- Sometimes when we're traveling, we get so engrossed in
our own conversations we fail to see significant things. We speed by these
emotional landmarks without noticing them. It may be the very thing we've
been looking for all our lives, but we miss it for a distracting remark
that happens to turn our heads in the wrong direction at that very moment.
-
- Think of what constitutes the point of no return. The
days that follow ignorant and unwise decisions are always filled with grief
and remorse. Sometimes, in the distance between the moment where we passed
it and the spot where we realize we've passed it, the epiphany dawns on
us " there is no turning back, despite all our fondest wishing and
hoping, despite all our teary promises to do better next time. Real life
has no reset button. Then comes that hollow time, with its aluminized applause
of silence, when understanding crashes in on us. Some mistakes, like the
death of your mother or your son, simply cannot be corrected. Sometimes,
in this life, there is simply no going back.
-
- So it is with the American dream, lying crushed in the
bleeding dust of official lies presented as eternal truths by neatly dressed
young people trying in vain to speak English correctly in front of mobile
television cameras, saying things like "the American people support
what has been done in Iraq" and trying to show their spontaneous sincerity
as the scripted words slither from their painted lips.
-
- America has been twisted from an example of hope for
the world into an armed robber intent on fleecing everyone it meets. Just
recently, America has changed the world from a place of hope to a place
of fear.
-
- We pass by these significant events as the newsreel of
our memories unfolds before us. We show appropriate horror at the mangled
bodies of people we never knew, then go on about our business " to
the mall for those birthday presents meant for people we hardly know, to
work on time to meet the daily shift quota, or to our homes to retreat
from the daily assault of debilitating images that assail us by using whatever
substance pleases us at the moment. So many events we try to pass by and
forget. Some can't, but most do.
-
- In the days following these events, we try to rationalize
that some mistakes can be corrected: we can go to court and demand a recount
for an election that has been so obviously stolen; we can catch the perpetrators
of a stunningly horrific crime and try them in a court of law in accordance
with the finest traditions of democratic justice; we can appeal to the
better natures of elected officials who pass laws without even reading
what's on the paper; we can take to the streets to protest decisions to
drop nuclear weapons on peasants far away; or we can point out to anyone
who'll listen that our leaders are lying about everything they say.
-
- But in the days after that, we learn to our shocked dismay
that the courts are closed to people without flashy pedigrees, that elected
officials seem not to want to catch the villains who perpetrated a shocking
mass murder, that legislators only really listen to representatives of
large companies who can fund their vacation homes, that large protests
are really great social events that accomplish nothing, and that precious
few people really care whether our leaders are lying or not, as long as
we have our homes, our paychecks, and our cold beer and warm beds.
-
- Most fail to perceive that if you fail to adequately
protect what you have now, chances are good that you won't have it for
very long. I'm talking about the future here, although you probably didn't
realize it.
-
- Listen, can you remember that sound you heard when you
passed the point of no return. No, of course not. You were busy. Talking
about something else.
-
- Since the turning of the millennium, we have passed by
four events that have changed the consciousness of our nation and the world
forever and irrevocably.
-
- 1. The stolen election of the year 2000, in which the
surreptitious denial of voting rights to tens of thousands of people of
color and manipulation of computerized voting systems turned the vote count
in favor of fascism, turned America into a police state. Few then were
prescient enough to have predicted democracy would soon die, but it has.
-
- Now there's no going back. The deed is done. The Constitution
is nullified. Habeas corpus is gone for the first time in 800 years. The
police can come into your home at any time for any reason. People can be
executed without legitimate trials. All as a result of a fixed vote. We
should have seen it coming. But we were talking, and the moment passed
by. Now, no amount of second-guessing can turn back the clock. Just look
at the political opposition, acting as if nothing really serious has happened,
that they can fix the difficulties with a few pieces of legislation. And
still America slumbers.
