Yesterday I met Nicole, a lovely woman in her 30s who was visiting from Las Vegas. We had a good conversation, but her words filled me with sadness and fear.
I asked her what it was like living in this summer’s heat, which has reached over 116 degrees F (46.6 Celsius). Nicole’s smile faded and she looked toward the floor. “I’m grateful,” she said. “I’ve got a garage and air conditioning. Things are OK.” I got the sense that she was happy to be in San Francisco where the temperature was closer to 60 degrees (15.5 C), but things were definitely not OK. People in Vegas are dying in the streets from heat and dehydration.
Las Vegas could be the poster city for America’s disconnect from reality, but people continue to move there and use up their fast disappearing supplies of water. The Guardian newspaper reported, “Las Vegas’ population is booming and the city is sprawling into the surrounding desert. On hot days, the highways and roads are littered with broken-down automobiles — commuter cars, ambulances, delivery trucks and buses that overheat as they made their way to and from the city-center.”
Many Americans blissfully ignore the realities of global warming, if they think about Nature at all. Most refuse to accept ecological limits on their lifestyles. For example, Las Vegas has over 70 golf courses consuming precious water. Vegas gets 90% of its water from Lake Mead, formed by the Hoover Dam across the Colorado River. Lake Mead is drying up from prolonged drought and overuse by the thirsty city and other users in the American West.
Las Vegas has over 2.7 million residents in the metropolitan area and 42 million visitors a year, according to Macrotrends.net. Professional football and hockey teams have moved there. Most people spend all day in air conditioned homes, workplaces, or cars, but some cannot. Those who work outdoors, who cannot afford air conditioning or are homeless struggle to survive the heat, and some don’t make it.
People in Vegas live in homes and party in hotels cooled by machines, powered by fossil fuel-burning power plants. The plants’ emissions make warming worse. The replacement of dirt, brush, and desert plants by concrete makes the city hotter. Strip shows, gambling casinos, and spectacular lighting are everywhere, but nature is nowhere to be found.
People move to Vegas for money and jobs. They visit Vegas to take their minds off reality. The local government takes small steps to help people, such as opening daytime cooling centers and recently banning “useless grass.” But the ban doesn’t take effect until 2027 and doesn’t include golf courses, and the cooling centers close at night even if temps stay up.
In 115 degree heat, residential building goes on, pushing the city deeper into the desert. One sweating drywaller told the Guardian, “When the boss is ready to go, you better be ready to work, or he will find someone who is. We have to make a living.”
Not unique; not an outlier
Las Vegas is a high-profile climate change story, but it is far from unique. Other desert cities in Nevada, California, Arizona and other Western states are growing rapidly. Many of them, like Phoenix AZ have multiple golf courses. Because these cities depend on Colorado River water, the river downstream has long dried up and no longer flows to the sea. Surrounding land in Mexico, formerly a lush delta, has become desert.
Other Western water sources are also overused and disappearing. The incredibly productive farms of California are based on pumping water from the ground and piping it in from other places. Their products include water-intensive crops such as rice and almonds that should never grow in a desert, but can with enough irrigation. They grow massive amounts of hay for feedlot cattle. That water mostly comes from aquifers created by hundreds of years of accumulated rainfall. It can’t be replaced in real time. But irrigation of industrial farms continues, and we enjoy the foods it produces.
Rich people aren’t the only ones ignoring natural limits. Last week, I attended a virtual gathering where people were happy that COVID restrictions were being eased. People discussed travel plans, including international flights and cross-country road trips. They had safety concerns about travel, but the fears all concerned COVID. Climate change didn’t come up.
Why would it be different when corporate media broadcasts fear of COVID and political dramas constantly, while scarcely mentioning climate or water? Worldwide, domestic air travel is back to about 60% of pre-pandemic levels and rising. Auto traffic in the US has returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to the analysis firm Inrix.
We have been warned
In 1988 NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director James Hansen told Congress that carbon dioxide emissions were creating a blanket in the atmosphere (called the greenhouse effect) raising global temperatures. His speech caused a sensation. Vice-President George H.W. Bush vowed that he would “use the White House effect to combat the greenhouse effect.” International treaties were passed to reduce emissions. The United Nations set up a permanent panel to deal with climate issues.
But money won and Earth lost. Since Hansen’s speech, global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 70%. Corporations are finding oil in more remote places using ever more-destructive technologies such as fracking, tar sands extraction, and deep sea drilling. Coal companies are blowing tops off of mountains to dig previously inaccessible coal. Factory farms have gotten much bigger and more dependent on chemicals and irrigation. The military keeps flying, shipping, and dropping bombs all over the world.
There are now 1.4 billion cars on the roads, far more than in Hansen’s day, according to carguide.com. Capitalism turns the Earth into products and sells them to ordinary people, and we’re buying them. We’re too busy watching their shows and playing their games to notice what’s happening outside our windows. Will people so separated from Nature voluntarily put down our toys so we can live?
Revolution would be a start
Although capitalism has proven itself incompatible with life, changing economic systems won’t be nearly enough to heal the devastation from 500 years of alienation from Nature. Perhaps nothing will, but Nature has formidable healing powers. If we stop kicking her in the face, stop ignoring and start loving her, she may still recover.
For there to be a hope of recovery, we would need a worldwide spiritual transformation, powerful scientific breakthroughs, and a political revolution. Everything would have to change, including you and me. But it could happen. I’ll be writing about it for sure.
First, we have to come back to Earth. We have to stop living in society’s distorted casinos of the mind and rejoin the rest of creation. We’ll be happier, poorer, and healthier, and our children might survive that way. It’s time to leave Las Vegas.
The good thing about getting old is people don’t expect as much of us. But even when we’re not doing, I believe we still have responsibilities to the people around us and the world that has given us so much.
The world is going on without us, but we still have valuable parts to play. We can be active in ways we don’t always recognize. These 11 practices can help seniors play our roles well, make us valuable contributors to society, and might make our own lives more rewarding.
1. Keep growing. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Keep making new friends. My mother lived in senior housing and, over her 30 years there, every single friend she had either died or moved to assisted living. She kept making friends with the younger seniors who moved in, and neighbors saw her as their big sister until she died at 91.
