Dear Alexander,
You have read the thoughts of a very decent American man we have here on our forum named Tim. There are others in his country as decent and thoughtful. Do we want to see such people burned as we dance and cheer. Do people seriously think the Tims of the US can change the government? Those people who cheered and are bellowing hate now have something wrong in their inner beings and aren't rational, either.
I have met many people from the United States and been there. The average people of the US are trying to do the best they can. Raising their kids, earning their livings, paying their mortgages, planting their flower and vegetable gardens. Looking out for their old parents or helping to nurse them, making their car payments. Putting the kids through college. Burdened with debt. They generally try to live decent lives. There are very strong, active forces, constantly at work manipulating to keep them consuming. If consumers don't keep consuming it seems the USA will have a financial disaster. The rest of the world will soon come under the same pressures. Then we'll see how different they really are.
The problems that concern you and that writer are really coming from the very, very rich who have been in power, often for generations. Don't you know that? Do you know that during WW2 the Krupp factories in Germany weren't even bombed. They were armament makers, too. Why do you suppose that was? Do you not know that there is a world wide social group of the very wealthy, and the ones who grip the politics of their countries in their iron fists and milk their people for everything they can get, so that they can put the mega wealth gained into Swiss banks? They think wealth will protect them from anything that goes wrong. Many of these travel around having good times together. Others are as greedy, and stash the money they grasp away in "safe places" while they spend their time manipulating governments and industries. They think they deserve their extreme wealth. They spend a lot of time working on getting and keeping it. They often have stunted souls. These people are always well guarded. They have chauffeurs who are taught how to avoid ambushes, wear armoured vests, have bodyguards, and alarm systems, and armoured limousines, and more. They are not likely ever to be hurt by something like a French Revolution which could come along to chop off their heads.
Nope. It isn't going to be stopped that way.
Why do you think I turned away from politics to religion, and looked for what I think has the power to change the hearts of men. Offers new solutions to world problems. Understands the real direction of the future? Which can bring warmth and love for others and for God to my heart. Also hope. I think you must believe I am a cloistered, gentle idealist. I have known for more than the past forty years that the UN couldn't go any further until each country gave up some of its sovereignty. They still refuse to do it. I assure you, things are going to change, because many behaviours that are making this world and society sick are coming to a head now, all at once. There is a solution, of course. But everything is going well enough still, that most people everywhere don't want to change themselves much. Or think about anything different than what they usually do, and their parents did, and they think is working as it always seemed to before.
We aren't going to like what is going to happen if we, the people of the world, don't have the wit to pull together ourselves, and stop hate, and cooperate with each other. We are going to go through a lot more in this world before this iron grip is loosened, and all the world's people learn to hate war, and to suffer themselves, when they know that someone on the other side of the world is suffering. What do you think it will take to bring people to that? There is going to be a different civilization. This one is breaking down. Have you noticed that?
Too many think it is a good way to rev up industry and to get more money from their stock market holdings by allowing the grinding of people and the destruction of the environment. The people who don't care aren't just in the USA, or "the West". There are lots of others who are abusing the farmland, using fire to clear it, over cropping, allowing the earth to blow away, not planting trees, cutting them in clear-cuts, refusing to change practises their ancestors followed. Refusing to try new foods that can make them well. It isn't just in the west that there are stupid, ignorant, uncaring people everywhere.
There is great political darkness and corruption now. It may be some relief to hate those little average Americans, like those dancing, singing people at the time of 9/11 did. That isn't the solution. Greed has become enormous and endemic. It is in everybody who falls for all the advertising and wants what they don't need. It is in everybody who is jealous of their neighbour and wants what they have. It is in everybody who wants to be wealthy and have it all. You know what the dummies say? "The guy who dies with the most toys wins."
