I admit: I’m having trouble re-adjusting to life in the U.S.A. Having just returned from two week shamanic journey through the Lake Baikal region of Siberia and northern Mongolia, where BTW, I saw no evidence, none, of chemtrails poisoning their glorious 360° skies, I am plunked back into the strange, crazed, complex conundrum of  contemporary American life, where, despite the gradual militarization of local police forces, most citizens (read: consumers) still seem to be willfully ignorant of the hell that “our” Military Industrial (plus Medical Agricultural Academic) Complex Empire continues to perpetrate upon people and planet. (Or might this be what the current opioid epidemic is about? The intense need NOT to know, instead to numb ourselves to ghastly reality?) Given that so many “jobs” depend upon raging American militarism in one way or another, I guess I should not be surprised. And yet I am. Over and over again. Always surprised. All my life, surprised. Perplexed. Stunned. Crestfallen. 

Will I “get over it?” No. I will not. Though the gift of being temporarily in a place where militarism is NOT the overriding atmosphere has deeply affected me, given me respite, it has also made me even more decisively aware that what we must do is to create real value — value that lies underneath the scrim that so-called “money” has overlaid upon the natural world. 

Here is another person who has also realized that the one obvious way we, as individuals, can shift our attention from destruction to creation is to re-enter our original communion with the land — and, I would add, in concert with each other. I find it gratifying that this post has been widely shared. Thanks to Darvesha.

Frida Berrigan: Growing My Way Out of Dystopia

Meanwhile, the latest:

House Passes $700 Billion Military Bill Sure to Make ‘War Profiteers Rejoice’

Which of course, leads once again to that old, fundamental question:

Is There An Alternative to Plundering the Earth?

Excerpt:

One thing remains generally overlooked: the abstract wealth created for accumulation implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is a “hole in the ground” and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated machinery and money without value.[37] However, once all concrete wealth (which today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx’s words, “evaporate”. The fact that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the answer to the question of which wealth modern economic activity has really created. In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually or on accounts) that constitutes a monoculture controlled by a tiny minority. Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive. And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production nor money?

The nihilism of our economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed into money – and then it will disappear. After all, money cannot be eaten. What no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities, money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying all “economic development” is the assumption that “resources”, the “sources of wealth”,[38] are renewable and everlasting – just like the “growth” they create.[39]