Eco-democracy 101: Wake-up calls

We always sense the passion of our body, heart and soul, and the manifestation of our profound humanness. Mine is in The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy, a four-year writing output from members of the Symposium for Realistic Living. We hope to get it into book form in the hands of those interested by December of this year.

The thinking is broken into four parts. The first part names 10 wake-up calls for today’s civilized sleepers.

Of the 10, the first is a no-brainer: the ecological crisis. The Titanic is sinking and many are still squabbling over the furniture arrangement. Planet Eaarth is in peril. Our recent experience of the Midwest’s unusual heat wave and East Coast’s earthquake is shaking familiar patterns, not to mention Irene’s incredible onslaught of the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard. Half of us deny climate warming.

Undermining the democratic process is a second point. PH’s Ferdinand Marcos wrote, “Today’s revolution is democracy,” and proceeded to prove it by its negation, resulting in a People Power uprising, replicated a few times since. The American Revolution is two centuries old, but we have allowed Wall Street to undermine the voice of Main Street.

Industrialization empowered repetitive actions to meet basic survival needs, and with the discovery of oil, productivity replaced mining nutrients from Nature. But the gift of the fossil-fuel economy became a curse. Our third wake-up call points to dysfunctional systems that created an oligarchy of power, undermined the democratic impulse birthed by egalité, équaliteé fratérnite, and carbon-scarred the planet and abused our psyches with the devastations of war, only so that access to oil is available to a few.

Malthus’ observed that population grows exponentially while increase in food production stays, and this is used to justify “dog eat dog” behavior and tactics. Despicable as this fourth reality is, the fact remains that the global population increased three-fold in my lifetime. Considerable stress is exerted on the commons of our global resource.

We’ve awakened to the reality that the context (images) we create to rehearse our story determines our behavior and how we perceive our existence’s meaning. From 30,000 BCE to about 6000 BCE, the all-embracing image of the matriarchal goddesses guided humankind’s culture and religion, but the next six millennia saw the rise of our fifth wake up call, patriarchy taking a divisive center stage to the detriment of what ancient China identified as “women holding half of the sky.” A culture of conquest and domination characterizes American empire, causing the Eaarth to falter more than it flourishes. Patriarchy extends from Timor to Timbuktu, Bali to Boston, and Sydney to Tripoli, perceiving feminine resurgence as a vengeful tigress to a purring meow, males finding themselves emasculated by the wayside. Even male aggressive pursuit of truth, once admired and necessary, is seen more for its bullying than its lucidity. Counterproductive patriarchy is being crunched under the dancing soles of barefooted Jane, Li, Olga, and Maria.

The curse of racism marks the sixth area of enduring malaise. The MLK memorial park in Washington celebrates the man but the breakthrough of a person of color in the nation’s capital only aggravates Amerika’s disdain for the darker race like the man in the White House. Admittedly, Amerika has no monopoly on racism. I was once told in an interview for an English teaching position in China that the institution was looking for a native speaker, and by that was meant color of one’s skin. Norway intrudes into our complacency.

Post-WWII saw serious critique on the theistic metaphor of our journey to profound humanness, and the installation of patriarchy is transcendentally blessed by grandiose theocracy, our seventh point. Now the death throes of second-storey divinity is celebrated with deliberate intensity in the awesome clouds of our unknowing, it also triggered a huge industry of illusions, delusions, and glorified architectures of mirages. Pronouncing the extreme unction on theocracy is a much-needed rite in recapturing the relevance of our authentic chants to live at the center of the real.

War makes the eighth point and this comes close to home since Hawaii, Guam, and the CNMI exist by virtue of their strategic value to the military machine. But if more than half of our national assets go into the global network of the Pentagon and the expenditure on promoting fear and homeland insecurities, the tyranny of phantom wealth, a ninth concern, is the financial market attached to the global network of the military-industrial complex.

The horror of poverty caps our list of 10. In a world rich with foliage, flora, and fauna, we have inequity in resource access; added petroleum-based synthetic chemicals in the food chain upset our metabolism and affect neurons. I look petite in China but 15 percent of their young are catching up with mainland U.S. obesity, now pegged at 50 percent. The rest of the world, rich in natural resource, is unable to feed its young. Worst, anxiety levels remain at an all-time high.

Eco-crisis denied, democracy undermined, fossil-fuel economy corrupted, population plight blighted, bullying patriarchy’s drag, racism’s curse, theocracy’s false hopes, war’s obsolescence, phantom wealth’s deception, and dehumanizing poverty, make the list. Wake up, world!