this can actually be a form of escapism from the material world we exist in, because just outside our doors is a world where people are suffering and dying as a result of decisions made in this world by real people.
Before my personal journey began a year ago, I spent years writing angry diatribes and letters raging about the injustices and insanity of this society and culture. Yet nothing has changed. The sense of outrage that everyone should feel has never materialized. George W Bush is still the less-than-intelligent idealogue and religious zealot he started his regime as. And Congress is still the rubber-stamp co-conspirator in his war against humanity.
Thus for a year, I've been a somewhat casual observer of the world as I journey towards some kind of self-enlightenment perhaps. Yet in the meantime, an insane and very cruel war rages on, and people suffer and die in our own country because of the concerted effort to make the rich richer and "to hell with the rest of us".
The thing that has broken my reverie at this moment is an issue that truly exemplifies how far from the idea of a good and just society we truly are.
Cost of 41 Days of the Iraq War = Cost of 365 Days of Health Care for 10 Million Unprotected Children in AmericaThe headline itself says it all, yet there is something going on under the surface that makes this all so much worse.
Since 9/11, a group of (for the lack of a better adjective) evil people has used fear, ignorance and a perverted sense of nationalism to transform a tax-hating population into one that is willing to spend an apparently limitless amount of money to wage a war that had absolutely no connection to the events of that tragic day.
500 billion dollars is the current estimate of how much this war has cost. It is an amount of money that few people can truly grasp the full meaning of. Sums using billions of dollars are thrown around daily when talking of billionaires' wealth, the annual income of many corporations, even the quarterly profits of some corporations. So we have become relatively insensitized to what a staggering amount of money even 1 billion dollars is.
Think of 1,000 millionaires. If each one has one million dollars, their combined wealth is one billion dollars. Now think of 500,000 millionaires and you can begin to understand how much this totally senseless war has cost so far in four years.
Meanwhile, people in the country are losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their retirements and their health care. Cities and states are continuing to cut back on services that mostly affect the poor, the sick and the young.
Yet look around. People are building bigger and more luxurious houses all over the country; Corporate CEO's, Hollywood actors and sports stars are getting increasingly enormous sums of money to perform their relatively unimportant jobs, and the acquisition of consumer stuff is promoted as the highest form of patriotism. The continued worship of wealth and the consumer culture has replaced any form of true spirituality; even when applied to those wealthy religions that are increasingly popular in this country.
Even with all that, it is the incredible ease at which Americans have been swindled that is the most clever feature of the Bush era. Since he began in 2001, Bush's mantra has been to repeat over and over "cut taxes, cut taxes". As it turns out, this has really meant to cut the taxes of wealthy individuals and corporations.
Nevertheless, when you can create reality as easily as they have done with the help of the very cooperative corporate media, then it is just as easy to make Americans believe that this war has cost them nothing.
The logic is that since my taxes haven't gone up, this war can't be costing me anything, right? Sure...state, local and property have all gone up. Consumer items have continued to increase in price, but since the tax rates on that form I fill out before April 15th every year haven't gone up, everything is copasetic.
People have such an incredible disconnect regarding the costs of the war, and by using the slick little method of postponing the debts incurred until the future, the real tax victims will inevitably be our children and grandchildren. This is also assuming that the current generation in power will not live in poverty in their dotage because of the decimation of Social Security caused by the eventual necessity of paying our debts.
Finally, since the only people who soldier on in this war are for the most part those whose own sense of patriotism involves blindly trusting the men who created it, most Americans have not had to sacrifice their own children--as was the case during the Vietnam War when the draft existed.
So while we have, in fact, sacrificed for this war, it just doesn't seem like we have. The result of all this has been perhaps the best marketing scheme ever devised...and the most cynical.
With all I've read and listened to about how humanity is on the verge of an evolutionary breakthrough, I sure as hell can't see it. In general, we in this country seem to be at least as ignorant, unable to think critically, prejudiced and as gullible as ever.
I certainly don't see any possibility of a great spiritual advancement anytime soon.
Just as I certainly don't feel right just ignoring these earthly matters while passing them off as merely a product of maya, or illusion.
What is happening out there is happening to real people who are experiencing real suffering and real dying!
And what of the greedy?
Ask the 180,000 professional mercenaries who are brutalizing and killing Iraqis in our name.
Ask Halliburton about it's billions upon billions in war profits it has made from multiple no-bid contracts.
Ask the oil profiteers who have appropriated Iraqi oil for their own purposes.
Ask the many individuals who stole thousands of artifacts from the Baghdad Museum, which housed invaluable artifacts from this, the Cradle of Civilization.
Ask hundreds of other small and large defense contractors and arms dealers who have benefited from our largesse.
I'm sure they would all give a hearty "Thank You" to the American people, who have graciously fed their greed and savagery.
To them I respond just as heartily, "Fuck you very much!"