Modernity Ward

I know it sounds cliché but we are standing at the crossroads of history.  There have been a number of loci in the past century where the course of future humanity, indeed the future of the world could have taken a tack away from oblivion.  These were either lost or corrupted to losses for society and for the continued well-being of the planet.  These loci were triumphs of the human spirit over greed and triumphs of the good of the whole over the good of the few.  But, in the same way that 'the war to end all wars' didn't, triumphs were coopted by the corporate machine and turned into widgets and memes.  Now, with the ascendancy of information technology and research in the behavioural sciences, comes the last stand of freedom and liberty.

There are two ways to look at how we have arrived at the current state of affairs.  The positive view says that domination by oligarchies has been around since humans formed satellite communities and have always been overthrown.  Chieftains, nobility, party members, juntas, etc. conspired to enslave their various populaces and exploit their labours,and strove to skew the distribution of goods within their societies.  And the people always rose up to win a more equitable share of the common good for everyone.  They rose up against emperors and clan leaders, against bishops and generals, against dictators and their bureaucrats.  The negative view says the oligarchies have finally become powerful enough to maintain the stranglehold of Adolf Hitler’s“Thousand Year Reich”.  

People used to rise up to protect the social good.  Their revolts were popular movements that sought to assert the primacy of the people. With time, the people were manipulated into rising up on the pretext that they were defending their way of life and the safety of their loved ones.  They were convinced that destroying another society’s prosperity was key to their own continuing comfort and ease.  They were press ganged into the dehumanization of basic training and damaged to the core as warriors conditioned to absorb the insanity of modern warfare.  Where past wars were profitable to the society through payment of tributes, enslavement of populaces, and expansion of domestic markets, the new wars are fought and paid for with public money and the plunder and tributes accrue to corporate entities and the obscenely rich who own and control them.

The next step is obvious and logical.  Since there are only so many protracted wars that can be sustained, the war must be taken to the populace itself.  In recent years it has become more and more obvious that the target of the super wealthy has become everyone else.  With the complicity of the merely wealthy whose goal it is to move into the oligarchic penthouse, the super rich prey on the marginalized – and eventually the vast majority in the society will become the marginalized.  Already, the old, the infirm, the children, the poor, the mentally ill, and their advocates are under attack.  When they have been isolated,what remains of the public will be (has already been) enslaved – shackled by their inability to earn a living wage, encumbered by crippling taxation and doomed to fight over the ever shrinking crumbs that are scraped from the tables of the rich.

Where are the vanguards of the slaughter of western society?  In the U. S., the southern Republican states lead the way with their bankrupting of state and local tax bases and the selling off any profitable public sector enterprises.  Right-to-work legislation, restrictive voting laws, the promotion of racial tension, and the suppression of education are all symptoms of the disease.  

In Canada, Alberta leads the way due to the vast influence of corporate (especially oil) interests.  Albertans were always a rather backward people, comprised of the avaricious, the religious, the essence of the American“. . . your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . .” yearning to prosper.  Because of its resource wealth,it has attracted an inordinate number of carpetbaggers from the scum of the capitalist pond.  In other words, it is the perfect proving ground for the enslavement of the modern citizen.  Alberta is the poster child of the corporate dream where wealth abounds but is distributed unequally.  

The gulf between the wealthy and the rest has grown into a chasm and will soon be an abyss. Unfortunately, a majority of the population seems to feel that their prosperity and future security is best placed in the hands and pockets of those whose interests are in direct conflict with theirs.  And money will continue to weave the great illusion and the greater lies that will rob the populace of their rightful share and their offspring of their birthright.

It will soon become too late to make a stand.  Choose your side now as if the lives of your children and grandchildren depended on it.  Or fail to choose and the choice will continue to be made for you