The Judgement of the Storm (updated)

It didn't take long upon the arrival of Sandy for the usual idiots to start declaring that THIS was finally the judgement that they had been waiting for upon whichever demographic they hate the most. (The self-aggrandizing John McTernan has managed to blame Republicans, Democrats, Gays, and Muslims at the same time.) I would suggest that there is perhaps a little bit of Biblical wisdom that points to the reasons for the level of destruction. For example, Isaiah 5:8,

"Woe to you who add house to house 

and join field to field 

till no space is left 

and you live alone in the land."

There are natural results of heaping all of your people and belongings in places that are vulnerable, and the expected result of a sea-born storm on a heavily populated urban center is exactly the devastation we now see. There is a reason that almost all of human mythology (yes, Christian scripture as well) points to our status not as owners and destroyers, but as caretakers and healers of the land. This isn't the first time a city has seen destruction of this type, and it certainly won't be the last - especially if we insist on heaping up wealth and people and their THINGS in coastal areas while driving up global temperatures and attempting to legislate away the consequences (no, really).

In the mean time, let's remember the actual Biblically correct reason for the destruction of some cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. It wasn't due to homosexuality or politics. It was due to the same things that plague our large, mammon-worshiping cosmopolitan centers today:

"...She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen." (Ez 16:49b-50)

So maybe it really was judgement after all?

In the meantime, I am with the rest of creation waiting

"...in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-21)

Maybe one day those that claim to be the children of God will cease destroying everything God revels in and calls good and cease their breathtaking, breakneck dive into abject mammon worship. Maybe then creation will finally see the children of God come into their own as those who promote freedom instead of wage-slavery, glory instead of class hatred, and stewardship rather than the decay that currently haunts our world and is championed by its money grubbing leaders. Maybe then, finally, those who claim to follow the Christ will remember that he tied all of the other commandments to loving your neighbor, and will actually heed the Psalmist and the author of I Peter both, and begin not just to cease evil and seek peace, but to actively pursue it. Maybe when we do this we can "dwell in the land forever." (Psalm 34:14 & 37:27, I Peter 3:11)

Try this for some thoughts on the Bible as a text-book for agrarian consciousness...

-----------------------------------------------

So, after some thought, I realized that this post seems a little harsh. To clarify:

I am in no way suggesting that Sandy was at all a judgement of any type. I certainly am not implying that the accumulation of wealth in Wall Street cost the homeless their shelters or that the racist bigotry of the city government cost the livelihood of those in immigrant communities - at least not via Sandy. Rather, I am pointing out the consequences of certain lifestyles and cultural choices which appear to be the norm in much of the country.

See, in my view, "judgement" of the OT biblical sort tends to be of the "reap what you sow" variety. This was probably even more true of nations as a whole than for the individual. When the prophets railed against those who forgot justice and the care of the poor, they weren't pointing at individuals but at the system as a whole. System failures and failures of leadership led to "judgements" as readily as did personal failures. Thus, when Israel failed to heed the call to avoid political ensnarement with Egypt, they suffered the consequence of invasion and conquest. When Rehoboam chose to listen to his juvenile advisers and not his elders and overtaxed his people, he lost part of his kingdom. When David's wife, Michal, laughed at his dance before the ark, she failed to have children. The fact often ignored was that, though these were interpreted as divine punishments, they were also natural outcomes. The Jews lost out to Egypt's enemies, Rehoboam had a tax revolt, and Michal probably didn't get visited by David much afterwards for, ahem, relations.

The same thing applies to Sandy and her causes. By avoiding every warning from those who know and care about the earth - from indigenous peoples to religious advocates for earth care to scientists - and instead racing for more things, larger incomes, more power, and individualistic mammon worship, we have managed both to create cities which are a drain on the environment and poised for destruction, as well as the storms and increased sea-levels that destroy them. Maybe, it is time to listen to our "advisors" and "prophets" before we self destruct as a civilization and a people.

The Catholic Menace

OK, now that I have your attention, some more thoughts on the new face of Evangelicalism in America and the world...

