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Christopher Eastman-Nagle's avatar

Amen to that Lynn.

Mind you, the comparison with Nazi Germany is more complex than it looks.

German subjects were the subject of a system of terror administered through the omnipresent Gestapo. A 'request' to attend their offices was a truly terrifying prospect and non compliance to their wishes would end in a concentration camp.

Political dissidents who did survive life in a concentration camp came back completely traumatized and never the same again.

We currently live within a system that is every bit as totalitarian as the Nazi one, but the one we live under does not require a security apparatus. The private and public systems of social administration have learned to apply the principles of public relations and marketing to the point of such scientific accuracy, they effectively control consciousness, in much the same way that a jewel wasp does with its cockroach prey.

I am the maker of dreams and the seeder of thoughts.

In me are the power and the profit.

Through me you will reach the visions of your customers.

Their habits are but the sum of my old campaigns.

I cannot be denied, for I pass beneath all understanding.

I am the omnipresent silent partner.

I am the shape of ambition,

The evocation of desire,

The imagined worlds of all.

There is no escape except in me.

I am the hope and the despair,

The answer to prayers for upgrades ever after.

They who believe in me shall be saved by products

And my enemies shall be frustrated for ever.

We live in a society of third generation Shop Troops and Contract Warriors in a economic system templated from world war levels of mobilization of people, organizations and natural resources. And the young know nothing else, as a world that has built itself around fantasies of desire and immediate satiation at any price substitutes the bombing of cities by military ordinance, to the bombing of mass populations by consumer ordinance,

The damage profile is one of not physical death and destruction, but existential death, bombed out social infrastructure a natural environment that is being systematically demolished with the same level of efficiency as pouring Zyklon B into concentration camp 'shower units'.

The biggest problem we have is just realizing what trouble we are already in. And the solutions, insofar as there now any at all, will almost certainly mean war.

Great journeys must be imagined first

and so trenchant in their intent

to slake the deepest kind of thirst,

they grasp imaginers by the throat

and tell them bluntly

only through travail and trial,

by purging fire

and hammer blows be smote

can their spirit be reforged

and history's child

be sired.

This ordeal can either temper

or destroy

according to its whim,

or perhaps the pilgrims’ strength within.

Courage can surmount faint hearts,

but how can faith presume

that having gambled all,

there is a way to save us in the end?

There are no roads upon the other side,

except the ones we make,

every step perhaps at stake

our lives,

every view through soldiers’ eyes.

And so we wile away our days

beside brooding familiarities

that will not speak to us for fear

that it is not the sun that brightens

all that we hold dear,

but the bonfire of our vanities;

that the deepening darkening shade it castes

is not shadow,

but decaying sanity.

We look for hopeful signs,

but at midnight,

the clock rings its hands and says

in anguished tones,

“Ladies and Gentlemen,

it’s time.”

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Mav's avatar

I speak up on person to person whenever I have the chance! People think the hormones have temporary effects and your child can just go back when they change their mind. Telling the whole ugly truth is important.

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