Unless you really own yourself, you're just a pawn in somebody else's game.
Tennessee Ernie Ford nailed it 50 years ago: "I owe my soul to the company store."
Could it be the most profound line in American history? In world history?
We sold our souls for the trinkets - the best wine, women and song. And while we were out capturing jewels, our most valuable possessions - the kids - ran off with their peers, got mixed in with the masses and got chewed up in our scams. Chickens roosting. We kill our children and deny we do it.
We let our kids go out to play, knowing the land had been poisoned by our inattention to the important things.
Now we raise our kids to be killed for lies, and squirm in the dark chasms beneath our pillows, dreaming the bills have come due. They have.
When people don't earn what they get, and don't get what they earn, a sickness develops, a corruption. Our society is set up so the middlemen get all the money. They don't earn their money, they steal it from others who do. But this is how the society has developed, and the entire human species has turned into a culture of parasites feeding on themselves, destroying the very conditions that sustain their lives with the deluded pretense of gathering "wealth."
That makes it difficult to appeal to their sense of reason, because their reason is to rape and plunder and not get caught.
The guy who said, "Crime doesn't pay," was a crook, because crime most definitely does pay, because it runs the whole world, and the best criminals - sociopaths posing as political leaders - often wind up running governments.
Everybody does only what they can do. Everybody tries to be as honest as they can. When you have to be slightly dishonest, or change the debate in order to cover up something you want to hide, you need to look at the thing you don't want everybody else to know, and understand how it poisons your life.
Are you happy profiting from someone else's misery? A majority of us are.
And that's where we are right now. That's the real war.
The real war presents the task of seeing what is real and what is not. At present the world pretends the freedom-loving American government is fighting terror all over the world. Precious few people understand that the freedom-loving American government has actually created the terror it pretends to fight, by combining with the subterranean intelligence agencies with its allies in corporate crime, Britain and Israel, to foment conflict in regions it wishes to further subjugate. That's why they hire all those mercenaries.
Iraq is the classic example, as renegade Mossad hit squads roam the country bombing Muslim faithfuls and beheading their own superfluous gophers. And already reports of Mossad operatives in the Caribbean islands portend new war against Venezuela, whose leader calls the American president a killer psycho, and all intelligent humans have to agree with him.
For many, the real war is about coping with the death of your child, blown to bits by his own countrymen posing as Arab crazies called al-Qaeda. GET THIS STRAIGHT! Al-Qaida was created by Cheney and Rumsfeld for use as designated enemies to serve in their demonic plans to blow up those buildings in Oklahoma City and New York City. You only have to read any regular newspaper to know that, if you have a brain.
But for absolutely everyone, the real war is about personal mortality, and WHY we do WHAT we do.
I learned once that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is really a book about life, and that we are not prevented from learning all there is to know about possible multiple lives right now in this one, compacting all our possible lives into this one, and living everything we could possibly be right now. This is precisely the kind of attention our world needs right now.
We need to see through the delusions, and distinguish the superfluous human games from the genuine requirements of life, the necessary survival strategies for somewhat intelligent animals living on a garden planet.
By that I mean we need to see the difference between paving paradise for parking lots and feeling the exhilarating energy in food that you take through its cycle from the ground to your mouth. Then you get some idea of who you really are.
Otherwise, as I said at the top, you're just a pawn in somebody else's game. And if you keep doing it, without ever realizing who the hell you actually COULD be, the species will go extinct, made forever inept and superfluous because of its inability to transcend its own self-constructed delusions.
Otherwise, when you go into that room with Ma'at and the Feather of Truth (or whichever other mythological metaphor you choose to accompany you on your final journey on this planet), you may never realize what the stakes really are, or why you ever lived at all.
And that's not only a bad thing for everyone and every thing, it's precisely the reason why the world we pretend to love in is the condition it's in right now.