2. Contribute as best we can. How? Well, for one thing, most of us can share wisdom. Because the world is changing so rapidly, we might run out of practical things to teach, but we can still mentor younger people facing the universal issues of life.
Helping with children is traditional old people’s work. A lot of seniors — I’m one of them — find children rewarding, especially with our grandchildren.
We can also stay involved in our communities. Older people have more time to go to meetings, write letters to editors, call representatives, be politically active. We can volunteer in whatever ways we’re physically able. Growing food or flowers in a garden is a way to enrich the world with our presence.
Doing too much can mess things up, though. It makes no sense for me to try and help people move stuff or set up their room from my wheelchair. I can give advice, but there’s no reason to get in the way.
3. Accept help when needed. Few people like being helped with things we used to do for ourselves, but sometimes other people can do them better. It’s hard for family and caregivers when we insist on doing things on our own when it’s dangerous, or will take all day, or we can’t do it right.
At the same time, a lot of folks offer help when it’s not needed nor wanted, or when they don’t know what they’re doing. We can accept help when appropriate and still be assertive about what we do and don’t want and need.
4. Care for those who help us. When I worked in long-term care, our staff loved some patients and were happy to help them. We kind of avoided some others. Patients who let staff know they were appreciated made the carers’ day.
In our own lives, we can thank people, tell them what they mean to us, give them little gifts, or food, or money. If we can’t do anything else, we can listen. Ask them to tell you about their life or about their day.
5. Don’t waste. I hate the way our lives fill with plastic. It’s not our fault; it’s how things are packaged and delivered. Buy less of it. The same with other stuff, like vehicles or electronics.
Many older folks try to save money for their children and grandchildren. I think that’s a good idea, but so is giving money away to good causes and people. Money in the bank isn’t doing any good in the here and now.
6.Love our bodies, even when they are sources of pain and worry. Our bodies are our closest connection to Nature. Ignoring one’s body is being thankless for one’s greatest gift. Touch your body, pay attention to it, give thanks for it.
7. Keep moving. A friend of mine just died at 107, and there’s a reason she got that far. She was walking until near the end, but when she couldn’t, I still noticed her moving her feet and arms in bed or chair, trying to maintain what she had. Moving our bodies keeps us in touch with them and with the world.
8. Don’t cling — If I will need a bunch of surgeries, mechanical devices, and medical equipment to make it to age 90, someone else can have my place. It took some years, but I have learned not to fear death. What’s the worst that could happen? I meditate, pray, read spiritual texts, and talk with others about it when I need to.
9. Heal conflicts within the family. Forgive others, ask forgiveness from them; let them know you love them. An unresolved conflict with a parent, child, or sibling is a source of misery for all concerned. Maybe get help with this from a therapist or clergy person. It’s one of old people’s most important jobs.
10. Tell stories from our own lives, our people’s history, folk tales, or other cool things we’ve heard. Stories are the best way to share wisdom and pass on important history. Younger people will enjoy and benefit from them when they would turn off a teaching session.
11. Enjoy each day. Take pleasure in small things, stay connected to Nature. I specially think about enjoying food and music, but you probably have other sources. Time with animals, plants, or children makes us happier and less stressed, which helps everyone around us. Remember to be thankful for all of it!
Old people don’t just take up space; we are participants in the world. If we make the most of our role, we will contribute more and probably wind up enjoying life more.
“Freedom is not free. It takes billions of dollars worth of media propaganda to manufacture the illusion of freedom.” Caitlin Johnstone
The United States’ national anthem calls the USA “the land of the free,” and many Americans love to think of it that way. If freedom means the right to carry guns, drive fast, and shoot off fireworks, the “free” label might be true. Other areas, such as work life, housing, healthy environments and the right to live in peace aren’t free at all. We have freedom for a few at the cost of misery for millions.
American freedom was always a lie. When the Star Spangled Banner was written, the country’s economy depended on over 600,000 slaves. By 1860, according to the US Census Bureau, that number had increased to almost four million, 13% of the population. The anthem actually celebrates slavery and American freedom in the same (3rd) verse.
This disconnect has never changed, and the oppressed groups are not only African slaves or Native Americans. They include most of the working class and much of the middle class. People think they’re free while working 60 hours a week to keep a roof over their heads or commuting 90 minutes each way to a job they hate. Depending on their neighborhood, non-rich people may live in fear of militarized police and of desperate youth driven to crime.
How can a country call itself free while locking up two million people? Or making 600,000 people sleep in the street? Do you think their situation doesn’t impact our quality of life? Can we walk by beggars every day and not feel the hurt around us?
These contradictions are inevitable in a society that prioritizes individual freedom above the common good. There used to be a saying: “No one is truly free while others are oppressed.” That’s a nice-sounding Leftist sentiment, but the truth is that no one is truly free unless others are oppressed. Individualistic freedom and oppression both represent separation from the mutual connection which is our natural state.
Drivers’ freedom to drive polluting cars keeps asthmatic children from walking outside. Smokers’ freedom might keep them out of indoor spaces. A child’s freedom to spill milk all over the floor depends on someone else’s having to clean it up.
On a larger scale, a property owner’s right to do what they want with their land involves denying others’ freedom to use the property. America’s 400,000 correction officers’ freedom depends on denying freedom to two million inmates, and they go home every night with the knowledge of their prisoners’ lives.
Do you see it? Individual freedom is a scam. It makes us miserable. Aside from sociopaths, most of us need connection to other people and Nature to live well. Going it alone doesn’t work. As Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of “Braiding Sweetgrass” says, “All flourishing is mutual.”
Good up to a point
Freedom is better than slavery, better than imprisonment, better than addiction (three conditions listed as opposites of freedom in dictionaries.) But the main definition, the one marketed by America is ‘the power to do what you want to do.’ And this is only good up to a point.
Children need limits to grow up. Adults need structure to stay sane. We need support and connection; otherwise things fall apart for society and for individuals. Freedom is good, but when we go too far away from our community, we become lonely, lost, and in some cases dangerous.
If a person is denied room to breathe and move, say in an abusive relationship or by an employer demanding a seven-day work week, they would be right to leave, fight back, or demand more freedom. But freedom from responsibility to our children or to our Mother Earth is excessive and will not make anyone happy.
