The Oil Spill and the Blood Spill

"I know, I know. I am proposing a sane world. I must be crazy."
~ Steve Bhaerman

The Oil Spill and the Blood Spill:
Same Problem, Same Solution
By Steve Bhaerman














Sometimes it's just not funny.

There is nothing funny about oil hemorrhaging in the Gulf of Mexico, or blood flowing in the Mediterranean - just the sad joke that we humans are largely the cause of our own suffering. And we are largely clueless as to how and why.

For millennia, we have been under the spell of the lowest common dominator, the notion that it's a you-or-me world, that to survive we must dominate or be dominated. Never mind that at the root of every religion and ethical system is some version of the Golden Rule. We have as a species chosen to apply this law selectively to those in our own family, tribe or nation. When we feel threatened - not necessarily ARE threatened, but feel threatened - we very easily adopt a conveniently modified version of the rule: "Doo-doo unto others before they can doo-doo unto you."

So, for tribes or nations to be manipulated by a sociopathic few, all these misleaders need to do is convince their people of an external threat, and this protective mechanism is activated. While fight-or-flight is a necessary response to an immediate danger, the blood flow to the hindbrain has to come from somewhere. It comes from the forebrain, the place of creative thinking and discernment. In other words, when we are in fear we are less intelligent.

In places like the Middle East, the us-vs.-them story is well established, and each atrocity by the other builds the story one more story high. The one thing the Palestinian terrorists set to blow themselves up and the Israeli soldiers firing on civilians have in common is the belief, "We are the good guys."

It's this belief alone that turns good guys into bad guys. It's how America justified using atomic weapons on Japan, napalm on Vietnamese, and bombs on Iraqi and Afghan citizens. It's the cost of war, paid by the other guy - the bad guy.

From the Mideast ... to the Midwest

In order to bring this notion home, literally and figuratively, we need to take what is happening in the Mideast, and apply it in the Midwest. Just as surely as the Israelis and Palestinians are at war, we the people of America have been divided into two warring tribes, the Red Tribe Republicans and the Blue Tribe Democrats. The main difference between these two tribes is that the right wing understands there is a war going on; the left wing merely feels assaulted.

Here's why.


Whether you believe it's an actual conspiracy, or merely the out-picturing of our divided collective consciousness, the body politic has been split into left-brain and right-brain, masculine and feminine. The political left represents the values of novelty and nurturance; the right stands for structure and protection. Each of these tendencies - progressive and conservative - represents a healthy biological impulse. However, separately they are incapable of wise rule. Why? Well, imagine living your life using only half your intelligence, or worse yet with two parts of your psyche constantly in mortal combat.

Consequently, each political party represents a toxic distortion of a valuable asset. Put bluntly, the Republicans represent the abusive male, the Democrats the enabler female. All of the muscle is on one side; all of the compassion is on the other. Instead of working together, these two opposing impulses have inflicted a deadly autoimmune dysfunction on the body politic. Who benefits? Those who have the most to lose by these two divided forces uniting as an integrated, whole "we the people."

In a healthy, integrated, whole system the forces of protection protect life. Consider the eggshell. It is absolutely necessary to protect the egg during development. However, for a chicken to be born, the shell must break. Structure must yield to life.

In our distorted, divided system the structures designed for protection all too often protect the predator. That's why back in the 1930s, Gen. Smedley Butler, at the time America's most decorated Marine, wrote a booklet called War is a Racket, where he confessed that most of the defending he did during the early part of this century was for United Fruit and U.S. Rubber. In the nearly 80 years since Butler's pamphlet, we have seen the simple desire for defense and protection rigidify into a Military Industrial Complex, a structure largely in service of itself, in partnership with the American empire.

Interestingly, the more libertarian right represented by Ron Paul know about Smedley Butler and his assessment of war, whereas he is an unfamiliar figure to most on the left. That's because each political polarity has it's own information pipeline telling them the "truth." The left is told that the Ron Paul variety of populist - as represented currently by the Tea Parties - are backward racists and isolationists. Meanwhile, the right wing impropaganda machine bangs away at the notion that "liberals hate America," making them as much of an enemy as Al Qaeda is.

