The Easiest Job on the Planet

It is difficult to muster any feeling other than nausea when looking at this photo of war criminals. Linked arm in arm, this junta marched boldly through the streets of Paris today, proclaiming their steadfast commitment to freedom of speech in the wake of the tragic attacks that left 12 dead at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, and resulted in 5 more in the ensuing manhunt. The nausea comes when any person of conscience shirks the corporate media’s imposed amnesia and remembers the mountains of corpses amassed by each of them, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen to Gaza to Libya and beyond. It also comes when one remembers the horrendous abuses and assaults on freedom of expression in the form of crackdowns on protestors and prison sentences for journalists in their own countries. This display was, of course, for one reason alone. It signals a new page in an unending war of imperialistic aggression, dressed up in the sanctimonious garments of western superiority.

Unlike most of the protestors who joined the march today, freedom of speech is meaningless to this gang of miscreants. But it is a useful phrase to employ when stoking the flames of social and racial hatred. Anti-immigrant fervor is already reaching fever pitch in much of Europe where austerity measures, imposed on the population by the very ones gathered today in Paris, have resulted in misery for millions. This spectacle provides a convenient distraction from their outright plunder and malfeasance. It gives them an exit from the ramifications of their murderous and cruel policies. And with a subservient press in tow, the same one that virtually ignored every other mass protest against their tyranny, their job has become the easiest one on the planet.

Kenn Orphan 2015

Before the Bulldozers Arrive

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When I was a boy my family would travel to Nova Scotia to visit my grandmother. She lived on an island off the coast that was close enough to get to by ferry in an hour, yet far enough away from “civilization” that one could feel happily secluded from its distractions and trappings. A breeze fresh with sea salt and pine off the bay would hurry me along dirt roads that led to no where. Deep in the wood I would be gently reminded of the ocean around me on all sides by the distant ping of a buoy. The pleasures there were simple, yet profoundly rich. Coming from New York I reveled in this solitude and natural wonder. My grandmother’s porch let out onto a beach strewn with round rocks and seaweed, and the backdoor opened onto a wood thick with pine and carpeted with moss. It was a land that seemed both exotically foreign and warmly familiar. I would spend my days going back and forth to each of these magical places with only short pit stops for an ice cream or a can of pop.

I am often reminded of these ethereal experiences when I have the good fortune to be in some place wild. I have been lucky to have hiked through jungles in Central America and across mountain ranges in the American west. I have been awed by the endless span of the desert and the billions, upon billions of stars that filled moonless nights. But sadly these moments have become mere punctuations in my life as adulthood has taken me through the underbelly of “civilization” and I struggle to breath in its plastic emptiness. It has become painful to see wildlife too close to the burgeoning sprawl, because I know that it will soon be trampled under the busy feet of progress, bulldozed into heaps of wood and entombed in concrete, glass and steel.

Industrial civilization, with its petro-economy, doomed the wilds of the earth centuries ago. Its cancerous penchant for endless growth and its disease of cupidity and avarice have commodified and butchered the natural world of which we are all born. Consumer capitalism has become the religion of the 21st century. Its liturgy of “market driven free trade” views the earth as an exploitable object and human beings as valuable only in terms of their material wealth. There is no room for the sacredness of the wild. Cloaked in garments of moral piety, the priests of Wall Street hold the ultimate power over all life on the planet. Their eyes may have been blotted out by greed, but their hands still grope feverishly for the next spoil. Meanwhile the oceans acidify and the permafrost is no longer permanent as it thaws rapidly and releases tons of methane, accelerating the warming of the climate. Despite the overwhelming evidence, extraction of fossil fuels has only increased. The melting Arctic ocean has become a playground for the petro-industry and the bloated military that protects their interests. They are not worried about a warming planet or dancing perilously close to another world war. They are busy piercing the surface of our fragile world like rapacious vampires that can never seem to draw enough of the earth’s blood to sate their appetite.