-
- But there is no going back. Democracy died when a bill
was passed by those who didn't even read it. The new American way. Goosestepping
in silence. And all across the political spectrum, the phony functionaries
who grovel for our votes (and who will ignore us when they have them) act
as if this shameful occurrence was normal. Perhaps it IS normal in a society
of treasonous pigs with no scruples, which is apparently what America has
become. Just a gaggle of dishonest accountants who don't really care where
the numbers come from.
-
- 2. The mass murder of many thousands of people in New
York City, Washington, D.C., and western Pennsylvania was blamed on Arab
terrorists minutes after it happened, yet all the top officials insisted
during those tear-stained days that they had no premonition such a monstrous
event could even happen.
-
- Do you understand how those two thoughts do not and cannot
co-exist in the same logical space? And if they don't, and you do understand,
you also understand that your entire sociopolitical paradigm was shattered
that day, because you know 9/11 was the handiwork of the rich manipulators
who run our society, a hard-hearted ruse with which to plunder Arab treasures
to the robotic applause of the drugged-out and brain-dead American populace.
-
- 3. America dropped radioactive bunker buster bombs on
defenseless peasants in Afghanistan, leaving them to twitch in the dust
as their children developed horrific red tumors on their heads. This was
billed a direct response to capture the alleged perpetrator of the 9/11
horror. Yet when the alleged perpetrator was offered up for trial in a
neutral country, the U.S. ignored him and continued bombing. And it turns
out the war in Afghanistan was planned long before 9/11. How can you launch
a war that was planned before the crime was committed, and then insist
the war was in response to the crime? Did we miss all this? Were we talking
about something else when all this happened?
-
- 4. Now America can bomb anyone it wants to for any reason.
The reasons don't have to be the truth, or even grounded in reality. They
can be total fantasy. This is the scenario we are now witnessing in Iraq,
where even proven presidential lies barely raise eyebrows and most agree
that Iraq needed to be bombed because the president and the TV anchors
said so. What was it we were doing when this became a logical action? What
trip were we taking when we missed that point that honesty was no longer
necessary for doing business in the world? And once they decided they could
kill all those innocent prisoners at Guantanamo without real trials, where
we going then? What was the sound of the Constitution being ridiculed by
federal judges and taken away forever? Did you hear it? What did it sound
like?
-
- Was it like T. S. Eliot's "not with a bang, but
with a whimper"?
-
- Right after all those wonderful millennium fireworks
celebrations, we came to a fork in the road, only almost nobody noticed,
because we were all too busy having so much fun and congratulating ourselves
about what a wonderful world we had.
-
- Since that magical moment, we have been travelling full
speed down the wrong road, with most of us still pretending that everything's
OK, that when we wake up in the morning, things will be as they always
have been, the stock market will rise, certain alluring items at the store
will be on sale, that our jobs will be there and we'll always have plenty
of gas in our cars. What was it we were talking about when these events
happened? What did we think about them? What did we do about them?
-
- What will you be talking about when you pass the point
of no return? Baseball? Dietary supplements? Social obligations?
-
- We're going full speed down a road of no return. We took
a wrong turn at the millennium fork. Plenty of people noticed, but nobody
said anything. We were all making too much money, all having too much fun.
-
- Had we been a realistic, functional society " one
that cast our focus on the health and maintenance of our lives and our
world rather than one that seeks to escape from our responsibilities because
we are so afraid of death " we could have learned plenty from those
four post-millenium events that have so profoundly changed our world for
the worse
-
- Were we not led in the wrong direction by the pathetic
prostitutes we see on the TV screens every night, we could have found out
that Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush conspired to deprive over 90,000 people
of their legitimate right to vote. I'm not saying any of the subsequent
events would have changed if Al Gore had been the president (after all,
Bill Clinton bombed the hell out of Yugoslavia at the behest of the International
Monetary Fund, and the murderous masquerades in Waco and Oklahoma City
were not exactly good advertisements for an open, honest government), but
it doesn't seem as likely that Gore would have rammed the Patriot Act down
our throats, despite the fact that it was written by Democrats, or bombed
New York City on the basis of Dick Cheney's think-tank report. Who knows?