Progressives are outraged by the assaults of Limbaugh, Beck and the like, but cannot respond effectively or courageously. Why? Because all the martial energy has been marshaled over on the other side. The right, meanwhile, doesn't dare empathize with the downtrodden, lest we empower welfare cheats. In having their attention focused on the lowly criminal, they are conveniently distracted from the highly criminal.

We are a political house divided, a body politic afflicted with bi-polar insanity. Somewhere in the netherworld, Machiavelli is smiling, for his lesson of divide-and-conquer has been well learned by our misleaders. We the people have learned to identify so much with what divides us that we completely ignore the common virtues and values we share as non-sociopathic humans.

It's Either an Awakening ... Or a Wake

Which brings us to the oil spill.

The major missing piece in this web-of-life threatening tragedy is our ability to act in unison in a moment of crisis. The bi-polar political dysfunction has bred so much mutual distrust, that we've wasted valuable time and energy in obfuscation and blame. But the problem goes deeper than that, as deep as the subconscious programming of "survival of the fittest." We are so programmed with fear of not enough - Swami calls this "scare city" - that we spend our attention, intention, time and resource on protection and acquisition, at the expense of other healthy human "cellular souls."

The cost of this agreed-upon greed, goes beyond the trillions of dollars spent and the millions of lives lost. We now have a rupture in the web-of-life itself, as the fluid we value more than life gushes uselessly and harmfully into the ocean, unstoppable by the magic of technology. Like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice, in our ignorance and innocence, we unleashed a power far too powerful for our Mickey Mouse consciousness.

And the good news is?

If we choose to use it as such, the oil spill may be the significant emotional event that bumps us out of the illusion of separation and into a healthier relationship with one another and the planet. What is called for is no less than a spontaneous spiritual evolution from children of God to adults of God, from victims and villains to aware, responsible co-creators. It's never happened before. But never before have we faced such a blatant and immediate human-caused disaster, one that calls into question our fitness as a species.

As many of us have seen in the "try this" or "try that" emails that have been circulating, there is no dearth of potential remedies or even solutions. We already have the worldwide network of communication to create an open-source approach to a situation that threatens every one of us. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention ... and intent is the father. What an opportunity for the people of this world to "gather under one big intent" to take the initiative to create a worldwide "we the people" authority to, for the first time, confront a species-wide threat as a species.

This would not be some top-down New World Order, but a bottom up, grassroots "new world ordering," where we access the heart-and-soul essence of who we are, an essence that has been lost through millennia of domination and programmed fear. It would mean gathering in intentionally diverse groups, and using existing polarities to stretch ourselves beyond the limited choices we currently perceive. It would mean calling forth the Sacred Masculine and the Sacred Feminine, to act in accord as dynamic duo dance partners. It would mean taking the obsolete political polarities of progressive and conservative, and turning them into healthy intentions by asking, "How do we wish to progress?" and "What do we choose to conserve?"

I know, I know. I am proposing a sane world. I must be crazy.

But the question to ask ourselves and one another is, how sane is the institutionalized, homicidal, suicidal insanity we have now? As the saying goes, if we keep on the same path, we will arrive at where we are going. Even if we are able to stanch the current oil flow, and we contain the damage to "just" one ocean, what will the next blow be? Will we be able to recover, or will it just be a matter of time before a human-made disaster kills us?

In our book Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton and I point out the phenomenon of "spontaneous remission," where an individual is told their condition is untreatable and terminal, and yet something mysterious and miraculous happens. They recover, and show no sign of the disease whatsoever. While we might imagine this some super-human miracle, when we look deeper we find that the recovery is preceded by a profound change of belief, and change of behavior.

In other words, a spontaneous remission is often the result of a "spontaneous remissioning." And so the choice is before us to collectively change our mission from "dominate or be dominated" to re-growing the Garden together.

This has been the wake up call we have been waiting for. And the snooze button is no longer working.


