Let's at least be honest with ourselves and each other from now on. We each turn a blind eye to our 'leaders' who action killing and torturing people, murdering and stealing on our behalf because it gives us this lovely comfort zone of I-phones and fresh food and cheap products and wealth. We love this comfort zone so much that we are ok with our leaders killing people far away, keeping poor people 'over there' enslaved and destroying environments and species across the water and even at home so that we can exist in our lovely coddled bubble. We can't pretend we don't know, and we sometimes care a bit, maybe enough to click a petition on Facebook - but even the so-called awake ones, even those of us who know quite a lot about what's going on, do almost nothing about it.
I want more from us!
Anita Roddick told me that the only way to turn this around is through the 'vigilante consumer'. That unless we choose more carefully what we spend our money on, nearly every penny we spend is unconsciously funding the brutality. We need to know, when we buy at a certain store or fill up our cars at a certain petrol station, who we are funding, because if we all decided to be totally clean about where we spend our money every day, the companies and structures that perpetrate this destruction would have no more funds to carry on. There's a famous quote 'if you think you're too small to be effective try going to bed with a mosquito'.
Russell Brand has also urged everyone to stop voting for these puppet servants of the Corporate oligarchs. Once again, if we don't vote them in or give them our money, the nightmare ends. There's space for something new. We fear that it would be a worse chaos - but what could be worse than this?
We clearly need an alternative, we need to BUILD THE NEW. We need a system that fairly allows hard work to be rewarded but never leaves anyone without the basic food and shelter and education that our resources can provide. Noam Chomsky told me that we are all educated to believe that 'there's nothing we can do', that our 'free' culture's Media is directed to really brainwash us into feeling powerless because in a culture like ours 'you can do A LOT'. He calls it 'the engineering of consent' and says that all through school 'we are directed to believe that success means becoming a millionaire....but there are other values'.
So...shall we? Can we make a start by foregoing some creature comforts so that less power and money streams into the hands of the Corporate oligarchs? What would you be prepared to give up? I'm writing this on an Apple computer, probably made in a Chinese sweat shop where someone jumped out of the window to their death due to horrific working conditions.
The crazy thing is that it could happen tomorrow if we collectively decided as one force to go for it. I get so excited for that moment, now that we have the internet we can instantly communicate as one. Is that day coming?
I've stopped eating meat because the factory farming industry is inhumane and backward.
I haven't stopped using petrol in my car.
I have started buying my vegetables locally and am learning how to grow my own, starting our own veggie patch when we move home in May...
...but I still buy some products from the big chains who sell aisles and aisles of toxic, processed food and care nothing for yours or your family's health.
Sourcing things locally seems to be a good start. Please list for the readers some first steps we can all take, achievable steps which will get the snowball rolling.
