Dear Friends and Family,
Before I launch off into my main point I would like to encourage you to forward this email to everyone in your address book that you deem appropriate. This is the culmination of my thoughts over the last four years and my life. Thanks for your time.
A new day has dawned. A day in which the majority of Americans have shown they favor religious fundamental beliefs over rationality; unilateral actions over diplomacy; wars for oil, money, and unreal objectives over peace, freedom, and unity; and, finally, privatized corporate control over socialized humanitarian efforts. All of these polarizations trouble me deeply. I am preaching to the choir I'm sure, but I assure you all that as an informed American who deeply believes in the minorities' arguments I will fight for change. The majority is wrong. Wrong in a way that can profoundly affect the world. We humans need to look ahead, look to the future. Short-term gain may work for the present generation, but what about future generations? What about the future of human kind? What do they get?
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
-George Orwell
Warning #1:
When human beings attempt to rule with governments that are based on personal belief structures such as Islam or Christianity decisions tend to be irrational. To those of you whom are religious (as I am) I am not criticizing religion; rather, I am stating that the supernatural world is purely a guide in the real world. Rational thought is based on real world problems, consequences, and results. Religion and the supernatural tend to allow us to cloak our short-term misdeeds in nice little bundles and then believe that it will all be ok in the end. However, there are some things that can destroy human life (i.e., nuclear war) even if forgiven by God or Allah. In the hands of the ignorant or deranged personal belief structures, God, and Allah offer humans (used loosely here) like Hitler, Bush, and Osama Bin Laden, respectively, rationalizations to do terrible things.
In nature, there is one fundamental unity running through all the diversity we see about us. Religions are no exception to the natural law. They are given to mankind so as to accelerate the proceess of realization of fundamental unity. -Gandi
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Warning #2:
Unilateral actions with other nations will lead to tension; conflict; and, in the long term a loss in human goals (i.e., survival). I have said that it is similar to the bully in the schoolyard. The bully will get what he wants that day in middle school. However, in the long term the bully is the guy who everyone mistrusts or shuns from the group. Picture America being the bully and everyone being Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. I would strongly encourage joining the group since America is after all made up of Europeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners. It scares me to think of going home alone and having no friends, being isolated in such a big world. But my feelings aside, it scares me more to think that these bullies I'm referring to have guns, nuclear weapons, and faithful followers. All of the greatest people in history were advocates of peace, humanitarian efforts, and most importantly unity not disarray.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Warning #3:
This one is short and sweet: WAR IS WRONG. Killing and dying for oil, money, and fictitious social constructs of fear (i.e., weapons of mass destruction). Life is not a choice it is a gift. We are not soldiers. We are not fighters. We are human beings, Antiflag. Greed is like LSD, you're in a different world when you're on it, and if you are greedy and powerful then there are inevitably others in your world too, a bad combination. Now, oil, as a mechanical engineer I can assure you there are alternatives to oil, but YOU NEED TO WANT TO USE THEM. Oil does make the world go around right now, but it does not have to. People do not need to die for money and oil. There are alternatives, ask me about them if you don't believe me. The Bush Administration has chosen to believe that we need to focus on the short-term, but I challenge humankind to focus on the long-term. The here and now is nothing without the future, I'm for peace.
People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge mankind into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evil. -1 Timothy 6:9-10
Warning #4:
Privatization and increased corporate power in American government will lead to greed, poverty, war, and inhumane treatment of the less fortunate. For instance, I have no health insurance. I cannot afford it. If I fall and break my leg (which I actually almost did last week when I slipped on the wet deck outside) I would have to pay a ridiculous price to get help, on the order of five figures. Why? Because private insurance companies drive prices through the roof. Why do insurance firms pay half as much as me for the same treatment? It is because the insurance corporations do more business (i.e., wholesale health care) with the hospitals. That is wrong. Humans have the right to take care of other humans. The g-word (government) doesn't even need to enter the discussion. It is a fundamental human duty to take care of each other. If anarchy were possible every one and their neighbor would do this. However, government can offer a little assistance from those neighbors who are a little less willing to offer their help. Whatever you believe, money has NOTHING to do with final argument. Humanitarian needs can be met through human efforts not through profit driven corporate decision-making.
Here's one for the deep thinkers out there:
The following socialist rhetoric is especially poignant when analyzed with respect to the current American majority. The way things are headed the liberal-conservative continuum is about to do a full 180 degree flip-flop.
Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul. -Frederick Engels
In reality, the State is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed no less so in the democratic republic than in the monarchy. -Frederick Engels
In conclusion, we live in a world were too many people worry about the short-term. The prevailing thought process is what I call linear opposed to cyclical.
A linear thought process is like this:
(1) Problem
(2) Solution
(3) Action
A cyclical thought process is as follows:
(1) Problem
(2) Solution
(3) Consequence evaluation
(4) Action
(5) Results evaluation
(6) Repeat (1)-(5) as needed
The Bush Administration has a life long record of using a linear thought process. They don't reveal to us any evidence of evaluation. I believe that this method is wrong, uncompassionate, and dangerous. Religion, unilaterism, oil, greed, war, and corporate power in the hands of a linear thinker can be very destructive and if not catastrophic to humankind. I strongly urge the religious to understand that religion is based on unity and love; the unilaterist to think about who he is taking from because they may take back some day; the oil and money hungry to evaluate the possibility that there are alternatives; the war hawks that initiating killing, hate, murder, and rage will NEVER solve a problem; and, finally, the corporate idealist to let humans take care of humans. I look to the future, a future in which my little nephew can grow and his children can grow. I cannot stand and watch a majority of fools lead humankind to harm, pain, and possible extinction. I strongly encourage each of you to think about my linear thinking versus cyclical thinking argument as it pertains to your own lives and the lives of those you love. Please consider the future before you make the past.
Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions, carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past.
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