You Get What You Pay For Amerika. Mass Society. Mass Shootings. Chemical Lobotomy.
29-31 December 2012, 1-2 January 2013
Jonathan ©. Gillis
One looks up at the sky on a clear night, and observes the vast ocean of space and the island(s) of stars; the wonder of seeing a picture of the past, while being cognizant, if only in manner of awareness, of existing in the existence of the present moment. Such marvel in simplicity! "The trouble with the eagerness to make a world is that, being already made, what is there must first be destroyed."[1]
This imperial capitalist way of life is antithetical to nature and natural symbiotic processes. To be clear, imperial capitalist civilization, which is predicated on mass violence and enslavement, causal of mass consumer culture, is in direct and unequivocal opposition to the natural world, which, like the finer and more specific life-forces of biodiversity and bio-diverse interrelations and interworkings contained within, it is rapidly and expansively destroying and replacing like a parasite to its host. The dominant, global hegemonic culture will not last forever. Perhaps in as short a time as 25 years, there will be systemic collapse, as predictable in terms of the looming climate chaos which will soon be in a runaway feedback loop, with the extremely grave threat, if not imminence, of global temperature increases to the point which would make most, if not the entire earth uninhabitable to most, if not all of life.
Countless species are driven extinct every day because of the dominant culture. Yet most citizens of capitalist empire are preoccupied in virtually every aspect of mass consumer life. Consumed by the very economy of consumption, the very economy that is predicated on mass violence and enslavement, and necessitates the utter destruction and decimation of the natural world, non-human and humans, and the natural symbiotic relationships and processes of life which evolved after millions and billions of years. "Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as 'the economy'…[There] are people engaged in the exchange of values, in productive and not such productive labor, and we give an overarching name to all these activities, calling them 'the economy', a hypothetical construct imposed on observable actualities. We then often treat our abstractions…as self-generating forces of their own. So we talk about the problems of the economy in general terms, not the problems of the capitalist economy with a specific set of social relations and a discernible distribution of class power."[2]
The likelihood of the extinction of the species is a rather major dilemma to be sure; probably the gravest. There are of course a multitude of other crises which are components to the actual crisis of dominant imperial civilization itself.
Whenever a school shooting occurs, there is no mention of compulsory schooling in the reactive mainstream narrative. Rather, when a school or other mass shooting occurs, those on the left end of the political spectrum scream bloody murder at the National Rifle Association (NRA), and essentially insist that gun control, and perhaps an increased budget and token reforms for the utterly dismal and thinning mental healthcare system, is essentially the be all end all to solve the serious problem(s) of the increasing prevalence of mass shootings in the domestic homeland of empire. That school massacres have occurred regularly enough to have become somewhat normalized––meaning, the horrific acts and the by now predictable commercial reactions to them are on the mantel of capitalist empire, along with massacres at other locations such as movie theaters and malls––is perhaps representative of the ever-maddening nightmare which the dominant culture characteristically produces.
Compulsory schooling, which was originally defended against by armed resistance, and for apparent good reason, less than six generations ago, certainly not ancient history, is so normalized an institution that the significant discussions around it are usually primarily concerned with reforming the education system itself, for instance, ensuring better pay and social insurances for teachers, that they actually keep their jobs, advocating smaller classes, opposition to budgetary cuts, to a lesser extent, opposition to standardized testing, and so forth. "By 1880, factories and financiers ruled the American roost, and a professional proletariat of lawyers, politicians, and others dependent on the favor of the mighty were making it hot for Americans who fought to maintain a libertarian nation as promised by the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. With this radical transformation from local democracy to de facto oligarchy, people with minds of their own became an impediment to efficient management. Think of it this way: lives assigned to routine work are best kept childish."[3] The mass school system offers the ruling elites mass obedience through mass indoctrination.
Correlatively, "more than 100,000 Native Americans [were] forced by the U.S. government to attend Christian schools. The system, which began with President Ulysses Grant's 1869 'Peace Policy,' continued well into the 20th century. Church officials, missionaries, and local authorities took children as young as five from their parents and shipped them off to Christian boarding schools; they forced others to enroll in Christian day schools on reservations. Those sent to boarding school were separated from their families for most of the year, sometimes without a single family visit. Parents caught trying to hide their children lost food rations."[4]
‘“The Indians must conform to ‘the white man’s ways,’ peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They ca
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