(Disclaimer for those who don't read the entire article: This is not an anti-Catholic post, though it is arguably anti-rich wealthy white Catholics in funny hats)

When I was growing up - in a little end-of-the-world us-four-no-more Pentecostal Church in South Louisiana - I lived and breathed a meta-narrative that was familiar to many of us that spent our early days in small Pentecostal churches in the late 80's and early 90's. With some variation, the theme was a post-tribulation, premillenial gaze at the future coming tribulation and rapture of the church, with an emphasis on the need to hunker down and wait for the end. Our particular flavor was decidedly unworldly, with an emphasis on avoiding politics and voting, a pacifist theology that resulted in conscientious objection for those drafted in Vietnam, a communitarian/agrarian ethic that emphasized working with the hands and led to such things as home-births, home meetings, and close friendships among many members, and an emphasis on humanitarianism that led to financial and physical support not just for missions, but for transients, the homeless, and the poor. We lived this life, however, in self-righteous assurance that we were destined for leadership (and apparently rather lonely) positions in the world to come - and we expected apocalypse at almost any moment... or at least the tribulation.

Regardless of the local flavor, this worldview was greatly influenced by an eschatology rooted in the infamous "The Late Great Planet Earth" and the paranoid ramblings of the anti-everything Jack Chick of Chick Publications and Chick Tracts fame. There were many evils in this world, including "Satanists" (a catch-all phrase for pagans, new-agers, followers of any native or aboriginal religions, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Halloween candy eaters, or generally Christians of other denominations), Television (Satan's window to our minds), Radio (except for certain NPR programs and the local Christian channels - as long as they weren't playing something modern like Carmen or Amy Grant), higher education (except for strictly non-liberal-artsy-fartsy tracks), sex (pretty much all of it, except for whatever mysterious things happened behind our parents closed doors and was only discussed with whispers and much glancing around) and politics (self-explanatory). One evil, however, overshadowed all the others... the CATHOLIC CHURCH. According to the books, pamphlets, comic books, and tracts we consumed, the Catholics were at the root of every problem, past and/or future, which the REAL church had to contend with. The papists were guilty of martyring the martyrs (we read the unabridged Foxe on the matter), creating non-pentecostal theology (we obviously believed what the apostles themselves believed... before it was perverted by Constantine), practicing Satanism, putting Jesuits in power of everything that was anything in the world, killing the Jews during the holocaust (Hitler was a "good Catholic" doing the pope's bidding in our world), planning the NWO that was going to bring the super-masculine and vengeful Jesus down on the world, and getting ready to kill or imprison or torture or all three anyone who refused the mark of the beast, the rule of the Pope, the New World Order, or the One World Church promised by extremely questionable readings of Revelation and Daniel. We were to avoid the entrapments of "The Whore of Babylon" at all costs, and stories circulated of local priests that laughed when told one's denomination, promising that we were indeed wayward children who would be ushered into the fold.

Anyone who knows me pretty well knows that I am no longer a cowering soul waiting in terror for my brothers and cousins to betray me to the one world police, my parents to be murdered before my eyes, hell's gates to open under me for noticing that girls have boobs, or for a Satan possessed world leader to arise promising - gasp! - peace (we were warned assiduously against peace... well, we were supposed to practice it, but not expect it or talk about it or rely upon it or attempt to get others to practice it because that was how you knew that the Anti-christ was almost here - people would start crying "peace and safety!") While I value the positive things I learned (and there were a lot) from my upbringing, I have changed considerably as a Christian, re-understanding my theology and re-claiming the socially conscious, peaceable, and Christological aspects of my cultural Christianity, and developing a new understanding of the meaning of Christianity, the use of its texts, and the value of its language when applied to political, societal, and cultural situations. This is one of the cases that arises from this re-thought, and I'm going to attempt to parse it out for you (and myself).

One thing that has occurred (and there are multiple reasons for this) in the recent political and religious spectrum is a sea-change in the way in which many modern Pentecostals and Evangelicals view Catholicism and it's role in the world. Some of the factors that play into this are obvious - such as the supplantation of Muslim's as the great evil,  not so obvious - for example the common fears regarding threats to religious boundaries and the rise of the atheist, agnostic, and "spiritual" amongst today's youth, or not obvious at all - such as the strong effort by the Vatican to bridge gaps and gloss over differences so as to appear non-threatening to the Protestants of the west. What is extremely surprising to me, however, is the very obvious way in which the Pentecostals I grew up with have chosen to not just change their views on Catholicism, but to actually embrace the most extreme, misogynistic, paternalist, patriarchal views that the Vatican has been able to think up in the last few hundred years. (Part of this is in my mind attributable to the fact that we are in 2012 with no apocalypse, but I digress.)