Watching the storms grow on the horizon can fill one with dread in those moments where denial is not at work. There is no where on this earth that industrial civilization has not touched. Plastic debris fills its oceans, industrial chemicals saturate its already diminished soil, and the air has become the repository for the poisonous byproducts of its feckless consumption. Its economic ideology has created an ownership class that has divided the world map into farms for its own wealth acquisition. It expands like bacteria engulfing what was once lush fields, meadows and woods. It crushes the powerless of foreign nations, colonizes their land and enslaves them in endless servitude for the perpetuation of its monstrous system. It scrapes away the tops of ancient mountains for minutes of electrical power.

The insanity that is industrial civilization was born of imperialism. Materialistic ideas of fortune became the priority of the aristocracy, and so the village and the community were sacrificed for the promise of more stuff. Petro-chemicals fueled the Green Revolution, where agriculture was industrialized on a massive scale. It dressed up the drive for these things in the guise of good intentions. Feeding the hungry became its pious mantra, even though the profit based economy was its true engine. Neoliberal capitalism, defined as “privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector,” emerged from the shadows of imperialistic plunder. It rendered vast swaths of the earth open for boundless exploitation by the wealthy elite; and sentenced entire populations of indigenous people to a life of alienation, debt slavery and urban poverty.

There is no political will among the elites to acknowledge, much less address, the coming collapse that all of this has spawned. Multinational corporations and banks that control the world economy (and thus the world) would not tolerate a loss in their already over the top profits that would come as a result of any meaningful reform. “The economy must grow” is their unassailable chorus; and their existence, however fleeting, is dependent upon the continued, systematic rape of the natural world. The wilds be damned.

To be sure, I have no answer to the conundrum of industrial civilization. In addition to being a product of it, I am also a beneficiary of its plunder by virtue of when and where I was born. I have not fled to the last remaining wilderness from where I can pontificate beyond reproach. I understand how easy it is to become paralyzed by the spectacle of its dazzling, self-destructive decadence. But, by all accounts, it appears to be in its final act with its curtain call being the demise of countless species, including our own.

In my childhood wildlife seemed to be forever and untouchable. The woods, the meadows and the sea appeared to me to be endless and invincible. I could walk under the canopy of trees and never hear a plane or smell petrol or run across another soul for hours on end. Now that I am grown I see that all of it is as fragile as glass. I am beginning to grasp just how dire the situation really is and, despite the false hope that the environmental movement peddles, there are no viable solutions to address what lies ahead, save the immediate cessation of fossil fuels and of industrial society itself. Indeed, on our current trajectory we appear to be headed for a world more like Venus than the lush, green earth we have been privileged with. But despite all of this, there are still forests unfelled and fields untilled to walk through, and I hope that this realization will cause me to have more reverence for the wilds that are left and time to stand in awe of their sacredness…

before the bulldozers arrive.

Kenn Orphan 2014

(For photo credit and/or source click on photograph.)

The Hermit Kingdom vs. Hollywood

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The corporate media has been in a frenzy this week over the alleged hack into Sony Corporation by the government of North Korea. The hack prompted executives to sack the release of the low brow comedy “The Interview” which involved a scene in which the leader of the Hermit Kingdom is assassinated. There have been outcries among the elite railing against this “attack” on freedom of speech, and the apparent cowardice of a multinational corporation. As if any corporation anywhere exhibited any virtue, much less courage, when their bottom line was at risk.

Oddly enough when it was the US government doing the hacking (and spying) on other nation’s governments (including allies) and on American citizens the corporate press was either apathetic or chimed in with the hawks of Washington demanding the punishment of whistle blowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. It demonstrates how, in the neoliberal order of America, corporations rank higher in priority than ordinary people.

This latest manufactured outrage has Wall Street, the Pentagon and Hollywood’s fingerprints all over it. Celebrity sycophants to Washington’s political class like George Clooney have joined the chorus championing “freedom of speech.” Yet one would be hard pressed to find the same level of disdain when it comes to the horrific practices of the NSA, CIA, FBI and the DoD which include not only hacking, but torture and murder.

