How do we get to a place where we fear/hate/harm the hands that serve us?
Democrats hating Republicans…
MAGA hating the establishment political parties…
Rural people hating City Slickers…
Wall Street hating Main Street…
Rich hating Poor…
Capitalists hating Environmentalists…
Us hating Them…
Everyone hating Anyone who hates them first…
Thoughtlessness.
How do we come to accept popular virtues as truth when they are disproved by our actual experience?
Independence…None of us live independently.
Freedom…Financial freedom only buys what other people produce.
Competition…When our bodies produce cells that compete we call it cancer. As such, humanity is a growing cancer in the ecology that sustains us.
Self interest…produced the richest family in America, who employs hundreds of thousands of people that qualify for food stamps.
Thoughtlessness.
When we consider America’s response to the COVID-19 Pandemic…
We exercised our freedom to wear a mask or not;
We asserted our independence by socially distancing or not;
We demonstrated our insatiable competitive spirit by reopening local economies far too early;
We revealed the dominant self interest by directing trillions of dollars to Wall Street while a third of all small businesses failed, working class employment plummeted 20%, and 12% of American households report food shortages;
And the culmination is 600,000 pandemic related deaths and counting, 33% of US households expecting eviction or foreclosure due to unemployment, while Wall Street booms (Nasdaq Composite up 43.6% in 2020 vs. 2019) and the billionaire class gained a trillion dollars in new net worth.
Thoughtlessness.
Can we find our way out of the swamp of thoughtlessness?
Absolutely.
Our persistent thoughtlessness pandemic will end the moment a critical mass of us remember who we are…
One human family, interdependently reliant on each other and the natural environment that sustains us.