He sat with them for an hour in prayer. Then he pulled his gun out and started shooting.
And today our national numbness is wrapped in a Confederate flag. The young man who killed nine members of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night was an old-school racist. “I have to do it,” Dylann Storm Roof is said to have explained. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Another way to look at war, racism and mass murder is that like global warming, immigration and pandemics, these are results of an environment under siege. A condition that places resource, habitat and population pressures on people and causes psychological dysfunction.
We are living the experiment of too many rats in one cage.
Alas, such a post does the elite’s work for them in rationalizing THEIR planned culling of the (human) herd.
You push the population numbers game while Koehler pushes the impossible WE frame as if WE all identify with this week’s mass murderer and/or the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their all-war all-the-time policies.
Both memes are deceptive and dangerous as neither points out that violence is a systemic problem built into a nation under thrall to the military-industrial-media complex.
Those who don’t embrace weaponry have no effective means (as yet) of anesthetizing this beast; but the incapacity to stop armies from marching is not the same thing as applauding their deadly efforts or agreeing to march with them.
And those that would grant no voice or witness to any deviation from the Mars-rules program wittingly or otherwise argue for the continuation of the same diabolical status quo that’s enabled patriarchal dominator forces to shape the narrative, along with cultural emphases and economic priorities for many generations. That hardly represents the wishes, will, or consent of “the governed.”
By suggesting that ALL persons are part of the violence, where is cognitive space allotted to any alternative to the continuing (and continuous) show of horrors?
One of the most densely populated Countries on the Globe is the Netherlands. They also have a very low crime rate.
The United States of America is one of the most resource rich countries on the Globe. They are also the 179th most densely populated meaning there are a whol epile of countries with more people per square mile and less in the way of resources. While among these are countries with higher rates of crime and of violence, there are that have lower rates of crime and of violence.
Now living on Canada’s West Coast I have become more aware of the traditions culture and History of the local first nations peoples here. They lived here in a land of plenty that had a very limited population for tens of thousands of years. They introduced a ceremony called the Potlatch well before the Europeans arrived. They introduced this Ceremony because they wanted to address causes of Civil strive and acrimony among its peoples. This Ceremony was predicated on those that had acquired too much giving that suplus away to those that had too little in an economy described as a “gift economy”.
In other words it not the lack of resources that was the basis of conflict. It was how they were allocated.
The Europeans brought with them the idea of entrenched Class equality and the idea that the Rich deserve their wealth and are entitled to more while those not of their status deserve being poor and should have less. Racism and Sexism are some of the methods the very rich use to dispossess the masses of their fair share and Capitalism as an economic system is used to justify and entrench this inequality.
Overpopulation is a problem that nature always solves one way or another (conflict, scarcity, etc.) and is recognized by elites and environmentalists in common.
I think the difference between “THEIR (the elite’s) planned culling of the (human) herd” and a liberal humanist’s version is that THEIR’s is done painfully with wars, pollution, abandonment and the like and OUR’s is done painlessly by family planning.
Available resources determine the carrying capacity of an area. And money is the world’s substitute for available resources.
The Netherlands is a country with a high per capita income so there are few conflicts (crime) over resources. Therefore it might be said that it has a higher carrying capacity than impoverished places with equally high population densities that typically suffer from very high crime rates.
The Potlach was an effective way to distribute resources more equitably. Unfortunately, Europeans brought their bad habits of gross inequality with them, from which we still suffer.
Contrary to the capitalist religion, our world’s natural resources are fairly limited. When these become scarce, problems like immigration, war and crime arise. There is only so much to go around. Resources need to be distributed much more equitably. And the less people there are, the more resources to go around, and vis.
Amen.
(But post must be at least 10 characters, so a concise, one-word expression doesn’t cut it here. CD, what is this rule about?)
I don’t think this article has anything to do with overpopulation. I see that it points out the tragic mind set of the US is that every problem has a violent solution. We are a very new nation, but since the time of our European development we have only had 22 years of no wars. Our history curriculum is taught from war to war as the most important markers in our nation’s existence. We are taught that competition is the way to excellence and that sharing and compassion are heresies against the religion of capital.
The Netherlands is such a wealthy country with a high per capita income not in small part due to the centuries of its rapacious colonialism in various parts of the world. Wealth created on the backs of indigenous peoples and genocides.
“My country, the great purveyor of violence in the world today” - Martln Luther King, Jr. Still true today.