It is in all who only look out for themselves and doesn't care about the welfare of the whole. It is in everybody who has to eat sharkfin soup, and the gall bladders torn out of grizzly bears, and "bush meat", and use the last mahogany, and fish the last salmon, and feed herbivores their own kind, and dump poisons into the food of animals so that farmed salmon are cancer dangers now, because of the PCBs in them. And dump into streams, rivers, the ocean. And kill the last whales for expensive dinners to boost the egos. Chemicals not well understood but profitable are forced into many unavoidable foods and things. People live too close to animals and pick up their viruses. Jungles are cleared, aboriginals are scattered and abused. Wars happen. New, virulent illnesses rise as organisms seek new human homes for the animal ones they have lost. Everybody who buys a big trucklike SUV and pollutes without caring is one of the greedy dummies. It is in everybody who needs to have a new whatever it is to stay in fashion, when the old whatever it was isn't the right colour.
Nobody has to eat McDonalds hamburgers, or their like. Nobody has to go to the stores that look the same all around the world. Nobody has to watch TV or movies that pour junk into their brains and hearts. They could choke them off by refusing. Instead they scream about how it is damaging their cultures, but too many of them also lap it up and feel a little more like the admired US citizens if they can have some of the US goodies. There is definitely a love/hate relationship with the USA. The world does it and both envies and hates.
Do you think I think the United Nations is going to make it? Not if things don't change. There is going to be some kind of a big, long, horrible experience for everybody one of these days. It isn't going to be too long from now because this world and some of its people are going to survive. Maybe it will be after your lifetime, but no wonder the youth of the world are so worried. They are afraid it is all going to land on them. A new civilization will grow up. Eventually.
Most of us won't be part of it I guess. Ben and I have changed our lives over the years so that we are quite light on the environment. We want to practise what we preach, as they say. People who don't do what they tell others to do aren't worth much, which is why I don't discuss philosophers much. Founders of the great world Religions always practise what they preach.
We are definitely trying. So are other people who think, in the USA, where those filled with envy and hatred would like to see them all die. If enough people around the world did the same, and cut out buying a lot of the stuff they do because they are suckered into thinking they have to have it by ads and other means, there would be change. Companies would wake up. People have allowed themselves to think that they have to live as is depicted to them to live. They don't. They can step out of the laid out track. So can any of you.
I just get sick and tired of people who think they should hate people from the USA, and that hatred is the way to accomplish anything. Who is trying to pay for AIDS treatment in countries that have top leaders sucking off their own people? Well, I think it's western governments, and Bill Gates and so on. Think about all the positive things the USA is doing, and has done in other countries. How about the Marshall Plan after WW2. Britain didn't get it and they staggered along for years. Germany and their other former enemies did much better because of it. They picked up their former enemies, and they hadn't picked the fight. Of course that is in the past, but a lot of those US citizens those hate dancers wish to see in anguish pay the taxes that did and do those things.
Is this writer, whose rank hatred you cite all the time, a person from India? Or one of those countries where poor children are allowed to starve with flies on their eyes, big swollen bellies and red hair from Kwashiorkor, while the wealthy don't see them as they pass in an armoured limousine?
One of the reasons I admire China and can't stand to read novels by writers from India, about India, is because of that caste system that is still supported and enjoyed by all, except the poor Harijans, who have to climb down into public sewers and shovel out the accumulated human fecal waste. Having the Harijan to lord it over must make all the rest feel good about themselves. Even when they can afford to have a different kind of plumbing that doesn't require this, it often isn't installed by those who could afford it. Even Mahatma Ghandi didn't try to tear down the caste system. Why not, I wonder.
China has tried to bring her people to the point where almost everyone has some shelter and some kind of food to put into their stomachs, and they introduced barefoot doctors when they were short of others. They have brought your country to the point where it can rise and take its place in the world. I hope the parasitic, greedy ones who so often claw their way to the top won't ever get hold of it. So far it still seems to be trying hard to make good improvements, even if there are some troubles.
A lot of the horrors mentioned here, and the troubles to come, are from lack of an inner core, self-directed, true spirituality. There needs to be the understanding that there is inevitably an accounting, and possession of both the fear and the love of God.
China and Chinese, and all the rest of the peoples and nations in the world will do what they will do, regardless of what I think. So I am committed to living my life as a responsible and loving human being. That's about what I can contribute. There seems to me to be a kind of insanity loose in the world. We could experience a great world wide monetary collapse one of these days. There is danger from so many angles. and there are intelligent people warning against them. But the bottom line, corruption, greed and foolish ignorance still rule.
Regards to you. I hope you won't take the blind hatred route.
Mary
