Suffering and Injustice Revisited
Print by Leopoldo Mendéz
Here’s something I wrote in 2014, two years before Trump was elected:
‘Suffering and Injustice - Whose Awe, Truth, and Hope Will Prevail?'
Trump and what has now become his Republican Party epitomize the very defiance of Humankind’s ‘cultural human nature’ I was writing about five years ago.
But, as the saying goes, the band plays on. After all, who reads, much less heeds, the run-on sentences of an agnostic-atheist philosophical ethnographer? Much less one not affiliated with a major university, think tank, or political party. An old retired guy who happily spent most of his working life in Trump’s so-called ‘shithole’ countries. A language blessed/cursed primate whose every thought and written word is not peer-reviewed or influenced by a craving for academic tenure and book deals? An unorthodox emotional guy, a sometimes loose cannon?
When politics in a society, that of the US in particular, becomes as it is now, bent irretrievably to the will of those seeking racial and religious supremacy, absolute power, and obscene wealth accumulation to such a degree that the social system is legally and morally unaccountable and unreformable, it may just be the time for unorthodoxy, emotion and letting cannons roll on decks. Arrr! Avast and stand to shipmates, the cannons may at times point at thee!
If such people as Trump and the current incarnation of the GOP continue in power and the path Humankind is now on to capitalist and ecological collapse remains irreversible, as many far more knowledgeable and wiser than me believe it will, our descendants in the US are very likely to live in a theocratic totalitarian society similar to that depicted in Hulu TV’s take on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale novel, or worse.
There are good, evidence-supported arguments by eminent academics and on many credible Internet sites saying that the US may very likely be headed toward such a Gileadian society.
If you think that’s too far fetched try and recall the certainty you felt in early-mid 2016 that Trump had no chance of winning the presidency. Then, the numb disbelief, fear and dread you felt the day after his victory, and have felt to a greater or lesser degree every day since. Those feelings will be nothing compared to the hysteria, panic and criminality each of us will see in others and experience ourselves if/when the global economy and ecology collapse.
The 2020 US election will be a crucial turning point for the US and likely, in turn, for all of Humankind - a survival-sustainability or extinction-planet death fork in the evolutionary road of Homo sapiens and Earth.
All humanistic and true freedom and justice-committed Americans, regardless of their political and religious affiliations or leanings, must resist, as a moral and ecological duty, efforts to take us further down the road to catastrophe and totalitarianism we are currently on.
Resistance must begin now, simultaneously on at least four fronts:
1) take nonviolent action to disrupt all actions of all those, in the private and public sectors, who refuse to immediately and fully address the current catastrophic economic and ecological threat to Humankind and Earth;
2) take political action at all levels to oppose, not nominate and electorally defeat all political facilitators of the current emergency regardless of their party affiliation;
3) support all science, technology and governance efforts to reverse all current harmful ecological and economic actions through a Green NewDeal;
4) support all media, activist organizations and education efforts that are committed to 1-3 through financial support and/or active participation.
As one Extinction Rebellion banner in Atlanta recently put it: ‘We’re F***ed, Fight Anyway.’ I agree.
EXCERPT FROM ‘SUFFERING AND INJUSTICE’
“Imagine the Earth populated by humans who cannot or will not reason; whose knowledge is not informed by objective truth; and who have no capacity for compassion beyond that for their own kind. All who eschew or misuse reason, reject or misrepresent objective truth, restrict their compassion to the like-minded, and lead or force others along this path, live in defiance of Human Nature. When they do so in order to advance their privilege, power, religion, ideology, or nation above that of all others, they subvert the freedom of every member of Humankind to pursue an awe, truth, and hope different from their own.”
...
“It is our ability to communicate about the consequences of our behavior in the past and potential behavior in the future, and the collective, protective covenant we entered into with each other at the dawn of humanity hundreds of thousands of years ago, that still distinguish us and represent, so far, our species’ greatest achievements. The core principle of that covenant is acceptance of the need to agree and act upon standards related to the avoidance and alleviation of suffering and those of fairness and justice, writ large. This, in the face of threatening events in the ever-challenging, ever-changing physical and social environments, is indispensable to our humanity, to enlightened, civilized life.”
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