The support for Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich in the Republican primaries is just the tip of the iceberg. Somehow, the leadership in the Pentecostal/Evangelical world and the leadership in the Catholic Church have managed to decide that - all past hostilities aside- it is more important to save 'Merica from independent women and the ever-present Moooooslum Menace than it is to retain any grasp whatsoever on the ideals in which they were birthed. In gradually being co-opted by the image of wealth, power, and vengeance held before them as ideals, our former watchdogs have been seduced by the very powers they stood against. The wealth of the Vatican, its worldly power, its corrupting influence on politics, its easy acceptance of almost any sin that doesn't involve sex or challenging wealthy white men in funny hats, and its penchant for war in the name of God are somehow becoming perfectly acceptable to those whose early idealistic self  would have rejected those things specifically because it came from a world and spiritual milieu  they detested. Instead of preaching humbleness, austerity, love, and peace, these neo-evangelicals preach war, worldly wealth, torture, hate, and vengeance. (And before anyone tells me they don't hate Muslims or Abortion doctors or women who use birth control, be aware that I am not stupid. Justifying killing someone is hate, railing against someone while red-raced and with spittle flying from your mouth is hateful, calling people slut and sand n****r is voicing hatred, and praying for the demise of those who share our creation is hatred incarnate.)

My point is simply this. The Catholic Church has never been the problem, nor is it worthwhile to rail against a religion that constitutes so much diversity inside its ranks. However, its leadership is as criminally moribund, as banally evil, and as self-righteously anti-Christ as any in the world. Unfortunately, those that hold power in the US and many other countries under Western influence are no better, and instead are participatory in the use of power to hold onto wealth, glory, and that self-same power in such a way that they have found themselves on the same side as this leadership. The separation that arises in Christiandom is not along Catholic and non-Catholic lines. No, the separation is between those who actually follow the words and ideals of Christ and those who see fit to twist and de-contextualize those words for their selfish interest. The vast majority of the leadership of the evangelical/Pentecostal world has brought into the form of Religion which seeks nothing less than complete and total temporal power... and will stop at nothing to get it.

The end result is a co-option of the independence of Christians to choose their own way into something that is looking more and more like the blind obedience demanded by those secular/religious powers the Protestants left behind during the reformation. If we were to use the language of John the Revelator, we might say that they have been seduced by the promise of "merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men"... and the power and will to achieve those things, along with the temporal power that implies.

It is indeed time to "Come out of her," but not the Catholic church itself or any other specific organization. Instead , all need to come out from the web of power and Godless anti-Christianity which is boosting itself into fascistic authority around the world once again. If we are to call ourselves Christians, we must heed Christ. We - no matter our denomination or lack thereof - need to recognize that the current call for physical control of the very souls and hearts of the populace is in itself anti-Christ. Christ calls us to love everyone, lay hands of healing even upon those we disagree with religiously, feed the poor and needy - even to our own detriment, avoid vengeance, care deeply and pray for those who wrong us or ours, avoid political entanglements and autocratic religious organization, visit those in prison (hint: not to torture them), and to die for these ideals if called upon to do so - all while forgiving those who perpetrate harm upon us and our fellows. When we instead seek temporal power, wealth, "security," self-righteousness, idolatry (in disguise as patriotism), or war upon non-Christians as ideals, we fall into the seductive web created by secular religious power. The love of mammon is anti-Christ. Vengeance is anti-Christ, Hate for fellow humans is anti-Christ. War against temporal power is anti-Christ. Forced religiosity is anti-Christ. And - most of all - doing or promoting these things in the name of God is using his name in vain - abject blasphemy - and should be fled from at all costs.