Freedom as marketing strategy
US talk of freedom is an advertising slogan. Older readers might remember the General Motors’ ad: “It’s not just your car; it’s your freedom.” In reality, American freedom is limited to the most superficial things, like guns, clothes, cars, or taste in music. We’re encouraged to show off our freedom by buying things.
May we think of freedom, not as the right to do what we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right. Peter Marshall
Writing on July 4 2021, I get the feeling many believe that making a lot of noise is freedom. In a pre-Independence Day thread on Facebook, some were pleading to prevent fires by not exploding fireworks. Some commenters agreed, but others (all male, I noted), called the post an attack on freedom. “Would you rather be free, or rather be a safe slave?” commented one. Personally, I’d feel freer knowing my neighborhood isn’t going to burn down while I sleep.
Freedom to starve
America’s mythology of freedom is used as club against any government attempt to help people. At age 70, I have social security and Medicare. Those benefits are sources of freedom, and everyone should have them. Because of them, I can go places, do things, have a decent apartment, enjoy life. Without them I’d be miserable or dead. Social support creates freedom. Isolation disguised as freedom creates misery.
When progressive politicians advocate making public universities tuition-free or canceling student debt, hundreds of freedom-loving Americans try to shout them down. “They made the choice to buy something they wanted. They should pay for it,” is one argument. “Why should I pay for someone else’s education?” is another.
Most of the world acknowledges that education is a social good, and at least 16 countries provide university-level education at low or no cost, but Americans think it’s freer for us to live with a lifetime of debt. Conservatives have fought against social security, welfare, Medicare, and other social programs as attacks on freedom. They think helping people unfairly forces some to pay for others and subverts poor people’s independence.
The cruel ideology of every individual for themselves makes most people poorer, more stressed, and more lonely. Studies show people who live in close communities are healthier and happier. When society helps people survive, they become more productive citizens, as many studies of universal basic income (UBI) have shown. Telling people, ‘You’re on your own’ is not liberating; it’s oppressive.
Selling war
America’s so-called freedom is used to promote endless wars. The military claims to be defending our freedom (from whom?) The US government says they are bringing freedom and democracy when they bomb, invade, or sanction other countries. The target countries don’t find freedom, only poverty and destruction, but people who follow American media would think freedom is on the march.
In the minds of US rulers, yelling “freedom” is a way to get people to spend their money, work their asses off, and fight wars. Their freedom is not our happiness; it isolates and impoverishes us. If we first re-embrace connection and responsibility, we will have the possibility of true freedom.
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“Under capitalism, all land is seen as a warehouse of potential commodities to be sold to the highest bidder.” Robin Wall Kimmerer
Can a person own a piece of their mother? No? Then, how can we claim to own land? Land is Earth, the giver of all life. We didn’t create it; it created us.
Dictionary.com defines ownership as “The total body of rights to use and enjoy a property, to pass it on to someone else as an inheritance, or to convey it by sale.” They could have added the right to deny other people its use. How does anyone earn the right to exploit their creator and exclude others, no matter who the process harms?
Owners no doubt spent money for those rights, but whom did they pay? How did the seller gain ownership? They bought it from somebody else, who had bought it from somebody else, until you get back to the original owner, a conqueror or King who stole it from the Indians.
Land ownership is possession of stolen goods. When a landowner claims a right to log a forest, mine coal under the ground, or build a chemical plant, because they bought the land, they are confessing to a crime and planning new crimes.
Private property has its valuable sides. People who live on land they own may take better care of it than renters or visitors. But many absentee owners, especially corporate owners, take all they can from land and leave it suffering. When money becomes more valuable than land, we get the environmental destruction and injustice we see today, with many people having no place to live at all.
We need a new definition of ownership and a new relationship to land. Indigenous people didn’t own land; they revered it. Many countries have other ways of managing land. We’re not stuck with letting rich property owners destroy our world.
Rights vs. obligations
In America, we spend a lot of time talking about our rights. People talk about their right to carry weapons, to drive cars, to drill for oil on land they have bought, or to pave it over.
Native Americans are far more likely to talk about their obligations. Nuxalk hereditary chief Edward Moody said, “We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can’t speak for themselves: the birds, animals, fish and trees.”
If modern land owners, especially corporations, focused on obligations instead of rights, the Amazon jungle would not be burning. The forests of Indonesia would not be turned into coconut plantations. People living near chemical plants would not be dying of cancer.
How did private ownership of property arise?
How did the concept of ownership get applied to land? It started about 10,000 years ago, when small tribes were growing into kingdoms. The first people to say ‘This land belongs to me’ were kings. Ownership gradually trickled down to the nobility and in the last 400 years to the capitalist class and then to the middle class in rich countries.
Ownership of land and the right to pass it on to one’s descendants are pillars of patriarchy and class domination. In nearly all times and places, men have owned land and given it to their sons. Land inheritance gives recipients a huge advantage over landless people and women.
I’m not saying private possession of land is always bad. Farmers working their own land tend to work much harder and better than those who are working for the government. The Soviet Union and China both experienced famines when they collectivized privately-owned or community-owned land and turned the farmers into workers.
This upside of ownership, however, only applies when the owners live on the land and love it. When owned by corporations or profit-seeking individuals, land becomes a rape scene, with most of its native life driven out and its fertility worn away by industrial farming, development, or lumbering. This is why we need a new relationship to land. Instead of seeing it as a bunch of resources to exploit, we need to care for it.
How should land be managed?
Since large-scale collective ownership and unlimited private ownership have both caused catastrophe, how should we manage land? Indigenous people and many other countries have programs that work, but so far the power of money has blocked them here.
Writing on Aeon.com, researcher Antonia Malchik gives several examples. In China, all urban land and wilderness land is owned by the state, and all other rural land is owned by village peoples’ collectives and allocated for specific uses, according to Xinhua.net. Urban land is allocated by the state for specific purposes or sold by granting leases to individuals or private bodies.
In Nigeria, people can’t own land. Instead they apply for a lease to use the land and get a certificate of occupancy, which may be for a few years or much longer. If people break the regulations set out in the lease, it can be revoked and the land re-appropriated by the state.
Scotland allows people to own their homes and farms, but not to exclude other people from them. You can still hike on their land and forage for food in the woods. The USA used to have such laws. Hunting on another’s unenclosed land was perfectly legal.