Hollywood has never missed a beat in producing films that parrot US foreign policy, celebrate the cupidity of Wall Street, or beat the drums of militaristic chauvinism. Ironically, it portrays itself as a bastion of free speech, but a scratch beneath the glitzy surface reveals a long, ugly history of corporate censorship. When it comes to understanding the hypocritical outrage from the ruling elite and celebrity class, all one need do is follow the money and the power. It is the only value they understand or will go out on a limb for.

Kenn Orphan 2014

Photo Credit: Michael Thurston/AFP/Getty Images

State Sanctioned Amnesia

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Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day are the days the empire has set aside to remember the fallen soldiers of American wars and those who have served in its armed forces. They are also opportunities for state sanctioned amnesia.

It is chance for politicians to go on ad nauseum about “duty” and “sacrifice,” foreign concepts for most of them to say the least. It is an opportunity for corporations to make a quick buck off of the follies of their imperialistic wars of plunder. It is an opportunity for Americans to once again ignore the statistics of homeless veterans and those who return with horrific injuries and PTSD, and the neglect they endure from an inept and inadequately funded Veteran’s Administration. An opportunity for social media to explode with meaningless memes extolling “freedom and liberty,” two meaningless words that serve to distract the public from the slow and steady erroding of the most basic civil liberties and rights ordinary citizens have left.

It is also another opportunity to forget about the NDAA indefinite detention “option” that allows the government to spirit away any American citizen to an undisclosed location, away from family or legal counsel, potentially kept there forever, to face a military tribunal for charges that need never be disclosed to the accused. An opportunity for Americans to lie to themselves about the whole scale destruction and occupation of other nations, impoverished and far less sophisticated than us in military might, and generally already destabilized by the CIA. An opportunity to minimize the loss and value of the lives of foreigners and soldiers of other countries who fought just as valiantly for the lies their government told them. An opportunity for Americans who dissent from these lies to be shunned and shamed, demonized and ignored.

If America really honored the fallen and those who have served, it would condemn the war criminals in Washington who continue to goad the nation into endless wars. If it really paid respect to veterans it would give adequate funding to the VA, treat PTSD in those who come home from the horrors of war, and house the nearly three hundred thousand homeless that line the streets of every major American city. It would pay them an living wage so that they need not go on food stamps. If it really hoped to spare a child the loss of a parent to a senseless war, it would take to the streets to protest any new war or intervention. If it really believed in freedom and liberty, it would understand that neither of these are possible in a time of war and that is just what the elite want in order to maintain their control and keep their wealth.

But none of that will happen on these days, or any other day of the year, because in the land of the free, dissent is the enemy, and nationalistic jingoism reigns supreme.

Kenn Orphan 2014

Bearing Witness

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“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” – Carl Sagan

We are all witnesses to the Great Dying, a sixth mass extinction, the last one being 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs. This is not hyperbole; it is a defining feature of our age.

Countless species are falling prey to the wealthy’s indifference, militarism and folly everyday. As in ancient civilizations, the wealthy and the privileged are generally the last to feel the pain of collapse, yet are most often the root cause. And compared to the mass of humanity we share this planet with, and as a result of rapacious exploitation and plunder, Americans, and westerners in general, are the wealthy and the privileged of modern civilization.

Despite overwhelming evidence of crashing ecosystems, many of us living in the twilight years of the American empire seem oblivious to the canaries in the coal mine. Every human being who has ever lived, lived here, on this little, saltwater drenched rock suspended in the endless, cold ocean of space. Yet so often one can feel as if they were alone, wandering among zombies and phantoms, unaware of or uninterested in grappling with what lies ahead of us. The magicians and merchants of corporate consumerism foster this disconnection gleefully, and create a labyrinth of distractions and doubts that add to the self-delusion.