Steve Bhaerman is a writer and uncommontator who has written and performed comedy as Swami Beyondananda. He is also the co-author with Bruce Lipton of Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There From Here (Hay House: 2009). He can be found online at http://www.wakeuplaughing.com/ If you like what you read, and want to get more of it, subscribe to Notes From the Trail here.

THREE VIEWS OF HOME

Kuala Kubu Bharu twilight

Kampong Pertak from the bridge

View from my garden, 5 June 2010

CLICK TO ENLARGE!

YOU BECOME WHAT YOU HATE!

The behavioral similarities between Israel under the Likudniks and Malaysia under the Umnoputras are more than startling. In both cases, the problem seems to lie with an entrenched attitude of arrogance, conceit and compulsive denial concealing a pathological insecurity and deeply ingrained sense of victimhood. Here's what Swiss-born psychologist and philosopher Carlo Strenger has to say about the current Israeli government...

"Israel will have to decide: it cannot rebrand itself as a liberal, creative and progressive country without being one. Our business sector, our artists and academics are mostly progressive, liberal and creative. But their impact on how Israel is perceived will remain negligible as long as Israel’s politicians and emissaries keep harping on victimhood and survival and as long as its policies are repressive." ~ Carlo Strenger (Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University)

The most important positive result of the ‘Branding Israel’ project has been that during the last decades, a powerful new sub-brand of Israel has evolved: it is called Tel Aviv, it is associated with Israel’s culture, technology and joie de vivre: it is perceived as liberal in outlook, full of vitality, creativity and oriented toward the future. Hence, the study concludes, Israel must rebrand itself as creative, vital and progressive; an image that has positive resonance with the young global elites.

However, there is one major obstacle in the path to rebranding Israel. Our politicians don't seem to understand how the mechanism of rebranding works. They confuse the old concept of ‘hasbara’, which literally means ‘explanation’ with branding. Explaining and arguing has no impact whatsoever on how people experience a person or a brand. Our relationship to brands is like our relationship to human beings: it is primarily emotional.

If somebody explains to you that she is a nice person, but does so sternly and harshly, it is the tone of voice rather than the content of the message that determines the listener's emotional reaction. Moreover: if you explain that you are nice, and are then seen behaving violently, it is the behavior rather than the words that will determine the emotional reaction. We all know this: if an airline explains to you that it is friendly, but you are treated dismally by its employees, you will tell your friends that the airline is horrible, not that it is friendly. Ultimately perception of a brand hinges on actual behavior and organizational culture, not propaganda.

[Source: Haaretz.com; kindly brought to my notice by Walter Smith]

Ehud Barak's "OneIsrael" is undoubtedly the big brother of Najib Razak's "1Malaysia"!

Also worth reading: Activists on the Ship 'Rachel Corrie' Challenge Israel's Unjust Gaza Blockade and Zionist Myths by Ira Chernus

Israel Barbaric ~ But Is Malaysia Any Better?

So long as oppressive and antiquated laws like the Internal Security Act continue to remain in force, the Malaysian government lacks the moral standing to condemn human rights abuses perpetrated by others who stubbornly cling to the primitive and ugly tenet that Might Is Right.

No doubt the global community must come together and insist that Israel immediately abandon its hideous pogrom against the Palestinian people. For a start the Gaza Blockade must come down and relief brought swiftly to the long-suffering Gazans.


Those of us who have risked being tear-gassed, water-cannoned and summary arrest just for holding a lit candle in public places to protest the existence of the obnoxious ISA will surely be heartened by the inspiring efforts of the Abolish ISA Movement UK, which began picketing the Tourism Malaysia office in London last month.

I read an uplifting report in Malaysiakini about their first gathering in Trafalgar Square. The Malaysian participants expressed surprise and delight at how the London Metropolitan Police responded to their picket. Not only were the Bobbies extremely polite, they went out of their way to be helpful, offering to help with traffic flow and to protect the protesters from harassment.

