Healing Our World: What's Important?

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

What's Important?

Now is the time,
to renew the barren soil of nature
Ruined by the winds of tyranny,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To commence the litany of hope,
Now is the time ...

Now is the time,
To give me roses, not to keep them
For my grave to come,
Give them to me while my heart beats,
Give them today
While my heart yearns for jubilee,
Now is the time ...
-- Mzwakhe Mbuli

We are entering troubling times, probably the most troubling in human history. Because of discoveries in the field of genetic engineering, we are on the threshold of being able to create life from non-life, life without nature, life without woman - which many would suggest has been the goal of our male dominated society all along.

What will the souls of these pitiful creatures be like? How will the value of life be reduced even more? How will it be possible to value some animal or person that can be created in a tube, in a dish, and grow like a plant? How much easier will it be to torture and kill such a creation because it was so easy to create?

How will our disconnection from the natural world increase if we create beings that are not born connected to that which has connected life from the beginning of time - a mother’s womb? The possible answers to these questions frighten me. But we must ask them - relentlessly - and do everything in our power to resist the temptation of the Machine.

Malidoma Some (Photo courtesy Echos of the Ancestors)

What he says next sends a chill up my spine. "Western Machine technology is the spirit of death made to look like life."

It makes life seem easier, comfortable, cozy, but the price we pay includes the dehumanization of the self. To sleep in a cozy home, a good bed and eat great, chemically produced food we must rhyme our lives with speed, rapid motion, and time. The clock tells us everything and keeps us busy enough to forget that there could be another way of living. It has made the natural way of living look primitive, full of famine, disease, ignorance and poverty so that we can appreciate our enslavement to the Machine and, further, make those who are not enslaved by it feel sorry for themselves.

We have been lulled into complacency about our illnesses in our culture. We have been taught to believe that we get sick because of the luck of the draw or because it was meant to be. We have been distracted so that we do not see the connection between reckless consumption and the production of life threatening toxic substances.

We have been taught to believe that the government will take care of us and set standards that protect our health. Yet time and time again, it has been proven that government-set standards for toxic substances are designed to protect the free flow of commerce.

Even the four food groups that the government promotes are really an advertisement for the dairy and meat industries that ignore the overwhelming evidence of the dangers to human health of consuming large amounts of animal protein.

At the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center, Nebraska, technician Kristen Katzberg reads DNA sequences. (Photo courtesy U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)

Water is so cheap that we still wash our cars with it and flush our toilets with it. Yet only one percent of all the water on planet Earth is fresh water and of that, much is already poisoned with industrial chemicals. But why worry? All we have to do is turn on the faucet and out it comes.

We place so little value on our atmosphere, the very air we breathe, that we continue to drive polluting vehicles and purchase goods manufactured by companies that put tens of thousands of pounds of pollutants in the air each day. Seventy-eight million tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and 1,800 tons of ozone depleting chloroflourocarbons are added to our atmosphere every day worldwide. But why worry? All we have to do is go outside and breathe and it seems OK.

We place so little value on our food resources that we fill our plates, eat what we want, and throw the rest away. Each day in the United States alone, we throw out 200,000 tons of edible food. But why worry? The supermarkets stay full and there seems to be no shortage of food.

Our culture places so little value on life itself, whether it be human or animal, that we obscenely torture animals in the name of profitable food production. It is considered a cost of doing business that 6,000 people each year die from tainted meat products.

Human life has so little value that it is acceptable that 120,000 children die worldwide each year just from diarrhea from bad drinking water.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration will not force an airline to implement a safety feature unless the cost of doing so is less than the cost of paying a wrongful death lawsuit to survivors of the passengers that could be killed. The average lawsuit = $3.4 million = the value of one human life.

Madison Falls (Photo (c) J.A. Giuliano)

Vaclav Havel gave us a powerful mantra to live by in his book "The Power of the Powerless." He said that the true nature of revolt is to "attempt to live within the truth." By doing this, we step out of living within the lie, reject the ritual of those in power and break the rules of the game, and discover suppressed identity and dignity.

We all have the power to do this.

Now more than ever is the time to focus on truth, time to focus on what is in our hearts and to decide what we want to pass on to our children.

Now more than ever, you and I must look at our actions as if our life depends upon it - because it does.

RESOURCES

1. Try on a new perspective and see how it fits. Visit the Indigenous Women’s Network at http://www.honorearth.com/iwn/

2. Read an interview with Malidoma Patrice Some at http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC34/Some.htm

3. Follow the work of Malidoma Patrice Some at http://www.malidoma.com/Malidoma/index.html

4. Monitor the destructive elements of our culture at Corporate Watch at http://www.corpwatch.org/

5. What would life be like without the TV? Explore this at the TV Turn Off Network at http://www.tvturnoff.org/

6. The Center for Media and Democracy will help you sift the truth from the hype at http://www.prwatch.org/

7. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Tell them that the killing must stop. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html or you can search by state at http://www.webslingerz.com/jhoffman/congress-email.html. You can also find your representatives at http://congress.nw.dc.us/innovate/index.html

[Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and the Manager of Discovery Park for the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation. He can be found in his new home in Seattle, watching the Machine all around him. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his web site at www.healingourworld.com]