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I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.
I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.
Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.”
Join us and thrive, or whatever happens to you as a result of your own sinful stubbornness is your problem.
Jarret’s supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret’s talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.
“We have lived before We will live again We will be silk, Stone, Mind, Star, We will be scattered, Gathered, Molded, Probed. We will live, And we will serve life. We will shape God And God will shape us Again, Always again Forevermore.”
She and Harry may be the most loyal, least religious people in the community, but there are times when people need religion more than they need anything else—even people like Zahra and Harry.
A few hundred acres of them here and there have been released by the government, sold to wealthy, usually foreign interests, and logged. And squatters have cut and burned a number of individual trees, as usual, to build shelters and feed cooking fires, but the majority of the protected ones, millennia old, resistant to disease, fire, and climate change, still stand. If people let them alone, they will go on, childless, anachronistic, but still alive, still reaching futilely skyward.
Beware: At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease.
We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to took down on—a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles. We need this lowest class as much as we need equals to team with and to compete against and superiors to look to for direction and help.
Before the election I told myself that people had more sense than to elect a man whose supporters burn people alive as “witches,” and torch the churches and homes of people they don’t like.
“There was a time, Christian Americans, when our country ruled the world,” he said. “America was God’s country and we were God’s people and God took care of his own. Now look at us. Who are we? What are we? What foul, seething, corrupt heathen concoction have we become? “Are we Christian? Are we? Can our country be just a little bit Christian and a little bit Buddhist, maybe? How about a little bit Christian and a little bit Hindu? Or maybe a country can be a little bit Christian and a little bit Jewish? How about a little bit Christian and a little bit Moslem? Or perhaps we can be a little
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How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?
When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.”
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.
Beware: All too often, We say What we hear others say. We think What we’re told that we think. We see What we’re permitted to see. Worse! We see what we’re told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see Even an obvious lie Again And again and again May be to say it, Almost by reflex Then to defend it Because we’ve said it And at last to embrace it Because we’ve defended it And because we cannot admit That we’ve embraced and defended An obvious lie. Thus, without thought, Without intent, We make Mere echoes Of ourselves— And we say What we hear others say.
Earthseed is adulthood. It’s trying our wings, Leaving our mother, Becoming men and women. We’ve been children, Fighting for the full breasts, The protective embrace, The soft lap. Children do this. But Earthseed is adulthood. Adulthood is both sweet and sad. It terrifies. It empowers. We are men and women now. We are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed Is to take root among the stars.