Our war is without a doubt not against flesh and blood. It is against wickedness, and it can't be fought with a defense budget, a flag, a tea party, or a gun held tight in what will eventually be cold, dead fingers. Instead, it can only be fought in the way in which Christ fought it - with a prophetic voice calling out evil where it lives and speaking truth to the powerful... a voice that calls for justice, love, compassion, and mercy; and decries violence, mammon, and the imposition of values upon those who do not share them. This is a voice we all should have, and it is the voice for our times.

Maybe, for a minute, we should contemplate the words of Amos when he warned his compatriots not to bother worshiping in their holiest places...

Therefore, because you tread down the poor
And take grain taxes from him,
Though you have built houses of hewn stone,
Yet you shall not dwell in them;
You have planted pleasant vineyards,
But you shall not drink wine from them. 

For I know your manifold transgressions
And your mighty sins:
Afflicting the just and taking bribes;
Diverting the poor from justice at the gate. 
Therefore the prudent keep silent at that time,
For it is an evil time.

  

Seek good and not evil,
That you may live;
So the Lord God of hosts will be with you,
As you have spoken. 

Hate evil, love good;
Establish justice in the gate.
It may be that the Lord God of hosts
Will be gracious

and then ask ourselves why the rulers of our current system call for exactly the opposite - and most importantly, why our churches have become hot-beds of support for those who perpetuate the evil, and avoid the good.

Of Right Wing Evangelical Super Law and My Ham Handed Efforts to Address It.

All apologies to my Muslim and Evangelical/Pentecostal friends for my new use of "evangelical Sharia" in describing the world that the extreme Christian Right in this country wants to impose on the rest of us. It does not do justice to long history of Islamic Jurisprudence, nor does it imply an unappreciative stance towards the complexities of the interaction of this form of religious law with modern governmental systems. Likewise, it does not reveal the subtleties of an evangelical tradition that has in the past, and for many still does, echo the best of what Christianity offers (community, morality, social consciousness, and prophetic truth to power).

What it DOES do, however, is bring radically to the fore the fact that the new Christian Right wants to bring about a Christian version of the world they claim that Islam wants to bring about in America - using a mutated and unrecognizable "Sharia" as the whipping boy for their project. They assume that if Americans are terrified of "Sharia," they will be open to the application of a radically redefined, heretofore nonexistent, and mightily misogynistic religious law - one that at every point echoes the one they act all terrified that the "MOOSLIM" bogeymen are going to impose on them! Of course, this leads us to the obvious point that their worry isn't really Islam or its philosophical and judicial underpinnings. What they are actually afraid of is a) women with any real power whatsoever, b) men that don't agree with them, and c) dominance by anything other than white American males or any of the "other" that promotes the continued dominance of the current CCRWRSWAM (Conservative Christian Right Wing Republican Straight White American Males - all regards to Todd Snider) in power.

So, my use of "Evangelical Sharia" is not a slam on either Sharia or Evangelicals as a whole - but rather an attempt to address in a directly satirical and mildly offensive way the fact that these bobble-headed giggle-twits (thanks to Lee Camp for that one) are not afraid in any real way that some radical form of Islam is coming to ensnare America. Instead, they are using a hopped up fear of some artificial mish-mash of Islam, secularism, science, education, and "Satanism" to attempt their own power grab - one that looks amazingly like the bogeyman they are scaring the public with. The Pentecostal world from which I arose had its issues, but its origins were radically communitarian and pacifistic. The heroes of my youth stood against killing, refused to vote so as not to be involved in worldly politics, and cared for the least among them. While there was inherent racism in the system, I was taught early on to avoid decisions based in prejudice, and that the value of each person was in their behavior and contributions as individuals. The founders of our movement stood up against wealth and power as ungodly, and stood up for humility and egalitarianism as models of a Christian civilization. I have watched sadly as the movement has lost it's socially conscious voice, suppressed the prophetic voice of its women, rejected its teachers, abandoned its pacifism, bought into the current frantic fear-mongering that passes for Christianity today, and - with open arms - embraced as models the very wealthy, prideful, arrogant, whited sepulchers that they rose up against in the beginning. Someone needs to say this. I have said it, am saying it now, and I will continue to say it. If it is offensive, I apologize - but not to those it was intended to offend. To them I say, "If it hurts, it must be striking a nerve."

