The following excerpts are from one of the A.P.R.'s favourite "New Age" library books. The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, by Jane Roberts.
http://www.amazon.com/Individual-Nature-Mass-Events-Seth/dp/1878424211/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317966180&sr=1-17
These paragraphs, though written in 1979, are exceptionally timely now, in light of the fast-growing and spreading "Occupy Wall Street" movement, taking hold across the U.S. And which we find greatly inspiring, and hopeful, for if the movement continues to grow, real and meaningful changes could occur. Labour unions are beginning to get involved, and even a few politicians, liberal Democrats of course, like Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders, are offering encouragement.
http://www.alternet.org/story/152622/this_is_only_getting_bigger%3A_20%2C000_rally_in_new_york_to_support_occupy_wall_street/?page=entire
Very few people really act, again, from an evil intent. Any unfortunate situations in the fields of medicine, science, or religion result not from any determined effort to sabotage the "idea", but instead happen because men often believe that any means is justified in the pursuit of the ideal.
When science seems to betray you, in your society, it does so because its methods are unworthy of its intent-so unworthy and so out of line with science's prime purpose that the methods themselves almost amount to an insidious antiscientific attitude that goes all unrecognised. The same applies to medicine, of course, when in its worthy purpose to save life, its methods often lead to quite unworthy experimentation, so that life is destroyed for the sake of saving, say, a greater number of lives. On the surface level, such methods appear sometimes regrettable but necessary, but the deeper implications far outdo any temporary benefits, for through such methods men lose sight of life's sacredness, and begin to treat it contemptuously.
You will often condone quite reprehensible acts if you think they were committed for the sake of a greater good. You have a tendency to look for outright evil, to think in terms of "the powers of good and evil", and I am quite sure that many of my readers are convinced of evil's force. Evil does not exist in those terms, and that is why so many seemingly idealistic people can be partners in quite reprehensible actions, while telling themselves that such acts are justified, since they are methods toward a good end.
That is why fanatics feel justified in their actions. When you indulge in such black-and-white thinking, you treat your ideals shabbily. Each act that is not in keeping with that ideal begins to unravel the idea at its very core. As I have stated [several times], if you feel unworthy, or powerless to act, and if you are idealistic, you may begin to feel that the ideal exists so far in the future that it is necessary to take steps you might not otherwise take to achieve it. And when this happens, the ideal is always eroded. If you want to be a true practising idealist, then each step that you take along the way must be worthy of your goal.
In your country [the U.S.], the free enterprise system originated-change the word to "immersed"-is immersed in strange origins. It is based upon the democratic belief in each individual's right to pursue a worthy and equitable life. But that also [became] bound up with Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest, and with the belief then, that each individual must seek his or her own good at the expense of others, and by the quite erroneous conception that all of the members of a given species are in competition with each other, and that each species is in further competition with each other species.
The ideal of the country was and is an excellent one: the right of each individual to pursue an equitable, worthy existence, with dignity. The means, however, have helped erode that ideal, and the public interpretation of Darwin's principles was, quite unfortunately, transferred to the economic area, and to the image of man as a political animal. Individually, you exist physically because of the unsurpassed cooperation that exists just biologically between your species and all others, and on deeper levels because of the cellular affiliations that exist among the cells of all species.
...In a manner of speaking, you must be a practising idealist if you are to remain a true idealist for long. You must take small practical steps, often when you would prefer to take giant ones-but you must move in the direction of your ideals through action. Otherwise you will feel disillusioned, or powerless, or sure, again, that only drastic, highly unideal methods will ever bring about the achievement of given ideal state or situation.
...It is not enough to meditate, or to imagine in your mind some desired goal being accomplished, if you are afraid to act upon the very impulses to which your meditations and imaginings give rise. When you do not take any steps forward toward an ideal position, then your life does lack excitement. You become depressed. You might become an idealist in reverse, so that you find a certain excitement in contemplating the occurrence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes. You may begin to concentrate your attention on such activities. You may contemplate the end of the world instead, but in either case you are propelled by a sense of personal frustration, and perhaps by some degree of vengeance, seeing in your mind the destruction of a world that fell so far beneath your idealised expectations.
None of the unfortunate situations discussed in this book [Jonestown suicides, Three Mile Island, eds.] have any power over you, however, if you understand that events do not by themselves. All events and situations exist first within the mind. At the deepest levels of communication no news is secret, whether or not you receive it by way of your technological gadgets.
