If We Wish To Stop

Those In Power Have Made It So We Have To Pay Simply To Exist On The Planet. We Have To Pay For A Place To Sleep, And We Have To Pay For Food. If We Don't, People With Guns Come And Force Us To Pay. That's Violent.

In Order To Maintain Our Way Of Living, We Must Tell Lies To Each Other, And Especially To Ourselves.

Slavery Was A Central Concern Of Governance Form The Time Of The First Nation-state. The Code Of Hammurabi, The Earliest Know Set Of Laws For Governing An Empire, Prescribed Death For Anyone Who Harbored A Fugitive Or Otherwise Helped A Slave To Escape. The Relationship Between The Law And Bondage Goes Back Even Farther: Indeed, The Oldest Extant Legal Documents Don't Concern The Sale Of Land, Houses, Or Even Animals, But Slaves.

If We Hope To Stem The Mass Destruction That Inevitably Attends Our Economic System (and To Alter The Sense Of Entitlement - The Sense Of Contempt, The Hatred - On Which It Is Based), Fundamental Historical, Social, Economic, And Technological Forces Need To Be Pondered, Understood, And Redirected. Behavior Won't Change Much Without A Fundamental Change In Consciousness. The Question Becomes: How Do We Change Consciousness?

I Wondered What It Does To Each Of Us To Spend The Majority Of Our Waking Hours Doings Things We'd Rather Not Do, Wishing We Were Outside Or Simply Elsewhere, Wishing We Were Reading, Thinking, Making Love, Fishing, Sleeping, Or Simply Having Time To Figure Out Who The Hell We Are And What The Hell We're Doing.