Some thoughts on birth control, abortion, and other uncomfortable subjects...

So, a quick few thoughts for my pro-life friends...

I understand your angst. The thought of the death of a viable or even non-viable fetus (if developed enough to sense what is happening) makes me sick. But there is a serious and rather glaring flaw in the logic being imposed from conservative leadership. For some reason, they deliberately seek to PREVENT the easiest method imaginable to stop abortions. Research shows that one simple political/social move could cut abortions in half (That means saving HALF of the babies you want to protect!!) The same decision could prevent a significant number of unwed births and remove countless children from welfare rolls. This magic bullet consists of a combination of birth control and sex education. Half of all abortions could be prevented by the use of contraceptives and the education necessary to use them.

Now, this flies in the face of Conservative Christian meta-narratives, and I will address that in a moment. But one must seriously ask why someone formerly (at least tacitly) in favor of birth control and women's choice such as Rick Santorum might fight the implementation of such measures. Giving such politicians the benefit of the doubt, we might suggest that they are "playing to their audience" in an attempt to gain support of the hard right core. On a less charitable note, one might ask if they are more interested in keeping the number of abortions high so they have a platform to stump on and sway core voters. Even worse, one might observe that in order for big business to function successfully, it needs to have a large pool of barely educated able bodies to pull upon in order to both man its manual labor pools and fight its wars. (Personally, I lean to the last two.)

As for the meta-narratives and myths on sex, birth control, and sex education in the RWCC story cycles...

It is simply not true that birth control or sex-ed lead to either more sex or to disease and unwanted pregnancies. That cat is already out of the bag. Arguably, this might have been true in the past, but it is highly unlikely. Historical research shows that even in Puritan America at least 1/3 of the marriages were for the convenience of making sure a baby wasn't a bastard. Unwanted babies arise from lack of knowledge as much as from the natural inclination in humans to engage in sexual activity. Greater access to birth control didn't result in an increase in single moms, though arguably the liberty to not suffer humiliation if one doesn't marry the father of one's baby does.

It is also not true that the Bible calls for a world with no birth control. The only scriptures that could conceivably be contrived to mean this consist of a morality tale from ancient Mesopotamia that involved keeping community laws and behaving morally towards others. If one were to assume that the story (found in Genesis 38 - the infamous "spill your seed" passage) was meant to imply universal law, then one would have to insist that widowed women have sex with and marry (often polygamously) the brother of their former husband... or even that in certain circumstances it would be perfectly OK to sleep with your father-in-law under false pretenses. If this was a prohibition on birth control or masturbation, one would be led to wonder why there was never law laid down that would have prevented these things, which were certainly well known in the time that the scriptures were being written. Certainly Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, or John might have thought to mention it in the NT? We certainly know that birth control, abortion, and masturbation occurred historically, if common sense didn't already tell us as much.

The other passages generally used consist of various rhetorical passages which state in various ways that the Lord created us in the womb or knew us before birth. Without taking up a theological or historically critical understanding of these passages, we might also simply recognize that this doesn't mean every chance at life was meant to BE life. Millions of sperm never reach an egg. Millions of eggs get passed out without encountering sperm. 50% of conceptions spontaneously abort in the first 2 weeks. Many never make it much farther. If the God of the Bible meant for sex to mean conception, then he is apparently quite capricious in the enacting of His ideas! Likewise, one must concede that if he manipulates who has sex and what the result is, then he is also able to control whether birth control works or not, and that he would know whether birth control would be used, and would actually be willing it when it both was used and when it worked. (My third daughter was proof of this concept in action =:-)

All this to say, once again, that the discussion on sex and birth control is too colored by politics and religious (and often male) bias, and not affected enough by logic or rational decision making.

So, some advice to my friends who DO buy into Conservative Christian meta narratives. Support Birth Control and sex education. Successfully prevent half of the unwanted pregnancies from becoming death statistics. Prevent more by being willing to provide homes for the children and hand-ups for the women and men involved. THEN work towards any goals you like in the direction of abstinence. If abstinence only is the goal, don't try to reach it by stubbornly "cutting off your nose to spite your face" in insisting that there MUST be enough abortions for people to recognize the importance of not having sex. If you believe what you say you believe, small lives are at stake.

