The Consumer vs. the Citizen, part 2
Don't worry! Be happy!
We have been told, even by former President Bush, that we are “addicted to oil” and that this addiction is a national security issue. At the same time, we are told that the “American way of life” (our over-the-top consumerism) is the “highest” in human history.
The paradox we face is that our “addiction to oil” sustains us our present “American way of life.”
Our addiction is unsustainable; and, yet, our soldiers are bravely fighting to protect that addiction. This is a tragic predicament: bad for us, our soldiers, and the WMD-less people whose lands we occupy. If we believe in “free trade,” why aren’t we allowing those people to sell us their materials—instead of taking them under the pretense of the “war on terror”? Because—as Alan Greenspan said—we take the materials we want by force, we have lost the world’s confidence that the USA spreads democracy. We’ve even lost our own confidence.
You have noticed that, as we are consumed by this tragic paradox, our civil rights have been eroded. The dehumanizing shakedown we endure every time we board an airline is the most obvious example of this, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have lost our civil rights in ways we cannot yet fathom—look at the Citizens United decision, which gives corporations the same rights as us to free speech; which might not sound too bad until you understand that the Supreme Court found that “free speech” = $$. It is likely we will find that those with the most $$ get to exercise their “free speech” the most.
So, us tiny human citizens are now fellow citizens with leviathan corporations, which are not alive or even mentioned in the Constitution; they’re a legal fiction. And/but/yet, they’re much bigger and richer and louder than us. We are at a might-is-right moment in history, and as Emerson put it: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
We are stuck in this mess because we have been taught in school and in the market to be good consumers. We have not been taught to be good citizens. In fact, we barely even know what it is to be a citizen. One of the main reasons we don’t know what a citizen is, is that in a nation where freedom is always extolled as our highest national value, we don’t know where freedom comes from; and, because we don’t know where it comes from, we take it for granted and/or can’t even explain what it is.
Thomas Jefferson said that “freedom is the gift of nature.” He was correct, and tomorrow I’ll tell you why.
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