"If New Orleans were dry" by Michael Ventura

Excellent column by Michael Ventura in this week's Austin Chronicle (excerpt):

"If our leaders are criminals that should come as no surprise, for we live on theft. We've invented polite words for our theft ("capitalism," "the global economy," "the free market"), but in fact it takes a lot of muscle and legalized theft for 5% of Earth's population to gobble 50% of its resources. Our way of life is a criminal enterprise, and it takes criminals to run it. For more than a century we've depended upon thinly veiled criminality for our good fortune, and we damn well are implicated.

Which is the underlying reason most Americans want to know nothing about their governance. To know would be to admit responsibility. To admit responsibility would put one in the moral dilemma of either taking action toward a more just world and thereby ultimately undermining one's own prosperity, or ignoring it all in the desperate attempt to live happily ever after. Many will believe anything that allows their fearful desperation to pose as righteous happiness. Any lie is welcome, and those who point out the lies are mightily resented. Democrats are as loath as Republicans to face the real problem. George W. Bush and the right-wing cabals cause tremendous and needless suffering, but they are not the fundamental problem. The problem is the way we sustain ourselves. The way we sustain ourselves causes much more suffering than Bush does. The way we sustain ourselves has brought disorder to every corner of the world and undermined the viability of the planet itself. Collectively, we are the maddened coven."

From the Tao te Ching: "Prosperity rests on disaster; disaster is hidden in prosperity."

Read the whole thing at the link above.