Insipid optimism is the demand of our corporate kingdom. Eternal youth, popularity, and economic fortune, are to be believed not only possible, but necessary for fulfillment and social connection. This is not an optimism that enjoins the soul to more wondrous places, or that stirs a connection to the nature we are all born of. This is the kind of optimism that unhinges you from reality; and that chaffs the skin of your soul. It is like a chisel set against your skull. It is the kind of optimism that condescendingly tells us that “everything is going to be okay.” Even if this were somehow true, everything is NOT okay for millions of people and countless species around the planet right now. And not acknowledging that underscores the inherent callousness in this way of thinking. It masquerades as hope; but it is merely cruelty obscured by a deceptive, mocking jingle.

In our society we are temporarily appeased by objects created for one use. In fact many wars of our age are fought for just this purpose. The plastic items that are choking our oceans were born in the darkness of oil wells and tar sands, drilled and scraped clean for the ease of a fleeting moment, and tossed away to become forgotten, yet enduring pollution. The shaming evidence is scuttled away in the darkness of the early morning, so that our day, our very important day, is not inconvenienced by the unending moan of the nature we crush under busy, productive feet.

Plastic debris that has washed up along the shore of the Azores. Photo courtesy of 5 Gyres.

The petro-dollar has made our penchant for convenience and self-delusion incredibly efficient. It has spawned the neoliberal economics that repress hundreds of millions of people and that is now driving us all toward extinction. And we have been conditioned to see this all as merely “the way of progress,” and to malign and ridicule those whose hearts see such sights and mourn the enormous weight of history, the staggering lack of empathy and the gaping dearth of a viable future for a species callously divorced from its soul.

We have been meticulously trained to separate life itself into worthiness categories, in fact, to be seen only as useful if it serves our copious desire for more. We house millions of sentient beings in concentration camps, bereft of comfort or even the ability to turn around, often brutally beaten and mutilated, stripped of the dignity any creature has a birthright to, all to sate our unending appetite for flesh.

We avert our eyes to the plastic bags clinging to the branches of decrepit trees, or the bottle caps that outnumber seashells on the shore, or the birthday balloons floating atop the waves at the beach, even while knowing their destination will in all likelihood be the stomach of some hapless sea turtle. After all, paying attention might cause us to question. It might cause us to change. It might reignite the sacred reverence our ancestors knew. It might cause us to face the demons of our cupidity and the resulting devastation and suffering they cause.

(photo: Chris Jordan)

We can remain in denial about the ecocide we are all witness to, as the cult of optimism would have us do, or we can acknowledge and embrace the sorrow that is a natural response to loss, devastation and catastrophe. In grief we make a choice to honor the lost and their existence. We speak in a clear voice, to anyone who will listen, that their lives mattered. And we are also forced to face our own mortality in the process.

Agreeing to walk through our grief honestly can be a catalyst for creative defiance and undaunted dissent. It is perhaps the only resistance we can offer to the insistence of apathy imposed on us from the wraiths on Wall Street and Madison Avenue. The unnatural barriers they have erected to mask our humanity crumble in the rancid pile they deserve when a soul is set free to grieve. It is in grief that we find ourselves to be inseparable from each other, and from the nature from which we are all born. In this way, sorrow is the only coherent answer to extinction. It is a wail of conscience.

(photo: Getty Images)

Bearing witness to the unprecedented crime of ecocide sweeping our planet is not accepting the carnage, it is lending another voice to testify on the behalf of the victims. And in doing so, it succeeds in making the difficult case for the worth of the human soul.

Kenn Orphan 2014

Humanity’s Epitaph

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Last month hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of major cities, most especially New York, for the People’s Climate March ahead of the neutered Climate Summit at the United Nations. It was a remarkable moment for the environmental movement which, in the United States at least, has become largely mainstreamed into corporate doublespeak, wedded to the establishment and co-opted for political gain by the Democratic Party. The enthusiasm and desire for a better future in the vast majority of these protestors should not be questioned or criticized; but the effectiveness of this march, if we truly wish to see any success from it, should.

Within the last decade there have been monumental shifts in climate models leaving even the conservative IPCC shocked and frightened. The overriding consensus within the climate science community is that things are far more dire than anyone had previously anticipated. Now we are beginning to see the first stirrings of climate chaos; and it is set against the ominous backdrop of corporate capitalism’s incessant, insatiable and rapacious plunder of an already ravaged planet. Catastrophic flooding, record breaking temperature extremes and intractable drought have become the defining norm of the 21st century.

