News Flash: There Are No Innocent Bystanders

Photo credit: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

March 27, 2014

“People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America.”

- Arundhati Roy

The state of global affairs has long passed the proverbial tipping point yet most folks, it seems, have confused the occasional weekend parade, I mean protest, with a full-blown movement.

News Flash #1: Anti-Republican bumper stickers and a heartfelt commitment to recycled toilet paper don’t constitute a movement. Neither do candlelight vigils, petitions, voting drives, letters to Congress, monthly donations to Greenpeace, yellow ribbons, red ribbons, pink ribbons, or becoming the change you wish to see in the world. All you need is love? Yeah… that and a million dollars a minute (what the United States spends on war).

Americans wield more influence and power than any people on the planet, but while an obscene number of humans in this world live in abject poverty, we live our lives in such a manner as to threaten every living thing on Earth.

For example: A primary component in your beloved cell phone is “Coltan” (Columbite-tantalite), a metallic ore found mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mining and sale of Coltan is not only funding both sides of that nation’s brutal civil war, it has directly contributed to a 90 percent decline in the local Mountain Gorilla population. Translation: Every text is an act of violence.

News Flash #2: There are no innocent bystanders.

So, comrades, how much more are we willing to tolerate before we act? To help with that question, here’s a small sampling of what we’re already enduring without any serious fuss:

• Epidemics of preventable diseases: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
• Poisoning of our air, water, and food (including mother’s breast milk).
• Climate change, animal and plant extinctions, disappearing honeybees, destruction of the rain forest, topsoil depletion, etc.
• 1/3 of Americans uninsured or underinsured when it comes to health care.
• More than half of the world’s top 100 economies are corporations, not nations.
• A rising income gap.
• Presidential lies, electoral fraud, limited debates, etc.
• The largest prison population on the planet.
• Corporate control of public land, public airwaves, and public pensions.
• Overt infringement of our civil liberties.
• Bloated defense budget, unilateral military interventions, war crimes committed in our name, legalization of torture, blah, blah, blah...

Before you know it, the government might start spying on U.S. citizens and detaining prisoners without charges while corporations ravage the earth in pursuit of profit, wiping out entire eco-systems in the process. Oops, sorry… they’re already doing all that without being stopped!

Since yesterday at this hour, 13 million tons of toxic chemicals were released across the globe; 200,000 acres of rainforest were destroyed; more than 100 plant or animal species went extinct; and 45,000 human beings died of starvation (most of them children).

What will we say in 20-30 years when we’re asked why we didn’t do more to challenge all this? What will we say when we’re asked why we focused on imaginary evildoers instead of the corporate pirates seeking to assault the planet and control our minds?

It’s not as if we don’t have choices: Which do you prefer, a consumer culture or an ozone layer? SUVs or Redwoods? Cell phones or Mountain Gorillas? Would you give up the ability to text TTYL to your BFF in order to save an entire species from going extinct?

The humans (and all earthlings) that come after us won’t care if we religiously posted on social media or we marched in parades (I mean, protests) or we held open doors for little old ladies… if they have no clean air to breathe.

They won’t care if we voted for Democrats or Republicans… if they have no clean water to drink.

It won’t matter to them if we ate organic or drove a hybrid or switched to an energy efficient light bulb… if they end up stuck on a toxic, virtually uninhabitable police state of a planet.

If anything, they’d probably just want to ask us this: What did you have against your planet and yourself? After all, they’d assume, if we didn’t despise our planet -- and ourselves -- how could we have stood by and let everything be consumed or poisoned or destroyed?

But before that question is asked of us, we still have time to ask this of ourselves:

Will we ever disrupt our comfortable lives and dedicate ourselves to stopping -- by any means necessary -- the global carnage being perpetrated in our name or will we continue defending “our way of life”?

The United States constitutes 5 percent of the earth’s population but consumes more than 25 percent of the earth’s resources.

News Flash #3: Our way of life is the problem.

As Ward Churchill warned us, people “from poorer places and poorer countries” have “no obligation -- moral, ethical, legal or otherwise -- to sit on their thumbs while the opposition (in the United States) dithers about doing anything to change the system.”

Again: Americans wield more influence and power than any people on the planet but, while the vast majority of humans in this world live in abject poverty, we live our lives in such a manner as to threaten every living being on the planet.

Repeat after me: There are no innocent bystanders. There are no innocent bystanders. There are no innocent bystanders. There are no innocent bystanders.

#shifthappens

Order Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism here.

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Mickey Z. is the author of 12 books, most recently Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on the Web here and here. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.

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