Russian peasants had the mir or ‘joint responsibility’ system, which ensured that everyone in a rural community had land and resources enough — including tools — to support themselves and their families. “Strips of land were broken up and redistributed every so often to reflect changing family needs,” Malchik writes. “Land belonged to the mir as a whole. It couldn’t be taken away or sold.”
One of Malchik’s Australian readers commented, “Here, my privately-owned five acres is heavily restricted. I can plant as many trees as I like, but I cannot cut down a tree without local government permission.”
A New and Ancient Attitude Toward Land
The economy of the USA is built on private ownership of homes. According to the Census Bureau, 65% of Americans own their homes. Taking home ownership away would devastate millions.
But as in the countries described above, redefining ownership as a very long-term lease with clear and restrictive terms would help everyone. You’ve got it as long as you take good care of it and don’t hurt anybody else. These systems work better when they are local, when people know each other and the land.
Leased land and homes would not revert to banks in a financial crisis. Government at some level would take them over, because companies would only be entitled to property if they lived on it or were working to make it better. Use it or lose it. Under these rules, government could keep economically distressed people in their homes and bring homeless people to vacant homes.
Bottom line is we need to follow indigenous attitudes to land. Lakota leader Mary Brave Bird said, “The land is sacred. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood.” We have to revere land; it gives us life. It’s not ours to own, buy or sell, but it is our responsibility to care for it.
Watch this video for more on indigenous approaches to land..
From the time of the Pharaohs to today’s mega-corporations, the rich and powerful have abused those who work for them. It’s time to make them stop and to create work we want and need.
From slavery times until now, big employers have never wanted to pay. In the early 20th Century, World War 1 was a great boost to US industry as new factories opened to build ships, trucks and weapons. The war also made labor scarcer, as thousands of workers left their jobs to serve in the army. Because the war disrupted shipping, the flow of poor immigrant workers from Europe dried up. The result was a huge shortage of labor.
Searching for more workers, industrialists invited Black former slaves to come North, offering far better pay and more freedom than they could get in the Jim Crow South. Southern Black workers started to move, creating a massive labor problem in the South.
Without workers to pick the crops, the landowners couldn’t get rich off the land as they had before. Owners tried everything to keep their sharecroppers and laborers home. They barred Northern recruiters from their towns. They arrested would-be migrants at train stations on made-up charges like vagrancy. Articles were written; emergency meetings were held.
The one thing they never seemed to consider was paying their workers a decent wage. According to Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns, when citrus pickers in Florida started demanding more pay, growers threatened to kill them. Sharecroppers worked all summer without pay and were told at season’s end that they owed the landowner.
Planters also kept the idea of treating workers better off the table. Foremen still walked the fields carrying whips to spur laborers to work harder. With few exceptions, if they couldn’t operate with forced labor (such as prison labor,) Southern bosses chose losing their farms over treating their workers decently.
From the plantations to the mines
Was this refusal to pay workers a uniquely racist thing, or is it common in class relations? Skin color obviously had a lot to do with it, but books I’ve read recently document how brutal exploitation of all workers is normal.
Consider the experience of miners. According to Professor Michael Goldfield’s book The Southern Key, miners’ lives historically resembled those of slaves. They weren’t allowed to take a day off when sick; company thugs could come to their shack, pull them out of bed and drag them to the mine. Miners routinely worked 12 hours a day underground, not seeing the sun, killed slowly by breathing in coal dust, or quickly in mine explosions.
Many workers lived in company towns and were forced to buy from company stores. Bringing in food from another source could get you arrested or evicted. Like sharecroppers, they could work all year and still be in debt to the company.
When miners organized to fight for better lives, they were usually met with violence. Coal mine owners routinely placed machine guns at mine entrances to deter picketers. Miners or outsiders who tried to organize a union were frequently shot by company gunmen.
Why it’s called wage slavery
Workers have made some progress since those days. We are not slaves or sharecroppers. But for many workers, once their shift starts, they are driven as mercilessly as slaves. This is where the term “wage slave” comes from; workers are free to quit but have no rights while on the job.
A high-tech form of wage slavery can be seen at Amazon warehouses, where workers are literally supervised by computers; they have to keep up an exhausting pace all day with a few short breaks. Workers frequently collapse or are injured. Amazon treats employees as if they were machines, resulting in a turnover rate of up to 100% per year in California warehouses studied by the National Employment Law Project.
Not all bosses are treat workers like Amazon, mine owners, and Southern planters have treated theirs. Books on management usually advise executives to consider their workers’ well-being, and many do. But clearly, dehumanizing, exploiting, and grinding down workers is a norm, and it has been for thousands of years. Slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude prevailed for ages. Now we have capitalism, and the difference from the older systems is not always clear.
Today’s workers are the new sharecroppers; employers need our work but are not willing to pay for it. Remember when everyone was celebrating ‘essential workers?’ Now those same heroes are considered bums. According to Rebekah Entralgo of Inequality.org, ”Republican governors from Montana, South Dakota, Utah, Iowa, and Arkansas have already announced they will cut unemployment benefits in order to force more people back to work.”
A sick relationship
Is there something in human minds that makes employers despise or discount those who work for them? Or is the cause an economic system that forces capitalists to drive the most production from workers for the lowest cost? It might be both.
Robin Wall Kimmerer has explained the difference between gift and market economies. When someone gives you something, the gift creates a relationship. When you buy that same thing at a store, the relationship ends when you hand over your money. You and the clerk don’t care about each other, and you have no connection at all with the producer.
The same is true when the thing in question is labor, rather than the product of labor. Why should an employer care about their workers? They already paid them.
A boss who actually knows you probably won’t treat you like a disposable robot, but Jeff Bezos of Amazon doesn’t know his workers and never will. Southern plantation owners didn’t know their field hands. Get to know your bosses, but don’t count on corporations’ developing a conscience. For many of us, if we want to have decent work, we have to get out of this system.
Ways out of worker abuse
● Worker-owned cooperatives run businesses all over the world. Workers are expected to participate in structuring their own job and participate in democratically deciding what the company does. A few have become quite large. We can all support non-corporate economics by buying from cooperatives. In most areas, community-supported agriculture (CSA) cooperatives will deliver food to you and save you shopping.
● Start your own business. Who knows, maybe you’ll become one of the few successful tech startups, or some other work that people want, hopefully one that’s good for society and planet.
