Shameful!

A mother looks out from her kitchen window and catches her eighteen-year old daughter smoking behind the garden shed.

A father opens the door to his eighteen-year old son’s room to find him jerking off while watching nude women on his computer screen.

Shameful? No. Embarrassing? Probably.

Shameful is when we ship those same eighteen-year olds to fight wars based on deceit and lies.

Shameful is when they come back shattered and tattered and the Department of Veterans Affairs disregards them.

Shameful is when those same politicians, political leaders and mainstream media lapdogs are now voicing indignation at this scandal. Where were they all these years while this was happening?

Something is terribly wrong here!

Things have been going really, really awry in these United States and in our world! It’s as if everything is unraveling! All our efforts at civilization are becoming undone! Our democracies are being exposed as facades. Our religious institutions are beset with vice. In a pathetic effort to enhance education our systems are failing. Our abuse is causing Earth to suffer. Our financial institutions are corrupt. Our supposedly free press has become beholden to the dishonest corporations that finance them and the politicians who grant them access to gossip and drivel.  It all seems to be so totally unraveling!!

One day though, all this nonsense will go away.

Assad (and his ilk) will go and he will neither take Syria or anything else with him. After all, Nero burned Rome. Where is he, I ask you? And is there still a beautiful city called Rome?

Putin will go, too, not only without a shirt but with nothing else on.

And Obama will one day try to convince St. Peter that he didn’t let the whole world down and Steve Jobs, standing at St. Peter’s side (who hired him as his App guru), will tell his boss: there’s no App that can do this!

Tolerance and Compassion sometimes seem as if they have fled Earth, or maybe they never really existed but in the minds of prophets and idealists??!! In the babble of radicalism, ideologies and partisanship simple common sense that can unite all of us across the board has disappeared.

However, the things that won’t go away are the small etchings that are occurring in our DNA and that are altering it, because, nothing will ever change unless we human beings drastically redo our whole behaviors and mindsets. In fact, if we don’t, despotism all over the world will continue and increase as it is going to for the foreseeable future.

Yes, we can invent superhighways and computers, acquire more wealth, more things and build fancier homes. It is, though, our brains that have to change.

In my generation, with me and my friends, attitudes have gradually begun changing regarding ethnicities, feminism, honor killings, religion, transparency, hypocrisy, privacy issues, war, rape, homosexuality, political malfeasance and all those other scourges that have been distressing us for thousands of years. In my children’s generations there is even more awareness about all these issues. And in my grandchildren’s generations these afflictions are slowly becoming relics of dying generations. Hooray for that!

Certainly these changes are not universal yet. That simply will not happen during one generation, or two, or three!

As long as most of earth’s populations remain within their Comfort Zones and insist on being Willfully Blind to the atrocities being committed in our names nothing will change overnight.

As long as we are too busy to engage with the world that is on our doorstep wherever in the world that we live then nothing will change for a long while yet.

As long as we allow our political leaders all over this planet to continue with their lies and negligence while we cheer and re-elect them then their tyranny will simply increase.

As long as that raped woman is not our mother, sister or daughter and we do not bother to speak out or get outraged things will take ages to change.

As long as that nine-year old little girl or boy is not our child we will not think twice that they are being sold to the sex trade.

As long as wars are fought “somewhere else” we will not be sleepless about any of their consequences.

As long as we are too pre-occupied to care equally about Every Man and Woman, Every Child, Every Atrocious Incident and Every Act of Injustice nothing will change in the foreseeable future.

It is damn shameful!

However, and as I have always believed, at some point this will change. It will change because there are, despite it all, honest human beings all across the world who will risk their lives and reputations in order to see that Justice is served and that Truth be told. Their numbers are increasing daily. Their outlets are increasing hourly. Their voices are rising by the minute. They cannot and will not be silenced, chilled or intimidated.  Yes and so will Truth, Justice, Equality, Democracy and Freedom. They too, cannot be muzzled forever and the power of their crescendo will one day outdo the power of any governmental despotism whoever that government is and wherever it may be. At some boiling point, the younger generations of heroes and heroines now flooding the internet highways with their indignation at all things unjust will gush into city highways and demand real and radical change. It has to happen.

So we should not despair! However we do need to go out there and make our voices heard, voice our indignation, talk to neighbors, friends, relatives, anyone who will listen! We have to leave our Comfort Zones, for if we are comfortable now and today with all these issues churning in our world, we will not be comfortable for long. If we don’t address the miseries and injustices of our planet, they will come back to find, to haunt and to hurt us. They will locate us, our children and our grandchildren. They will! It’s true!