|
Chapter 12 - Project USA.I traveled across the U.S.A. with Sylvia as my teammate. Here my hope became dimmed. America was a lifeless place by comparison. The kinds of 'town' meetings that Ushi and I had been able to arrange with relative ease all across Russia, were not so easily organized in the "Land of the Free," and those that were organized were poorly attended. People were either afraid of police state measures, or were more concerned with making money than with the survival of their nation and civilization, which is fundamental to their own survival. Their focus had been drawn away from the reality in which they lived, into a narrowly confined world that had become increasingly irrational, bordering on insanity. This growing insanity seemed to have pervaded the whole of society, from the grass roots level to the very top. The prevailing attitudes, and the country's policies, had become increasingly inhuman. Most people had become like so many black holes in space that draw everything inwards unto themselves with a gravity so great that not even the faintest glimmer of light could escape, nor a thought about another and the survival of humanity. There was no vitality left in the society that we found. Nothing was being built anymore. Industries were destroyed or fell apart, and the workers that once supported them were gradually thrown onto the scrap heap together with the once functioning facilities. Hardly anyone seemed to care anymore about anything outside of their selfish concern centered on their, "my money" mentality. People cared little about the homeless who were dying on the streets, or the uninsured who had no longer access to medical help when illness struck. This self-isolation of society from one another had become exceedingly deep and seemingly impenetrable. Where we drew a thousand people to our meetings in Russia, to explore the road to human survival, we got twenty at home, and often the response we got from them was cynical, if not hostile. Occasionally the response was outright frightening when people couldn't face the fact that their life-long savings, which had been thrown into the financial markets in the hope of lavish returns, had evaporated into nothing during the great crash after which there was no liquidity left in the markets to repay anyone their hard earned investments, much lass profits. The profits that people were told they would receive had never been produced by anyone. The minuscule amounts of profit that were actually pulled out of the speculative market, that gave the impression that profits were indeed being generated, were not profits in real terms, but redirected investments of other unwary trusting souls. In the shadows of these losses, the few industries that America still had, that once supported a few people's living with savings left over, were like all the previous industries gradually being torn down. It was plain to us that a society cannot survive on a platform of legalized stealing from one another for any extended period. Sylvia and I saw the evidence of this tragedy everywhere. But why couldn't everyone else see the facts before their eyes? Why the delusion? Why the denial or reality? We tried to explain the facts, but to no avail. Whenever Sylvia spoke up to confront people with the truth that they should have seen themselves, especially since the financial disintegration had already begun again, some people reacted with uncontrollable anger as if their world was being destroyed by Sylvia's declaration of the truth. One businessman even drew a gun at Sylvia in a hotel lobby, so that I had to step in between them and disarm the man by talking some sense into him. The man ended up crying. Only on rare occasions had we been able to actually address the primary issue of our campaign, the impending nuclear war and the force that is driving it, and the nature of this force as an economic issue. Usually, there were constant interruptions by which the focus was shifted back onto trivial concerns that were totally inconsequential in the face of the world's gradual drifting towards an evermore-likely global nuclear war. || - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||
|