Why We Do What We Do Despite What You Think We Should Do

This is written as a brief response to the question of why so many of us COTB's (Children of the Boomers) are continuing to fall away from the systems of thought and politics with which we were raised. Upon much soul-searching and consideration of circumstances, I decided to address the issue - so here goes... (Hold on, because I don't really know where I'm going with this.)

Personally, I was raised as a conservative Republican, and worked early on as a young Republican operative. I faithfully toted the party line of God, Guns, and Glory around Maine via tables, talks, and telephone calls. I am still fond of some of those actions. Via those moments and movements I learned to stand up for what I believed in. I learned to face harassment in supporting those beliefs, and that this harassment could lead to the distilling and clarification of those beliefs. I learned to carry myself well in public view, how to debate in a crowd or in person, how to deliver a short and concise message, and how to provide a good television interview. In fact, I am still proud of some of the positions and ideas I supported, though I am much more nuanced on them now.

The same holds true for those children of the Boomers who were raised as Liberals or Democrats. Despite the ideological and political differences in position, the experiences are often the same. In similar ways, we fought for our idealized positions, convinced of the righteousness of our causes. Interestingly, the values with which we were endowed by our parents were often not only similar, but of similar origins and circumstances. I protested abortions because God wanted me to - the same reason that some young Democrats protested the lack of funding for the poor. I stood up against "the system" when I decried the loss of family values - while young liberals did the same when they stood up for the rights of LGTBQ individuals. And I felt I simply followed the dictates of conscious and common sense when I worked hard for the election of conservatives who would work to make sure that the large corporations and wealthy "job creators" kept trickling down funds to us poor undeserving masses - while my counterparts labored for the election of those who would stand up for the rights of the workers and union members who they felt (rightfully so) were the real backbone of society. Unfortunately, what we all discovered as we grew older was that we had all been given the proverbial shaft.

I started this missive out in order to point out to my friends on the right the severe difference between the values with which I was endowed as a child and the real world values which I was expected to hold fast to once I was grown. This started out as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of the G rated Disney movies with which were plied as children... you know, the kind where we learned that the wealthy and politically powerful were always the bad guys, unless they had a change of heart. The ones where we learned that things were never what they seemed, that miracles could happen in favor of the little guy, and that we should never find ourselves falling in love with the obvious choice. Where we learned that dreams could come true, that good people win in the end, and that greedy buggers always get their comeuppance. I was going to discuss the values that we were taught in Sunday School - how we were taught that judgment, vengeance, and life and death belonged to God, that greed and the laying up of riches was antithetical to Christian thinking, and that God was on the side of love, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and clothing the naked. I had intended a thoughtful yet light analysis of how those values were as thoroughly debunked as the mythology of Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny when we got to be grown up Republicans, and how these values stayed with us despite the debunking - just as the joy of giving and celebrating the life of spring never left us either.

However, the truth is that I don't feel very jovial about the situation anymore, and I don't think that my counterparts who have arisen from the left do either. The fact of the matter is, I am royally pissed off. All of us, left, right and center, are simply fed-up to the yin-yang with the blatant disrespect and disregard for the values that we all know are true - despite differences in how they were presented to us when we were young. In all actuality, we were all fed a line of bull the size of which dwarfs some of the greatest piles of crap in the history of the world... up to and including the one that led to bets in favor of Napoleon at Waterloo. The truth of the situation is - as we are gradually discovering - that none of it mattered at all. Our energy, our zeal, and our commitment were all used shamelessly and cynically to further the causes of a very few, very wealthy, and very evil people and conglomerates that were (and are) intent on driving the rest of the world into slavery and/or peasantry so that they might rule the world with as little opposition as possible. This is something that many of us have sensed, and some of us are convinced of. The current unrest around the world is a symptom of this realization - a realization that has led to a quickening of the process, rather than a withdrawal of the threat. The post-ideological and post-partisan nature of the current youth movements is due to the very desperate nature of this threat.

