Our country is being run by a military industrial cartel that is driving us off the extinction cliffs with carbon pollution and extinction of species, polluted air and water.
This system works pretty well for about 20% of Americans, but 60% live in the Dollar Store economy.
And our political system denies that so many people struggling, heat exploding and perpetual war, extinction is bad for us.
In fact the right wing of this political machine bought a Supreme Court that just gutted all the rules that helped moderate poisoning everything for profit.
This is a moral problem as well as a political one. Poor people are paying the health costs living near oil and manufacturing plants without decent health care.
When does a political system that disregards so many of our citizens finally change?
What is your theory of change?
Stick to the conceit there is an individual with personal problems?
Or do you organize protests and alternative political views that say we are all in this together? Or do nothing?
Right now for instance, the political apparatus is so fossilized that a geriatric man with Sundowner syndrome is President who will likely lose to the right wingers.
Should I stay or should I go?
The Democratic alternatives do not publicly object to the bipartisan War Party burn the planet politics, but they are younger and can articulate a vision of America the beautiful that begins to look 7 generations into the future.
And bonus, they have a huge upside running against the right wing placeholder convicted felon and rapist Trump.
Here's to America the beautiful. Hope springs you celebrate with your family and friends today, plant seeds of peace.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 2012.
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