Fear

Hitler was afraid.

There are many passages in Hitler's speeches and writings where he stokes fear in others, and betrays his own fears. Over and over again, he paints the specter of an apocalypse that will come about if the Communists or the Jews get their way. The world will descend back into utter primordial darkness. All the legacies of human civilization will vanish from the earth. Etc. In the end, of course, he did more than most to realize and bring down upon his own country a desolation and destruction somewhat resembling the very thing he feared.

Likewise, America and Americans are in fear. Zionists live in perpetual fear. White supremacists in general live in fear. There are endless enemies, "savages", "terrorists", always threatening the descent of the world back into primordial darkness. And, like Hitler, like the Nazis, like all the other empires of the past that eventually decayed and collapsed, we are doing more than most to precipitate the very descent of the planet into the hellish dissolution that we most fear. The Pentagon is the biggest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet. The very quest to protect "our way of life" now threatens all humanity and much of the rest of life on Earth with annihilation.

None of this is to say that all fears are exactly alike, or all equally irrational. Arguably, the fears of the Zionists bear some foundation in reality more than did, say, Hitler's. Osama Bin Laden did bear malice and kill innocent people. Even if the Cold War really was largely a fairy tale told expressly to enrich and empower the USA military industrial complex, still and all, Stalin was not-such-a-nice guy. Maybe in some ways the Dulles boys did have a good bogeyman straight out of central casting. But was it really necessary to use that as a pretext to subvert and overthrow an endless list of supposed "dominos", from Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (God forbid United Fruit should be forced to start paying taxes on its banana plantations! Better fight the Red Menace over there before they come over here!) to Mossadegh in Iran, and a thousand places in between. Was (or rather, IS) it really necessary to bomb and blockade Gaza to the point of starvation for almost a decade? Is there not a disproportion in all of this imperial rage, blindness, and mayhem not dissimilar to the worst excesses of the worst dictators in history?

So what's the alternative?

How about face our fears? And I mean our worst fears. What would happen if we just gave it all back?

Give the Palestinians back their country. Give the Native peoples everywhere back their countries.

The horror of it all!

Except, could it really be worse than the place we are headed now? Climate science is telling us we are headed to a very dark place indeed. The future of human survival may very well be at stake, and possibly within a few short years, not even decades.

So imagine we took a supreme leap "backwards", and opted to give it all up. What would that look like?

People are simpleminded creatures, for the most part. That's part of why they are so easily frightened. So I should hasten to point out that literally "giving it all back" is not even really possible, because ... to exactly whom do you give what back? The original Native peoples of the Americas, for example, had no use for oil refineries, or speedboats, or tv sets...

So what I really mean by "give it all back" cannot be taken in the Biblical literalist, "God-created-heaven-and-Earth-in-seven-days" sense. But it can mean this: begrudging no one anything, and giving up the notion that we are in any way superior or more deserving of a decent and fulfilling life than any other being on this Earth. Putting down our defenses of "our way of life", and instead living and walking in humility and a sense of gratitude and service to others.

As silly and simpleminded as most people are, I actually think that's a point in such a creed's favor. Because what humanity needs right now is in fact a whole lot less cleverness and calculation. Our cleverness and calculation is in fact what has probably been most conspiring towards our own demise. We are half again too clever for own good.

The simple fact of the matter is that our collective survival depends more on the humble and simpleminded people getting the upperhand than our maniacal "betters" getting theirs, they who are not perpetually scheming for grandiosity and personal advantage, they who most easily and readily take heed of Christ's admonition, "Consider the lilies of the field: they neither pique nor pine, yet even King Solomon himself had not such a raiment as these".