let them eat cake

What the hell is wrong with Humankind? Don’t we ever get it? These monsters are not imaginary; history proves this again, and again, and again. But we recoil from that truth, and we insist that people who look like you and me cannot be monsters, really. Can they?

The problem I grapple with is how to concentrate reality into a bite size morsel, a consumable for a consumer culture. I struggle to find a particular link, or a concise excerpt, a quote maybe that captures it all, that will leave everyone nodding in recognition and gazing into the middle distance thoughtfully as they walk away, the whole world thus changed.

This is not possible. The monsters are real, the peril is mortal. And the reality which confronts us—the world—is not reducible to a single bitter pill. The terror which we MUST face seems far beyond our capacity to absorb in anything less than several lifetimes. But for the love of humanity, we must not only confront the peril within our lifetimes—within the next several years—but we must conquer it as well.

What is right with Humankind is that they always amaze themselves by overcoming challenges which they ‘knew’ were insurmountable, by accomplishing in their own flesh miracles which they believed none could achieve but the hand of God. Recently, I have discarded most of my former anti-religious rhetoric; I find my attitudes are greatly moderating as I wake from my foggy delusions. Current circumstances have revealed to me a belief I never knew I had, and it is this: I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we will not be given one iota more than we can handle. Call it faith if you wish, though for my part I defer.

I very well may profess a newfound faith, with a still undiscovered voice, well before this nightmare is over.

The most powerful nation this Earth has ever known is being used to rabidly terrorize all of Humankind. The crimes of these over-takers are legion. They have co-opted every one of us as unwitting co-conspirators by cultivating our passivity and by developing among us a tolerance that seems able to ignore any atrocity conceivable. You think those are overstatements? Let me introduce you to the woman who doesn’t know that the black eye she got from walking into a door really came from the man she sleeps with. Denial is the most insidious deceiver of all. And chief among these monsters’ crimes are their cold-blooded and vile machinations to deceive billions of innocents.

If there is one thing that is mind expanding, it is experiencing extremes. For many who endured the administration of George W. Bush, and began to see the facileness of government during his illegitimacy, the advent of Obama was a hope that spanned from the kernel of our souls to the outer space of our dreams. To witness the depth and breadth of those dreams—nearly infinite, but not quite—to see that devoured with apparent ease into the gaping, salivating maw of deceit, reveals not only the breathtaking scale of evil, but hints at the heretofore hidden magnificence of good that by definition exceeds evil. For many who have seen the Alex Jones’ film, Obama Deception, it expanded our minds in just such a monumental—and terrifying—way.

These petty words mean little in the crisis of our ignorance. A small fraction of a percentage recognizes the evil that is upon us, and they are throwing stones at the tanks in Gaza, and dying for it. Others are losing farms, homes, and lives to CIA funded thugs in Afghanistan, or just losing lives in black-op fomented violence in the cities of Iraq. Still others who cannot hope to understand why, are the children in the smog of LA, cut off from medical care and dying of asthma. It is not only the relative few forlorn individuals on this planet who know of these dangers first-hand, but also nations, besieged, yet proudly defiant, like Honduras and Venezuela. They tell the truth, and truth cannot be rejected from any quarter, especially in a world where death-dealing lies come from almost every quarter.

I think Marie Antoinette was not so much flippant in her famous retort, “Let them eat cake,” as she was being scornful out of frustration with peasants who, at the time when she spoke those words, had not stood up for themselves, and had largely tolerated intolerable lives for a generation. She didn’t want them to kill her, one assumes, but some kind of revolt was certainly in order, she must have thought.

Your economy has been gutted, your children’s future is in the hands of a very few immeasurably wealthy monsters who are allowing a tiny fraction of their wealth to be used—at their pleasure—as the entire economy of this nation, until they are ready to pull the plug. They are not worried about a revolt. Indeed, they want a revolt; they have planned for it. And they will make it happen when the time is right for them. And your children’s debt will never be paid. You are dooming them to a life as wage slaves, where the only way they can get ahead is to be more evil than the next guy. But even magnificence in evil won’t get them very far because the competition will be fierce. The masses will all be evil, soullessly evil, just to survive. And if you hope for success for your progeny in that kind of world, I cannot imagine what you will hope for that success to be. “For if a man gains the whole world, and loses his soul…”

I say, let them eat cake. In fact you might as well start eating it right now. Either that, or you better start doing something very different, very soon.