This prompted me to email the organizers of the Abolish ISA Movement UK on 2 May 2010:

Read your piece in Malaysiakini about how helpful the London police were when you organized an anti-ISA picket in front of the Malaysian Tourism Office. It warms my heart to see Malaysians abroad who still feel passionately about the homeland - and how it is being misgoverned.

The Umno/BN regime appears to be a 19th century feudal mindset trapped in rapidly changing times. In the two years since the political tsunami of 8 March 2008, Umno/BN leaders have apparently learnt nothing - except that their survival is threatened, which is why there seems to be a return to despotism and the police state mentality created by Mahathir.

Nobody I know favors Najib Razak as the nation's top civil servant. Indeed, we would prefer to see him and his wife in political exile - or behind bars where they belong. It would be great if all of you could demand voting rights - the only legitimate use of postal votes - and help us boot BN out at every election until they evaporate like a bad dream.

All the best to you always,
Antares
~^@^~


This was the reply I received almost immediately:

Dear Antares,

Thanks so much for your encouragement and feedback. You are right - the country is in a shambolic state and it is such a pity - because Malaysia has such potential and could be such a great place if only..... We're not really doing very much but we definitely feel the conviction to do SOMETHING and show solidarity to all the Malaysians back home who are sick and tired of the status quo and face persecution and prosecution when they stick their necks out. And I think we need to take every opportunity to remind the Malaysian government of their obligations to the people and embarrass them if need be!

Voting rights - great idea. We are actually working on that, a test of whether or not denying Malaysians overseas a vote is in fact unconstitutional (we think it probably is) - as at present only government officials and Malaysian students overseas can vote. And given the number of Malaysians abroad, you're right that obtaining a postal vote could make a real difference ( as long as its not hijacked by BN). Do keep me posted if you have any other ideas of what else we can do from an overseas campaigning point of view.

Warm regards
Abolish ISA Movement UK


On 31 May Malaysiakini carried the following report (reproduced in part):

Malaysians launch monthly anti-ISA watch in London

Despite the cold and the drizzle, the monthly anti-ISA watch held yesterday in Trafalgar Square by the UK chapter of the Abolish ISA Movement, received an impressive turnout.

Malaysians from all walks of life turned up at the venue, in front of the Malaysian Tourism Office, to show their solidarity to those detained under the ISA (Internal Security Act) as well as those back home who take considerable risks in campaigning tirelessly to end this oppressive law.

Present were a number of human rights activists, students, ex-ISA detainees, lawyers, journalists, bloggers, artists and concerned citizens.

Some were Malaysians who had lived in London for up to 30 years and others who were just passing through, having read about the monthly ISA-watch initiative on Malaysia's vibrant internet news portals.

There was a distinct buzz and energy in the air as the protest gained momentum on a busy corner of Trafalgar Square, where tens of thousands of people pass each day.

Over 150 passers-by stopped to take information leaflets on the ISA, most of them curious to find out why the tourism office was garnering so much attention.

Many were shocked to learn of the flip side to Malaysia's sunny tourist image and the murky depths below its advertised turquoise clear waters.

The protestors carried banners and placards reading 'Stop detention without trial!', 'Malaysia - Stop Human Rights Abuses!' and 'ISA - a violation of human rights and civil liberties.'


London police helpful

The protestors were stopped by the metropolitan police once - but only to enquire that if was running well and if they could provide the demonstrators any assistance.

Inspiring young artists and activists added colour to the demonstration by reciting ISA-inspired poetry and songs.

One of the organisers explained the catalyst for these London demonstrations saying, "Over the last few months, there has been a sense that the Malaysian government has been trying very hard to spruce up its image abroad.

"London seems to be at the centre of this glossy marketing campaign - with initiatives such as the government sponsored Malaysian Kitchen project, a maiden exhibition at the Chelsea Flower Shower, the promotion of Malaysia as a health tourism destination and Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak's recent appearance in a design and current affairs magazine, the Monocle.


"Alongside this is Malaysia's re-election to the UN Human Rights Council a few weeks ago.

"Whilst this public relations re-branding exercise is not in itself a bad thing, we feel it's important for the Malaysian government to accept that if they want to play on an international platform, they need to abide by international human rights norms and standards.