● Grow our own food — maybe on some of the land currently wasted on lawns and golf courses.
And things we could do collectively:
● Universal Basic Income — With modern technology, workers and machines produce great wealth, most of which is kept by the corporate owners. We could easily tax them and provide a basic income to everyone. People would still need and want to work, but would not have to work horrible, dangerous, or extremely low-paying jobs to avoid hunger and homelessness.
● Revolution — In theory, a people’s government could take machinery and land away from the super-rich by force and organize production to improve the health of society and Nature. Revolutionary governments might, for example, have great public transportation, community-based agriculture, and far less military and police spending.
Gratitude is the rock star of emotions. Over 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues. It is the parent of all the others.” Being grateful reduces stress. It makes us happy and fun to be around. If our gratitude stops at giving thanks, though, it won’t last. We have to give back, to live in what Native American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls reciprocity.
“Through reciprocity the gift is replenished,” says Kimmerer. When Europeans arrived in 17th Century America, they were astonished at the richness of the life they found here. They attributed the bounty to God, and Nature certainly was the first source. But the indigenous people’s stewardship of the land had a lot to do with it. They found ways of harvesting plants that caused them to grow back stronger, ways to hunt and fish that increased animal populations. They took from the land, but they didn’t take too much, and they gave back to it.
“Reciprocity means keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving,” says Kimmerer. “All flourishing is mutual.” This is a deep lesson. In my experience, embracing the idea of reciprocity changes the way we see the world. Life is not about getting and holding; it’s a constant flow in which we take part.
“All flourishing is mutual.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer
To live with reciprocity moves us to find our gift and give it. It means taking what is offered with gratitude, not being greedy. It means personal growth that benefits the world, not “improving our solitary selves, so that we achieve our own personal goals, with no real thought about the fallout,” as essayist Jessica Wildfire describes most self-help writers.
Reciprocity is revolutionary
You might notice that reciprocity is the opposite of how our economic structure pushes us to behave. Capitalist economics assumes we are all individuals motivated above all by material self-interest . In capitalist societies, money equals power, so such societies tend to devolve into rule by the greediest, as we can see in the USA today. Imagine instead a society where reciprocity, not greed, was the operating principle.
Dr. Kimmerer says spreading gratitude is a revolutionary idea. “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires… Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift, subverting the foundation of the whole economy.” Gratitude is bad for business, but it’s good for people and crucial for a planet being eaten by excessive consumption.
Canadian writer JB McKinnon, author of The Day The World Stops Shopping says “Consumption — of fast fashion, flights, Black Friday-discounted gadgets — has become the primary driver of ecological crisis… When people buy less stuff, you get immediate drops in emissions, resource consumption and pollution, unlike anything we’ve achieved with green technology. That’s not to mention the impact materialism has on our mental health, inducing feelings of inadequacy and envy, and encouraging a culture of overworking.” We are so much happier when we live in gratitude, and the world is so much better off when we live in reciprocity.
“Consumption — of fast fashion, flights, Black Friday-discounted gadgets — has become the primary driver of ecological crisis.” -J.B. McKinnon
Doing gratitude right
When I was a child, it seemed like everyone gave a brief prayer of thanks before eating. “Saying grace” usually meant saying ‘Thank you, God’ and digging in, but is an impersonal God really the only one to thank? What about all the animals, the plants, the insects, the sun, the moon, the people who grow food and bring it to us? What about water, without which life cannot exist? What about thanking all them, especially the ones who gave their lives to feed us?
Dr. Kimmerer describes the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy Thanksgiving Address. This address is traditionally spoken at public meetings and may go on for half an hour. “When you say the Thanksgiving Address,” says Kimmerer, you realize all you have been given, and it becomes impossible to feel deprived.” It helps people come together to face the issues they confront daily.
In my life, I find that I have to give frequent thanks if I want to stay sane. But I notice that giving verbal thank yous, or a prayer or a Thanksgiving Address doesn’t make me feel much better, if people keep suffering and the world keeps getting more desperate. I have to move beyond thanksgiving if I am to live in reciprocity with Nature’s gifts.
Swiss philosopher Henri Feredric Amiel wrote, “Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.” For our own well-being and to move the world in positive directions, we must turn gratitude into action.
“Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.” Henri-Frederic Amiel
Turning gratitude into action
When people do good things for you, how do you pay them back? Thanking them is good; let them know how their actions have helped you. Doing things for them in return is a form of reciprocity. If you are disabled and can’t do much, as I sometimes am, you can repay them by listening. You can advocate for them; you can teach them and let them teach you. You can give gifts, or you can send the gift forward to other people and living things.
How does one reciprocate with animals and plants? They might not understand ‘Thank you,’ but one can care for them, create healthy spaces for them, whether they’re pets or wild. Pay attention to them; love them. The gardeners among you know better than I do how to give back to plants. I just know gardening is hard work that brings pleasure to a lot of people.
Protecting wild things enables them to keep giving back to us. Get involved in restoring habitats and ecosystems. Community gardens feed people and give living spaces to plants, insects and birds. If we can’t do physical restoration, we can give political support to those who can, or we can donate.
Reciprocity applies to the way we treat other people, too. Don’t use them up; don’t hold them back. Listen to them; build them up, and they’ll give back to you.
Gratitude for Mother Earth
Giving back to Earth doesn’t mean living in poverty; it means treating all of Nature as family. Indigenous Americans of the lake regions harvest wild rice but make sure to leave enough to re-grow for next year and to feed the animals who need it too. Their rules include never taking more than half of the plants or animals, and only to take what Nature offers freely. So, using oil that bubbles up from the ground or a gusher would be OK, but fracking with explosives for shale oil would not be. Cutting a few trees you need for a house is a thing, clear-cutting a forest is not.
Reciprocity with living things would mean big changes in agriculture and the use of chemicals. If people saw the factory farms and the chemical plants and talked to the people who live near them and work in them, there would be a lot more vegetarians and organic eaters, and a lot fewer users of industrial chemicals.
When we realize we depend on Nature to keep us alive year after year, as indigenous people do, says Kimmerer, you will treat it as well as you can, give back freely to increase the gift. Capitalist science has confused us into believing that we do not depend on Nature; we depend on technology and money. But we can’t eat money. We still depend on Nature, even if our electronic cocoons obscure that dependence. We must take care of Nature and each other the way she takes care of us.
