Those Who Build the Machine

Amidst the deaths of 80 people in the nationalist uprising in Tibet against China, the United States has removed China from the list of top human rights abusers, and has added Syria, Uzbekistan, and Sudan. Most pundits are speculating about the diplomatic repercussions of this action. According to the new report, China's “overall human rights record remained poor” in 2007. What does this mean for the Olympics in Beijing, it is asked? What does it mean for U.S. -- China relations? Did it matter, considering that they are one of our most important economic partners before the removal?

My quesion: what right did America have to maintain such a list, much less add or remove any country? I say that it had none at all, considering its despicable track record in terms of its own corrupt presidential election in 2000, torture and illegal imprisonment of its own citizens and citizens of other nations in dungeons like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the incredible destruction it has leveled economically and, more importantly, in terms of lives, in its failed wars of the last eight years (not to even touch those which occurred before the second Bush reign), its failure to appropriately address its own problems with its poor and homeless, and the massive environmental destruction it has inflicted at home and abroad.

If the corporate oligarchy which controls the world and the corrupt politicians who do its bidding were not brainwashing the American populace with a deluge of advertisements, political myths, and narcissistic “culture;” were not adminisering a constant I.V. drip of “otherization” of the human beings its armies are fighting, of tabloid absurdities which pass as news, of numbing self-interest; were not engaged in surgical removal of the souls of our babies and the rendering down of our workforce in the machine of desperation, poverty, and despair; how could the population be so complacent?

Who is the proletariat now? We are all and have always been the proletariat. Even if you rake in enough money to satisfy your every desire; even if your children attend expensive private schools and drive pricey automobiles; what of your grandchildren? What of their children? The population will continue to grow, as will the wealth gap which is looking more like a chasm, a canyon, each day. Eventually, your descendents will be starving with the rest. Our goal, first and foremost, should be to pull out those wires, tubes, and plugs which suck out our life-force to power the Machine. We must all, one by one or as a group, find ways to live life in ways that do not feed into the economic Juggernaut which is surely bringing apocalypse of unfathomable proportions on the generations of the future.

And if you are one of the leeches who care nothing for the wellbeing of any except yourself and yours, then I say that you have no place in society. You have no place with the humanity that you attempt to abuse. I castigate you, I will teach my children to castigate you, and they will teach their friends and families to castigate you, until you are driven into the barren mountains of sullen solitude which your actions declare that you seek. May you starve there alone and unloved, wretchedly reflecting on the millions of lives the machine you helped to build have ruined.