Your thoughts and beliefs and desires form the events that you view on television. If you want to change your world, you must first change your thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. If every reader of this book changed his or her attitudes, even though not one law was rewritten, tomorrow the world would have changed for the better. The new laws would follow.
Any new law always follows the change in belief. It is not the other way around.
...There is no civilisation, no system of science, art, or philosophy, that did not originate in the mind. When you give lip service to ideas with which you do not agree, you are betraying your own ideals, harming yourself to some extent, and society as well, insofar as you are denying yourself and society the benefit of your own understanding. Each person is an idealist. I simply want to help you practise your idealism in the acts of your daily life.
Each person alive helps paint the living picture of civilisation as at exists at any given time, in your terms. Be your own artist. Your thoughts, feelings, and expectations are like the living brush strokes with which you paint your corner of life's landscape. If you do your best in your own life, then you are indeed helping to improve the quality of all life. Your thoughts are as real as snowflakes or raindrops or clouds. They mix and merge with the thoughts of others, to form man's livingscape, providing the vast mental elements from which physical events will be formed.
...You are involved in a cooperative venture, in which your slightest impulse has a greater meaning, and is intimately connected with all other actions. You have the power to change your life and the world for the better, but in doing so you must, again, reevaluate what your ideals are, and the methods that are worthy of them. Science and religion have each contributed much to man's development. They must also reevaluate their ideals and methods, however.
In larger terms, there are only scientific and religious men and women, however, and fields of science and religion would be meaningless without those individuals who believe in their positions. As those men and women enlarge their definitions of reality, the fields of science and religion must expand. You must be reckless in the pursuit of the ideal-reckless enough to insist that each step you take along the way is worthy of that ideal.
You will understand, if you are a practising idealist, that you cannot kill in the name of peace, for if you do so your methods will automatically undermine your ideal. The sacredness of life and spirit are one and the same. You cannot condemn the body without ultimately condemning the soul. You cannot condemn the soul without ultimately condemning the body.
I would like each of my readers to be a practising idealist, and, if you are then you will automatically be tolerant of the beliefs of others. You will not be unkind in the pursuit of your ideals. You will look upon the world with a sane compassion, with some humour, and you will look for man's basic good intent. You will find it. It has always been there. You will discover your own basic good intent, and see that it has been behind all of your actions-even in those least fitted to the pursuit of your private ideals.
The end does not justify the means. If you learn that lesson, then your good intent will allow you to act effectively and creatively in your private experience, and in your relationships with others. Your changed beliefs will affect the mental atmosphere of your nation and of the world.
...There is no event upon the face of the earth in which each of you has not played some part, however minute, because of the nature of your thoughts, beliefs, and expectations.
There is no public act in which your are not in that same manner involved. You are intimately connected with all of the historic events of your time.
To some extent you participated in putting a man on the moon, whether or not you had any connection at all with the physical occurrence itself. Your thoughts put a man on the moon as surely as any rocket did. You can become involved now in a new exploration, one in which man's civilisations and and organisations change their course, reflecting his good intents and his ideals. You can do this by seeing to it that each step you personally take is "ideally suited" to the ends you hope to achieve. You will see to it that your methods are ideal.
If you do this, your life will automatically be provided with excitement, natural zest and creativity, and those characteristics will be reflected outward into the social, politicial, economic, and scientific worlds. This is a challenge more than worth the effort. It is a challenge that I hope each reader will accept. The practising idealist...Give us a moment...When all is said and done, there is no other kind."The "Occupy Wall Street" Movement began in earnest just a few weeks ago, with small demonstrations around Wall Street in New York City, and have quickly grown, and spread, and are meant to continue indefinitely, until, through direct action, politicians will be forced to begin acting on meaningful changes. Explicit demands of the movement are still evolving, but start with re-regulating the banking and financial industries, as they were before the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1999 (by the Clinton Administration), investigation and prosecution of criminals in those "industries" who deliberately created and spread "toxic" investment programmes which nearly de-railed the global economy, investment by the federal government in massive public works/jobs programmes, to relieve the growing, crushing unemployment levels in the U.S., and very importantly, the revocation of "Corporate Personhood", by which means a coup has occurred, leaving the U.S. under a dangerous, sociopathic, corporatist government. Concerned only with corporate profits at the expense of other countries/peoples, and the environment, leading to aggressive warfare, massive unemployment/impoverishment across the globe, and accelerating environmental destruction.
One of our favourite authors, ex-New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, had this to say about the movement, in it's early stages:
The Best Among Us
An activist from the Occupy Wall Street movement is shown being arrested by police in New York on September 24, 2011. (Photo: Brennan Cavanaugh / Flickr)
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.