That’s reciprocity, and it will make us happier and healthier.
From the editors of Penthouse Magazine: “One of the most popular themes of letters we receive is wife watching. It seems there’s nothing quite like seeing your significant other in the throes of passion with another man, or in some cases men.” (Introduction to Penthouse Letters to the Editor, 18th Edition.)
My partner found this collection of amateur erotica in a laundromat, and a brief survey shows the other 30+ editions are similar. About 80% of the fantasies involve getting wives/girlfriends hooked up with other men and then watching or participating. Research by sexologist Justin Lehmiller Ph.D. found that 58% of American men had such fantasies, with 25% saying they “often” had them. Men whose women are not sexually faithful are often called “cuckolds,” seen as weak, not manly. Yet, we can see from erotica and research that many men like that role.
Why do so many straight men find cuckolding exciting? It certainly goes against the established sexual narrative, in which men regard sharing a sex partner as the worst possible injury. Men in many cultures will abuse, leave, or kill a woman for having another lover, or even for looking at another man.
Partner-sharing and cuckolding are not limited to heterosexual men. In a 2018 study, Dr. Lehmiller, David Ley Ph.D., and sex-advice columnist Dan Savage interviewed women and gay men who do it, too, but straight males are the largest group.
Sex at Dawn
One reason for this fantasy and practice might be that partner sharing is a natural, healthy part of human sexuality. If modern, patriarchal, monogamous pairing is not how humans evolved to mate, we probably won’t be happy living that way.
What if people evolved to have multiple partners, and our current system goes against our natural instincts? That would account for cuckold fetishes, as well as the cheating that goes on in more than a third of American married couples, according to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.
In their book Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha lay out a strong case that prehistoric women typically had multiple partners, often in one session. Because the paternity of a child was not knowable in this system, tribes collaborated to raise children. Ryan and Jetha say this behavior was normal in societies where land was not privately owned. People moved a lot and so had few possessions; nobody was rich. In a society like that, it was not in any man’s interest to claim a child as exclusively his own.
According to Sex at Dawn, women were not confined to one partner or one household until private property replaced community ownership in the first two millennia B.C.E. According to Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, private property led to the nuclear family, which allowed powerful families to amass vast wealth over generations. To pass this wealth on, strict monogamy was enforced so men could know whose children were theirs. Women were often thought of as possessions; their sexuality was suppressed. Humans have been frustrated ever since.
Female sexual openness: the evidence
Ryan and Jetha provide chapters full of evidence to support the claim of multi-partner pairing in humans. Behaviorally, we see the well-known inability of most heterosexuals to be satisfied with monogamous relationships. Many of us are sneaking around or regretting that we can’t.
Historically, many past and present cultures were and are sexually more open than ours. According to this article in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, some form of spouse exchange was “acceptable in 39% of the world’s cultures as late as the 1940s.”
Zoologically, different species have different mating patterns, but few practice lifelong monogamy. Humans’ closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos (pygmy chimps), couple with many partners.
I find orgasmic vocalization, the tendency of many women to get loud during sex, to be convincing evidence all by itself. Noisy sex certainly seems bizarre from an evolutionary point of view. How could it help a woman survive or reproduce to start yelling “Here I am. Come and get me” when she is most vulnerable to predators? The only explanation that makes sense is Ryan and Jetha’s: a loudly orgasmic woman is advertising for more sex. A desire for more partners also explains women’s ability to have multiple orgasms, a talent shared by few men.
Anatomically, human males have the largest penis size and sperm outputs of any primate, probably to aid in spermatic competition with other men to fertilize eggs. Vigorous sex and a large penis might displace the semen of lovers who came before. Non-scientifically, some prehistoric people believed that a child could have multiple fathers, each contributing their best features to the infant.
More important could be the social peace and cooperation sexual sharing can bring. Most Americans have heard of the wife-sharing practices of the Natives of the polar regions, sometimes known as Eskimos. The swapping promoted peace between neighboring bands and protected men of one band who ventured onto others’ territory. There is much more evidence in Sex at Dawn and in this TED talk.
Why is sharing hot?
Even though partner-sharing has demonstrated social benefits, why is it an erotic fantasy? Why is it hot, and what do cuckolds get out of it? Writing on HealthLine, Adrienne Santos-Longhurst cites research “suggesting that watching your partner with another man prompts a biological response to have longer and more vigorous sex.” It’s a turn-on because it drives a man to compete.
Along with sexual arousal, Santos-Longhurst gives other possible motivations, which would also seem to apply to women open to sharing:
● Some men may gain status or self-esteem from showing off a hot partner.
● Some men enjoy observing their partner’s pleasure, a reaction polyamorous people call compersion.
● People of all genders might find it burdensome to keep a partner sexually satisfied, and might appreciate some help.
Why isn’t partner-sharing more common?
If Ryan and Jetha are right, and monogamy is not natural for humans, why is it so dominant in modern cultures? It seems we can’t do what we evolved to do because our social structures don’t allow it.
As societies changed to value property ownership, our sexual relationships came to resemble property relationships. According to Mind Body Green sex and relationships editor Kelly Gonsalves, “We’ve been trained to protect our mating relationships, and today we’ve organized our entire society around monogamy.” Nobody wants to be thought a cuckold; nobody wants to be called a slut, or suffer the economic and social loss that can go along with those labels.
As large property-owners came to dominate society, monogamy became the only acceptable way to mate. Governments and churches cracked down on alternatives. By now, most people have learned discomfort and jealousy outside of monogamy.
Some in the West embrace multiple partners, but their numbers are low. Studies find that only about 2–5% of Americans admit to being swingers, usually heterosexual couples who swap partners on dates or at parties, or to being polyamorous, having multiple intimate relationships at the same time. Perhaps social disapproval accounts for the relatively low participation in partner-sharing.
Why would society or its rulers so strongly condemn non-monogamous relationships? I believe the intimate connection between private property, male dominance, and monogamy makes partner-sharing outlaw behavior. The big property owners and society’s rulers are overwhelmingly male. They benefit from the status of women as property and the stability of the nuclear family, as long as they can cheat occasionally.
How would partner-sharing change our lives and our societies? Well, for one thing, we’d be happier. Studies of swingers and polyamorous people consistently show that they are happier and report more committed marriages than non-swingers.