"Denying people their liberty indefinitely without charge or trial and using this archaic law as a way of silencing human rights activists, journalists, bloggers, opposition politicians and the man on the street, is not acceptable."

[Read a fuller report at Malaysia Today.]

SAY A BIG NO TO BIG BULLIES!

Israel's violent and deadly commando attack on the Freedom Flotilla must be vigorously condemned by the global community. What Israel has been doing to the indigenous Palestinians since 1948 (and even before) is certainly reprehensible and utterly unbefitting of any nation that considers itself civilized.

Just because Israel is funded by the Rothschild-Rockefeller banking cartel, which controls most of the Western economies and almost all Western media, it believes its ruthless military operations to be kosher. Well, no violence can ever be completely kosher, even if genuinely in self-defence - not unless no other recourse is possible.


Most decent folks around the world are understandably outraged that Israel has used unnecessary and disproportionate force against unarmed pro-Palestinian activists and other humanitarian organizations intent on easing the great suffering of the Palestinians under Israel's fascist domination.

However, I am aware that what Israel has come to represent to the world does not reflect what a vast majority of Israeli citizens actually feel. Just as a large number of Americans are vehemently against their government's militaristic and opportunistic foreign policy, especially in the cases of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, many Israelis would much rather see genuine reconciliation and peace prevail in the Mid-East crisis, which has gone on far too long.

There are hundreds of Israeli airforce pilots now serving a jail sentence for refusing to participate in a war against unarmed civilians. They are derisively labeled "refuseniks" and the rightwing Israeli government has declared a news embargo on them. A large number of Israelis have long been engaged in efforts to bring about a peaceful resolution to the deep-rooted conflict between Arabs and Jews that reaches all the way back to the time of Abraham and Sara.


Like many Malaysians who do not agree with their own government's policies and actions, peace-loving Israelis are rarely given a voice in the mass media. So it's easy for those in the Muslim world to hate Israel and all Israelis - without differentiating between the people and the government that chooses to use bullying tactics to get its own way.

One can argue that people get the government they deserve. Did the American people deserve two warlike Bushes as their president? Certainly not - but then did they really have a choice? Elections are only too easily rigged, voter opinion manipulated by the mass media, and democracy hijacked by sophisticated thugs with deep pockets. We have seen only too clearly what the Barisan Najis propaganda machine can do, apart from gerrymandering and shameless vote-buying.


In Malaysia, the government has done a lot of stupid, unenlightened things - without the public's knowledge. And when the public finds out, their protests are often suppressed by force - tear gas, water cannons, mass arrests, and fear of detention without trial.


In other words, Israel's arrogance and ruthlessness merely reflects the obnoxious egocentricity that comes with having enough money to buy more earthly power than one knows how to exercise wisely.

It is this abuse and misuse of power that we must condemn and outlaw on this planet - not the Americans or the Jews or the Malays or the Chinese or the Japanese or whoever temporarily takes on the role of the Neighborhood Bully.

Let us constantly remind ourselves: when we are strong it is our moral duty to help the weak, not exploit or oppress them. Compassion, forgiveness, and magnanimity are the true measure of mature power.

Those who use violence to force their will on others are not truly strong, nor are they anywhere close to maturity. In fact, they are evolutionary throwbacks and are foolishly choosing the path of inevitable extinction.

I left the following comment after reading a Malaysian Insider report on the Israeli pre-dawn strike but it wasn't published:

Behind these acts of violent provocation, whether carried out by Mossad or the CIA or MI6, I see the pudgy hands of arms manufacturers who cannot accept the possibility of "peace on earth, goodwill towards all." Perpetual war is good for business, and so - like the oil companies that suppress all forms of free, renewable energy - the weapons industry must send its agents out to fan the flames of hatred around the globe, to thwart all sincere efforts at reconciliation and conflict resolution through frank discussion and mutual understanding. As always, the worshipers of Mammon are after more and more and more profits - regardless of the evil consequences to humans in particular and the ecosystem in general.