To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists [and now can be murdered by a secret panel, with no due process, as a US citizen, eds], where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.
Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.
The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.
Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.
Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.
This is a hopeful time now in U.S. history, but also a dangerous one. The corporate elite who run the U.S. government are going to try every possibility to discredit and neutralise the Occupy movement. Beyond just the usual police harrassment and break-up of demonstrations, other tactics will be having undercover provocateurs trying to instigate acts of violence and/or vandalism, co-opting parts of it into larger, more "mainstream" groups, where it will slowly be strangled, or, in worst-case scenarios, a "false-flag" event of some sort, will be staged, a "terrorist" attack perhaps. Which will then, it is thought, lend more support to a real crack-down on activists. That is why it is so vitally important that everyone who is engaged in, and/or in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement always keep in mind that the means must remain worthy of the goals, i.e., using non-violent methods of non-cooperation and protest, to build a more sane and just society, and constantly articulate, feel, and visualise the kind of changes we wish to see. It has been very heartening to see lately, as well, that many of the protestors have been appealing to the NYPD, chanting sayings like "you NYPD are part of the 99% too!", and the police, some of them, have expressed solidarity. As they should, because all public employees are threatened by our current Corporate Regime.
Many in the news media have been critical of the movement for not being more specific with their demands, but as we wrote previously, there are basic ones that have been presented. To these, we here at the Alaska Progressive Review would like to add the following, and many others have suggested similarly:
1. Immediate revocation of the "Patriot Act", re-instatement of Habeus Corpus, investigation and prosecution for waging aggressive warfare, torture, and genocide, of officials from the Bush, and current Obama Administrations.
2. Immediate end to the wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, immediate cessation of the illegal and immoral drone attacks throughout the Middle East, and reparations to the countries affected.
3. Cutting the U.S. defense budget by 2/3, dismantling all of the 1000+ overseas military installations, and then involving current active duty military personnel in national and global infra-structure and disaster-relief projects (along with the newly-developed civilian programmes of a like nature).
4. Instituting fair and balanced taxation on all income tax levels, with a negative income tax at the lowest income levels to guarantee those who can't work, life (this was actually proposed in 1971 by then pres. Nixon, we kid you not!). A 0.5% financial speculation tax on all stock and investment trades.
5. A national health care system similar to all the other industrialised nations in Europe and Canada, which would save the U.S. government hundreds of billions of dollars.
6. Aggressive promotion and investment on alternative energy research, development, and rapid implementation, before runaway global warming causes irreverisible global sea level rises from the melting of Greenland's ice sheets.
7. Ending the "Drug War", legalisation of all drugs, combined with strict management of them, and investment in treatment programmes for addicts. Countries that have done/or doing this have seen great results in decreased addiction levels and lowering of crime rates.
8. Expropriation of (at fair market value) privately-run prisons back to the public sector, ending corruption and illegal/unfair imprisonment of vast numbers of people.
9. Changing federal tax codes to favour worker-owned business, businesses that will manufacture in the U.S., with living wages/benefits, cooperatives, and credit unions.
Many more could be articulated, but these are some things that if done, could truly make this country a just, sane, and inspirational one to the rest of the World.
WHAT COMES NEXT...
In case you missed it, a few days ago, the U.S. government murdered one of it's own citizens in another country, without any due process or court procedures, using a "drone" aircraft in Yemen, and in which, as with all these attacks, many innocent civilians were murdered. That means that the U.S. government, through a secret panel, answering to the president, has declared it legal to murder, not just civilians in any country, but U.S. citizens as well. Just how long do you think it will be then, if the current system is left unchecked, before progressive people/activists, will be targeted? Just as they were in Chile and throughout South and Central America in the 1970s-early 1990s.
Paul Craig Roberts, who used to be the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, in the Reagan Administration, and who has since become a strong progressive voice, wrote a very good summation of what this means, you can read it here:
However, we here at the A.P.R., are more hopeful now, that this can be stopped, and must, if we are to still have a supposedly "democratic" country, with our Constitution as our legal bound. Paul's recommendation that young people flee the country is unduly pessimistic at this point, and impractical. Do you think Canada, with a population of 30 million, could take in 10 million U.S. refugees, much less want to? Very improbable. All the more reason the Occupy Wall Street Movement must continue to grow and spread, and why we here at the A.P.R. fully support it, all of our very survival and well-being is at stake. Cheers.