More sexually satisfied people might resist the patriarchy in other ways. We might not value the property rights of banks’ owning millions of empty houses over the rights of homeless people to have shelter. We might not accept working 12-hour days in crappy jobs when we have more pleasurable alternatives. Our corporate rulers would not approve.
Sexual relations should not be property relations. We don’t need to serve the patriarchy in bed. We no longer live tribally, but why shouldn’t we live as if our happiness mattered?
Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi in Cuba Image: Mondoweiss.net with permission
Pushed by repressive governments, Big Tech and the Israel lobby are suppressing freedom of speech and academic freedom. As often happens, attacks on Palestinian rights are the sharp edge of the wedge undermining everyone’s rights. Palestinian academics and supporters are fighting this censorship and asking for your help.
The Israel-identified community, with its legal arms such as The Lawfare Project, political arms like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC,) and dozens of others, have suppressed pro-Palestinian voices for years. Now, in the era of online learning, hot war in Israel/Palestine, and COVID shutdowns, they are moving to de-platform Palestine completely.
Ameer Al-Khatahtbeh, who runs a magazine for millennials called Muslim, says he has documented 12,000 acts of censorship on Instagram alone in the past several weeks. The censorship is especially heavy on campuses.
In September 2020, the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program at San Francisco State University (SFSU) planned an online classroom called “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, and Resistance,” to be hosted on Zoom. The program, including speakers and audience from three continents, was organized by AMED professor Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and Women’s and Gender Studies professor Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa. One of the featured speakers was to be Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Poster for canceled April webinar
The inclusion of Khaled, who hijacked two planes in 1969–70 to fight against Israel’s takeover of Palestine, drove the Israel Lobby into a state of fury. As documented on the Mondoweiss web site, “The event was protested by a number of right-wing, pro-Israel groups. The Act.IL app, largely funded by the Israeli government, drove hundreds, perhaps thousands of users to write and call the California State University directors, warning them of consequences for supporting “terrorists” such as Khaled.
Zoom canceled the program, a for-credit college class, without the school’s public consent (though Dr. Abdulhadi thinks they may have agreed privately.) The organizers moved the program to Facebook where it was also blocked, then to YouTube, only to have the same kind of pressure from Israel-identified opponents shut down the live feed 20 minutes after it started.
In April 2021, Drs. Abdulhadi and Kinukawa sponsored another Whose Narratives, inviting Khaled, now 77 years old. Once more, Israel’s advocates got Zoom to cancel the program, but this time they went further. They convinced Facebook to shut down AMED’s page, making it more difficult for AMED faculty to communicate with the public or even with their own students. They have also pressured SFSU administration to cut back AMED classes. As of now, two AMED summer courses are on hold because of lack of access to a platform.
Summer class without a platform
Under criticism for blocking academic freedom, Zoom in April 2021 trumpeted a new approach to online instruction, transferring decision-making power to universities. But it reserved exceptions for cases where “Zoom determines that there is legal or regulatory risk to Zoom if it does not act.” The Israel Lobby’s attacks on Khaled repeatedly called her a terrorist, a label which conceivably could lead to legal problems for anyone giving her a platform, though such problems have never materialized in practice.
Despite widespread condemnation from academic groups including the journal Academe, the California Faculty Association, the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York (PSC-CUNY,) and others, Zoom refused to reverse its censorship decision. In response, UCLA English professor Saree Makdisi tweeted, “This is what happens when we subcontract our universities to Zoom: they decide which events are acceptable and which aren’t. It’s outrageous.”
Censoring Palestine on Facebook
After Zoom deplatformed the April panel with Khaled, Facebook shut down the AMED program’s FB page without prior notice, taking down years’ worth of documents. They have so far refused to reinstate the page.
Tech giants, especially Facebook, seem heavily influenced by Israel and its Lobby. In May 2020, Facebook hired Emi Palmor, former Director General of the Ministry of Justice of the State of Israel, as a member of their Oversight Board, a committee that makes content moderation decisions on Facebook.
According to the Association for Progressive Communication, “During Palmor’s time at the Ministry of Justice (2014–2019), the Ministry established the Israeli Cyber Unit, or ‘Internet Referral Unit,’ whose work has deliberately targeted and resulted in the takedowns of tens of thousands of Palestinians’ content, and imposed severe limitations on freedom of expression and opinion, especially about Palestine.” According to the 7amleh Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, Facebook complied with 81 percent of Israel’s requests.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP,) an organization which co-sponsored the September AMED event and which advocates for Palestinian rights, released a statement and a petition calling on FB to restore the AMED page immediately. They wrote, “ Jewish Voice for Peace chapters across the country planned to live-stream the Whose Narratives event. When the event was canceled without notice, we were informed that these chapter pages were now at risk of being blocked from Facebook.”
JVP Director of Special Projects Tallie Ben-Daniel wrote, “The AMED page provides vital, intersectional programming on the connections between the Palestinian struggle and other liberation movements across the globe. Facebook is depriving students, scholars, organizers and community members of access to irreplaceable material and programming. By erasing the AMED Studies page, Facebook is assuming a vast power that all conscientious users must reject: the power to ban university academic programs from their platform, especially those that center on justice for Palestine.”
Please consider signing and sharing their petition.
Facing world anger over their violence in Gaza and Jerusalem, the Israeli government counter-attacked. They accused their critics and all supporters of Palestine of being Jew-hating anti-Semites. By claiming their political and humanitarian critics are anti-Semitic, they normalize anti-Semitism in the West and seem happy to do it.
As Palestinian-American scholar Steven Salaita tweeted during a 2014 massacre in Gaza, if calling out murder of children is anti-Semitic, what other choice does a person of conscience have? Israel’s false Jew-hatred claims harm Arabs, Jews, and all who work for peace and justice. They expose Jews in the West to attack from real, right-wing anti-Semites like Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
I am one of those supporters of Palestinian freedom. If I weren’t Jewish myself, Israel-identified Jews (often called Zionists) would call me anti-Semitic. As it is, they call me self-hating. I don’t hate myself, but then, I’m not the one committing daily crimes against humanity.
