excerpt from Diane Harvey's "The Dire Straits Chronicles (vol.1)"

www.rense.com/general15/dire.htm

"Most of us have our little appointed rounds, like so many donkeys trudging around a world of grindstones, and that has been enough for us. We have long preferred the regular appearance of carrots and grain to any difficult life hewed out in the wilds of a climate of actual freedom. (At this point we can barely go for so much as a simple long walk without running into impassable highways, miles of fences, no trespassing signs, endless asphalt shopping deserts, the exacting of local/state/national fees for the right to move a muscle, bands of loose criminals, streets of suspicious householders, and even more suspicious police asking why any human being might actually want to walk around on the earth these days. This may be a single small example of the loss of practical freedom, and quite immaterial to most people, but it is a telling one all the same.) Freedom is just a word people have been flattering themselves with, on the drive to the mall to buy whatever trinkets television told them to buy for their "lifestyle" this year. Freedom is a wonderful idea, but it died out somewhere along the way, from a general lack of enthusiasm for its rigorous and often positively Spartan requirements.

We have far preferred a life of collecting stuff to a life dedicated to understanding and dealing with the world of conflicting human energies and forces all around us. We have preferred burying ourselves under a mountain of enjoyably addictive substances, activities and materials to fathoming the workings of human consciousness and all its manifestations. We long ago collectively abdicated the responsibility of citizens for keeping an eye on the various criminal and secret operations of our governments and those who bought them. This is exactly what the forces of darkness wanted us to do, and we have dutifully obliged them.

Thoughtless and unexamined addiction to rampant materialism created an overall psychological condition of dense denial about the origin, ownership and manipulation of the world's resources. We want Endless Things, but we don't want to know where they come from, who does what to who in order to grab them in the first place, or how they got into our hands, because that immediately becomes too uncomfortable. In order to shove away all encroaching information about the conveniently hidden sources of our fatty lifestyles, we must choose to become unconscious, extremely arrogant, willfully ignorant, and fatally stupid in order to blot it all out. We have collectively been living the lie of unconscious blind entitlement, and we have liked it like that. And this is one of the root causes of why we find ourselves suddenly in the middle of two kinds of evil, engaged in a struggle for domination of ideologies and resources. Like most people everywhere, always, we have cared nothing for the presence of various kinds and degrees of evil in the world, so long as we were not personally bothered, and now it is all bearing down on us at once.

A truly free society would have required massive collective participation, vigilance, strenuous effort, individual responsibility, and tremendous sacrifice: none of which was remotely attractive to the majority of busy ever-consuming materialistic peoples in the West after World War II. Human beings are not yet free, have never yet achieved any high degree of sustained freedom in any society, and have certainly been far less free for some time now, here in the West, than we are told we are. At least let us not fool ourselves in this regard. Ideology can present itself to unthinking people as anything it likes. In reality, forces and energies are what they are, no matter what they call themselves.

In most of the world, money, corrupt power, and various warring ideologies own everyone. Those who own the physical resources, the sources and means of information and culture, the religious and educational establishments, and the governments and militaries: they own us all, one way or another, and our children, and their future. This bothers most people not at all, since they have long ago been devoured by Authority's aims themselves, and are now separate self-replicating embodiments of corporate/government/military programming."

diane harvey    merak@sedona.net