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I'm sure I mustn't be the only one who sees the irony in George W. Bush hosting a Middle East Peace Conference. It's a nice touch how countries like Sudan and Pakistan have been invited, too; they're paragons of peace and humane leadership, to be sure. And Bush, for God's sake. "Hey, why don't I hold a peace conference for the Middle East? I've led such a great example in Iraq. That war of mine in Iraq has set the stage perfectly for true peace in the Middle East. Laura, are there any more donuts left? You know how much I love those honey crullers..."
I tend to take a wholistic, idealistic, nondual, and perhaps naïve view of world events and the current state of affairs. In my humble opinion, there are relatively uncomplicated solutions to the wars, global warming, and other major concerns and conflicts in the world right now. If the world's wealth and concomitant well-being were more equitably distributed such that extreme poverty, ill-health and homelessness were mostly eradicated throughout the world (including in North America), then a lot of these problems would just cease to exist. In time (and perhaps with a certain amount of spiritual and emotional guidance), people would be able to adjust to a normal quality of life and they could cease to feel the need to seek out violent means to achieve their goals.
As far as the environment is concerned, that one is really simple, I think. We just need to climb off the corporate machine that keeps us buying new cars and driving everywhere, and building huge houses that require ridiculous amounts of heating and cooling, and stop buying the millions of tons of useless and harmful gadgetry and plastic bullshit toys and electronics and other distractions that are made with fossil fuels and shipped to us with fossil fuels and made by indentured factory workers in developing nations or in China or what have you.
The tricky part, I know, is what does everyone do with their free time? And how do those factory workers make a living? And so on, and so forth. I agree, that might be more complicated. But it's not an intractable problem. If we depopulated the urban centres and repopulated the rural areas, regenerated agricultural land to raise all of a region's food requirements instead of 10,000-unit hog farms run by multinational agribusinesses, then a lot of positive things would come of that. New employment, improvements to the quality of our food chain, decrease in carbon emissions related to shipping cherry tomatoes from Argentina to Canada, and so on. I can't think of any downsides, other than to the stock prices of these many, many companies.
And of course, that's the biggest rub. These sorts of changes would necessarily result in a pretty big downsizing of the stock market, and there are some very powerful and shockingly rich people who run that little shell game. So I don't know how that one would work. But come on, don't you think that all those other things would fix the world's major ills? It could be so simple -- we could knock it off in just a generation or two, if we put the same kind of effort and sacrifice into it as my grandparents' generation did during WWII.
But to quote Suzie Derkins in Calvin and Hobbes, As long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.
I tend to take a wholistic, idealistic, nondual, and perhaps naïve view of world events and the current state of affairs. In my humble opinion, there are relatively uncomplicated solutions to the wars, global warming, and other major concerns and conflicts in the world right now. If the world's wealth and concomitant well-being were more equitably distributed such that extreme poverty, ill-health and homelessness were mostly eradicated throughout the world (including in North America), then a lot of these problems would just cease to exist. In time (and perhaps with a certain amount of spiritual and emotional guidance), people would be able to adjust to a normal quality of life and they could cease to feel the need to seek out violent means to achieve their goals.
As far as the environment is concerned, that one is really simple, I think. We just need to climb off the corporate machine that keeps us buying new cars and driving everywhere, and building huge houses that require ridiculous amounts of heating and cooling, and stop buying the millions of tons of useless and harmful gadgetry and plastic bullshit toys and electronics and other distractions that are made with fossil fuels and shipped to us with fossil fuels and made by indentured factory workers in developing nations or in China or what have you.
The tricky part, I know, is what does everyone do with their free time? And how do those factory workers make a living? And so on, and so forth. I agree, that might be more complicated. But it's not an intractable problem. If we depopulated the urban centres and repopulated the rural areas, regenerated agricultural land to raise all of a region's food requirements instead of 10,000-unit hog farms run by multinational agribusinesses, then a lot of positive things would come of that. New employment, improvements to the quality of our food chain, decrease in carbon emissions related to shipping cherry tomatoes from Argentina to Canada, and so on. I can't think of any downsides, other than to the stock prices of these many, many companies.
And of course, that's the biggest rub. These sorts of changes would necessarily result in a pretty big downsizing of the stock market, and there are some very powerful and shockingly rich people who run that little shell game. So I don't know how that one would work. But come on, don't you think that all those other things would fix the world's major ills? It could be so simple -- we could knock it off in just a generation or two, if we put the same kind of effort and sacrifice into it as my grandparents' generation did during WWII.
But to quote Suzie Derkins in Calvin and Hobbes, As long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.
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