Lately I have been reading a searing, vivid, powerful memoir entitled Every Man in this Village is a Liar by Megan K. Stack, a young journalist who is featured as one of the speakers at an upcoming Literary Festival at Old Dominion University, a few miles away from where I work in Norfolk. I had picked up a copy of her book at Kramer Books in Washington, DC, and was immediately captivated by her precise images and her moral passion, so I bought it, and have scarcely been able to put it down since.
The book is mesmerising in its vividness and eloquence, but her subject matter--the war zones of the Middle East where she was sent as a correspondent by the Los Angeles Times--is utterly appalling. She records what she sees and experiences, first in Afghanistan, then on the Israel/Palestine border, then Iraq (and later elsewhere) with such clarity, precision, candor and pathos that you feel it in your bones.
However, reading this account of the sheer cruelty and horror of war on all whom it touches has also left me in even greater despair for my country than ever, particularly because she is eyewitness to innumerable atrocities wrought not only by the so-called "terrorists" (whatever the hell THAT means) but by the US military as well. For indeed, we are guilty as hell in all of this--except, of course, that "we"--the majority of American voters--never actually had any say in this ongoing crime against humanity, since the Bush Regime hijacked the country in 2000 and 2004, and Obama, who was legitimately elected (for a change) on a promise of ending the war and putting an end to the perversion of justice in horrific places like Guantanamo, has only continued these heinous occupations in the Middle East and the ongoing atrocities in which "our boys" are complicit every day.
And so indeed, my original fear has been validated--that the United States of America, as a concept with any real basis in the enlightened ideals of Thomas Paine, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, ceased to exist on December 12,2000--the day a shamelessly partisan Supreme Court overrode the rule of law and validated the theft of an election. The great hoax of 9/11/01 thereafter only confirmed the hijacking of our nation by this pernicious criminal syndicate of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. And since then, the former "United States of America" has become a neofascist, corporate sponsored, pseudo-democratic zombie nation, living a lie, murderously stalking the world while muttering empty platitudes about "freedom," "democracy" and the "global war on terror."
I wish I could renounce my citizenship and move elsewhere--I can't. But then, it does not matter whether I am a "citizen" or not, since the nation of which I was once a proud citizen no longer exists. So instead, I have no alternative but to proclaim myself a citizen of Gaia, like my role-model Thomas Paine, who said "the world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion." And a citizen of Gaia can live anywhere on the planet and still be at home. In fact, all nation states are just mental formations--arbitrary lines drawn on maps. We are bound by their laws, but the only laws that matter, ever, are those that are compatible with the Laws of God (i.e. love your neighbor as yourself) and the Laws of Gaia (This is because that is). If any given laws enacted by any human government are compatible with these, we obey them; if not, we engage in Satyagraha.
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