When their 11 days of bombing Gaza stopped because of worldwide pressure, Israel started wide-scale arrests of Palestinian civilians and breaking up Palestinian neighborhoods. Their nominally civilian “settlers” continued burning Arabs’ olive trees and assaulting Palestinians in the street. Lebanese journalist Laith Marouf reported that over 1400 Palestinians had been arrested as of May 27, 2021. Residents of the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighborhoods were arrested, with their homes slated for demolition or being given to Jewish settlers.
At the same time, the Israel Lobby launched a scare campaign about a supposed upsurge of attacks on Jews, mostly blaming Palestinians. American political and media figures rushed to speak out against these supposed “hate crimes.” But is this upsurge really happening, or is it a distraction to take our eyes off of Israel’s crimes? Is opposition to Israel, no matter how militant, really anti-Semitic?
Israel does not represent world Jewry
Israel calls itself the Jewish state and privileges Jews above all other groups, especially the indigenous Palestinians. They use this self-proclaimed representation of Jews to claim that anyone who attacks their state is attacking Jews. They tell critics, ‘Everyone else has a homeland. We should have one, too. If you disagree, you must hate us.’
From Israel’s founding in 1948, American Jews like my parents have been told to ‘make aliyah,’ meaning move to Israel. Most didn’t go, but many supported Israel financially and lobbied for them politically. Israel-identified Jews have built the most powerful lobby in the country, and their army of volunteers and large donors has gained a great deal of control of Congress. Very few politicians, even progressive heroes, will speak openly against Israel. Those who do, such as Rep.Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Earl Hilliard of Alabama, and Paul Findley of Illinois often see their careers cut short by Israel Lobby funding and volunteering for opponents and loud attacks in the media.
Israel’s rulers do not represent or even care about Jews in other countries. They support right wing, anti-Semitic governments in Hungary and Ukraine. They work closely with Christian Zionists who believe Jews are inferior. Most damaging to us, Zionists normalize anti-Semitism. When Israel says of every action and every publication that attacks Israel: ‘If you don’t like us, you don’t like Jews,’ some will respond, ‘’OK then. Maybe we don’t.’
The Israel Lobby deliberately plays into the hands of the real, far-right anti-Semites such as Bowers. If Jews are scared to live in the West, they will be more likely to move to Israel, or at least to give financial and political support. Promoting anti-Semitism has been the Zionists’ game plan since the founding of modern Zionism in 19th Century Europe.
Zionist founder Theodore Herzl of Austria wrote in his Diaries that, “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” According to British investigative journalist Asa Winstanley, for the next 70 years, Zionists collaborated with anti-Semites to worsen conditions for European Jews. When Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews of German citizenship, the Zionist Federation of Germany was the only Jewish group that supported them.
Zionism itself incorporates a deep, internalized hatred of Judaism and Jewish culture. Herzl wrote in his book Der Judenstaat, that it “was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who cause anti-Semitism” and that “where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations.”
Religion has nothing to do with it
Israel’s government and supporters like to portray their conflict with Palestinians as a 2500 year old religious struggle, but it is actually a 20th Century land grab by Europeans who happen to be Jewish. Most Israeli leaders are atheists; the Biblical story of Moses is only an excuse for them. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé wrote, “Most Zionists do not believe in God, but they do believe He promised them Palestine.”
“Most Zionists do not believe in God, but they do believe He promised them Palestine.” Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe
Though not based on religion, Israel is an ethnostate. Jews there live by very different rules than indigenous Palestinians. People whose families have lived in Palestine for centuries cannot return, while Jews from Brooklyn with no family in Israel will be welcomed there with open arms. As former South African victims of apartheid Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela have said for years, Israel is even more discriminatory than apartheid South Africa was. Human Rights Watch, a generally pro-American NGO, recently declared Israel an apartheid state.
In response, four Jewish members of Congress wrote President Biden that charges of Israeli apartheid were “anti-Semitic to their core,” while giving absolutely no evidence that the charges were wrong. When the New York Times published pictures of 62 Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs, giving their names, career anti-Semitism watchdog Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League called it a “blood libel,” referencing the historic lie that Jews killed Christian babies and drank their blood.
Was Foxman over-the-top in comparing a truthful, compassionate naming of victims to the most vicious of anti-Semitic lies? It’s hard to find a more blatant example of using anti-Semitism charges as a weapon. As Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone wrote, “If you consider anti-Zionism to be anti-Semitism, you cannot be surprised when anti-Semitism seems to increase after Israel bombs babies.”
Is anti-Semitism rising?
Have incidences of anti-Semitism increased significantly during the destruction of Gaza? Or, as Johnstone says, are these claims an attempt by Israel to “reassert narrative control”? According to an analysis published in The Grayzone, the reported cases of attacks on Jews have often been Palestinians’ defending themselves from Jewish attackers, who turned their cameras on when the Palestinians fought back.
A scholarly article by Mari Cohen, called “A Closer Look at the Uptick in anti-Semitism” in the journal Jewish Currents, found that “the reported ‘upsurge’ of anti-Semitism included angry tweets, explicitly anti-Israel signs, peaceful demonstrations for Palestine, and graffiti both anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish.” There is no upsurge of violence against Jews, but claims of rising anti-Semitism have now replaced criticism of Israel’s bombings as the trending topic among corporate media and politicians. That is the narrative control the Israel Lobby seeks.
We need to clarify this imposed confusion. Jews have been traumatized for centuries by violent Jew-hatred, peaking in Hitler’s attempt to kill us all. So, it’s not hard to manipulate Jews with fear or non-Jews with guilt over anti-Semitism. We can’t ignore it, but defending Israel is not protecting Jews or anyone else. Aiding Israel contributes to imperial domination, endless war, and shifting the whole world far to the Right.
In the 21st Century, anti-Semitism in the USA and Europe is very real, but it does not come from Arabs or from people who support Palestine or who fight Israeli crimes. Why are charges of Jew-hatred only raised against progressives who oppose Israeli apartheid?
As I have written here and here, Israel and the USA are intimately connected in trying to dominate the world. This is not something the majority of the world’s Jews want. It is not anti-Semitic to oppose Israel, but it is anti-Semitic to consider all Jews as supporters of Israel and Zionism.
If you’re interested in learning more about this issue, here are a couple of sources:
Rabbi Zusya said, "When I die, I know God won't criticize me for not having been Moses. Instead, he will ask, 'Why weren't you Zusya?'" We should all be brave about being ourselves.