This is not a new situation, nor is this the first time that a situation such as this has arisen. Power is seductive, and it takes neither a earth-shattering conspiracy nor a forceful coup for those with power to find ways to over-exercise their authority. All it takes is time... and once again, the time has come. The evidence is everywhere. From the consolidation of mineral and water rights around the world by a few powerful corporations to the consolidation of housing through artificially orchestrated foreclosure storms in the US by the same corporations, from the stagnation of wages around the world to the austerity measures that make sure that those in what should be the most prosperous nations in the world are largely forced to work harder and harder for less and less and have no hope to climb out of their current circumstances, and from (for the US and many Western nations) the ongoing warfare in nations where we have absolutely no concern to the refusal to intervene in situations around the world where intervention is much more morally imperative - there can be no doubt that there is little hope for those without much wealth or power to maintain any modicum of respect, dignity, or sustenance for much longer without willingly or unwillingly kowtowing to those who sign our paychecks and sometimes deign to bestow us with largess. Here in the United States this has become abundantly clear in the last few months, as the White House completely ignores and insults those who petition through the avenues the White House itself set up, as our elected representatives consolidate power to themselves through electoral restructuring, gerrymandering, and the installment of a militarized police state, and as our robo-cops have tear gassed, dragged, and bashed the heads in of those (including academics and veterans) who have dared to cry foul to the policies of the elite.

The end result is, we have refused to buy the bill of goods that we were having foisted upon us. Toting political party lines, marching to political drums, and carrying water for political hacks has gotten us where we are today. The in-your-face evidence of both the Bush and the Obama administrations and both the Democrat and Republican congresses has clearly shown that our representatives have sold their souls for the pittance of power given them by the wealthy and powerful of the world as surely as a cheap whore sells their body for the short high they can get from a needle. The only recourse open to the people was the courts, but decisions such as Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission and Kelo v. City of New London have made it clear that the courts are just as corrupt, while those few justices who have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the Powers That Be will be likely run over, disbanded, or overruled by the soon coming installment of political scum who will be elected by people who are still to vested in the system to see when the system has completely failed. As our protests have been met with lies, fear, patronization, and finally outright violence, there is only one path left. We have chosen to opt out of your system. No more voting for donkey's or elephants because we think one side or the other won't screw us quite as hard as the other. The truth is that both are engaged in a rapinous rampage against the rights which we all recognize as belonging to all human beings. We are tired of being told who to hate, who to kill, and who to plunder in order to keep these idols in power. As the corptocracy/oligarchy/plutacracy in which we live tightens the hold on our information sources, our food, our privacy, and our education, we refuse to be engaged with and by those systems. We WILL find information and disseminate it regardless of corporate media and global laws to halt it. We WILL practice food independence, regardless of the walls of lobbyists thrown up in our paths. We WILL maintain our privacy, or see to it that those in power have no privacy to speak of. And we WILL educate ourselves and our children, in the face of those who think the only proper schooling is one which creates happy little wage slaves for the corporate machine which grinds them to pieces.

We stand in solidarity with the values raised by those heroes the world over and throughout time who refused to bow to any power or authority that violated basic human kindness and decency. We stand with those who insist that the time of partisan bickering in the service of clouding all sides of the issues be given up for reasonable and responsible consensus politics. We refuse to be co-opted by the instigators, infiltrators, and leaches of the dead political system which brought us to this point. And most of all, we stand UNITED in this cause around the world and for as long as it takes to throw off the bonds of our would be masters.

Finally, we will react with compassion, we will facilitate the communion of all of humanity, we will follow the prophets of so many religions and philosophies when they teach us of the simple and universal golden rule, and we will stand for the rights of EVERY HUMAN BEING to have an equal right to own their work and achieve the just rewards of that work for them, their families, and their communities. We do not care if these values for an individual arise from rational atheism, a solid religious upbringing, or a special message from a blue-green alien riding a ship behind Uranus... just so long as they are recognized and brought to life. We do not care if the political system from which your views arise is Communistic, Anarcho-Capitalistic, or a more conventional system... so long as you stand with us. We will live the values with which we were instilled, even if our fathers and mothers have forgotten they existed - or for that matter, in the face of their insistence that they matter not at all.