Maybe he would have. The people in OKC sure think he might have.
-
- The great lesson that has been missed by the stifling
of the investigation into the World Trade Center disaster is the opportunity
to see a continuity of manipulative aggression in the foreign policy of
the United States throughout the 20th Century. I mean, the situation now
is not that much different than it was in the 1890s when a stock market
crash was engineered by rich industrialists, and then a new grand plan
of imperialism was undertaken by U.S. presidents that resulted in major
carnage in the Philippines, Cuba and even Hawaii that rivals in dishonest
insincerity what has recently taken place in Afghanistan and Iraq.
-
- Had there been a legitimate and independent investigation
into the horror of 9/11, more people could have seen that the land of the
free and the home of the brave has been provoking wars for profit around
the world throughout the 20th Century, and that even the U.S. motivation
for participation in World Wars I and II are subject to alternative interpretations
that clearly reveal the main cause of them was manipulative profit-seeking
from Wall Street and Washington.
-
- A truly legitimate investigation into the grand deception
of what is called 9/11 might also have revealed that it doesn't really
matter who is president " that the tyranny and the murder goes on
no matter who is president, because that's the way it has always been in
America.
-
- A real investigation into 9/11 might just have allowed
us the opportunity to at least hope for a humane world, and possibly work
toward one. A real investigation would have enabled us to see, perhaps,
that American capitalism engineered by behind-the-scenes billionaires,
funding both the Bolsheviks and Hitler, has caused all the wars of the
20th Century.
-
- But now the cat is out of the bag for all the world to
see. Naked and vicious power, with nothing " secular or sacred "
able to stand in its way. No reason needed to use it, only an impulse toward
gluttony by a sufficient number of godless petronazis mouthing religious
phrases to keep the evangelical zombies lulled ecstatically in their apocalyptic
aspirations.
-
- As one commentator said the other day, the neocon conspiracy
that has grabbed control of the United States and its military might is
now much more dangerous than Hitler's Third Reich or the Soviet Union's
Red Menace ever were, in part because there is no one to stop America from
turning the whole world into a radioactive wasteland like the one that
now exists in Iraq, but also because there is no voice of freedom anywhere
in the world able to stand up and oppose the American Zionist propaganda
machine that trumpets is new, horrid messages that twist the truth and
obscure the atrocities. Like "freedom is economic slavery" and
"democracy is a one-party system where all opposition is treason."
The irony is that the rich patricians uttering these sadistic slogans are
the ones who are the real traitors to the people of the world, and everything
human and holy.
-
- There was a time, not too long ago (I'm thinking '60s
or '70s here), when idealism could have prevailed, where the noble nuances
of selflessness and concern for others could have determined the future
we have chosen for ourselves. But corporate fascism belittled and marginalized
such quaint sentiments as inferior to naked profits and sophisticated selfishness,
and now we are travelling down a road on which there are no U-turns. Although
it happened very recently, we are well past the point of no return, and
the road not taken will forever haunt us in our dreams, in each needlessly
dead body we see sacrificed on the evil highway of pure profit.
-
- What was it we were talking about when all this happened,
and how important does it seem to us now, now that we can no longer turn
back around, and make all those needlessly dead people live again?
-
- And we teach our children that stealing money from the
dead is all we need to make us feel good. Rejoice, ye faithful, this is
the new American way.
-
- Surely, this is the point of no return. We passed it
some time ago. What was it you were saying when we passed it?
-
-
-
- John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida
and can't believe how many Americans just don't care about the world they
live in. Autographed copies of his collection of Internet essays, "America's
Autopsy Report," may now be ordered ($18.95, plus $5 shipping and
handling) by writing to him at 250 N. McCall Rd. #2, Englewood FL 34223,
or by e-mail through Pay Pal.
|