(A public bus traverses flood waters in Calgary, Alberta. Photo: Larry MacDougal/The Canadian Press)

By many estimations the proverbial 11th hour for the climate. and thus for humanity itself, has been drastically reduced to one minute before midnight. Yet in this unprecedented moment in human history ineptitude, lack of will and doltish denial continue to reign within the avenues of power. The machinery of entrenched political power and wealth is a formidable adversary and any change in direction is generally derailed if the masters of the machine cannot profit from it. Appealing to this depraved and ultimately suicidal sensibility has proven to be ruinous for any meaningful progress to stem the advance of climate change.

The People’s Climate March was arguably a noble venture to raise awareness and prick the ears of the powers that be. It could be dismissed as naive or even a foolish waste of time by some; after all promoting or peddling false hope or optimism only serves the status quo of doing nothing. But the misanthropy of weary activists itself will damn the efficacy of the movement just as much as rampant denialism, intransigence or profiteering at the expense of the climate.

(photo: Associated Press)

Worldwide weather patterns are rapidly becoming chaotic and severe. Reality asserts that we may have already passed the tipping point and climate catastrophe is only a matter of time. Therefore the need for a realistic approach has never been more paramount than it is today, if for no other reason than to attempt to alleviate the suffering we see today and that will inevitably follow.

We must face the fact that climate change is here to stay and it is growing angrier by the minute. We must accept our culpability in the ecocide that is vanishing countless species from the earth at breakneck speed. We must also realize that the powerful are, despite their strident assertions, not in control and have instead chosen the easy path of playing on people’s prejudices, ignorance and fears in order to exact the largest profit they can as the lights go out. They have used our precious resources to build walls to protect them, free speech zones to insulate them from voices of dissent, and institutions to defend their crimes. They stoke the fires of bigotry and Bronze Age mythology in order to distract us from their theft and murder. They create new enemies to be fought so that the public does not see how utterly inept they are at dealing with the real and urgent threats to collective humanity.

(Well heeled 1% look on in bewildered amusement at Occupy Wall Street protestors. Photo: Associated Press)

If this movement is to have any success it must move quickly to disrupt and dismantle the mechanisms of industrialization via fossil fuels that are driving us rapidly towards calamity. It must divorce itself from Wall Street and corporate wealth. It must tear down the old vestiges of prejudice, racism and bigotry that merely serve to embolden state violence and reinforce repression. It must shake off the privilege of Western neoliberal economics that have served to exploit impoverished nations through the lie of “free trade” and devastate ecosystems. In so doing, it must derive its strength from the bottom up, dismissing any enticements from parasitic political entities that only seek to render it anemic through guile and deceitful placation. And it must identify and align itself with the poor and disenfranchised of the planet.

(Indigenous Brazilians protest the construction of the Belo Monte dam on the Xingu river. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)

If it cannot do this then it was nothing more than a vain political spectacle that should be fast replaced. Otherwise it will only serve as humanity’s epitaph.

Kenn Orphan 2014

Photo: Protesters in New York City – Mel Evans/AP

Self Destruction Writ Large

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Recently, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one of the most conservative, scientific/political organizations, issued its most dire report to date. It warned that climate change will have “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” in coming decades. It goes on to say that “the risk of abrupt and irreversible change increases as the magnitude of the warming increases.” Unknown to most of the public is that this panel is very conservative and years behind reality in its assessments. Their reports are also subject to being watered down for geopolitical and economic reasons. As a UN body, the IPCC responds to its masters. And, like the World Bank, they follow the dictates of neoliberal capitalism. The common definition of neoliberalism, the dominant geopolitical force of our age, refers to “economic liberalization, privatization, free trade, open markets, deregulation, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.”

Economic neoliberalism attaches a monetary value to everything that exists and, in doing so, catastrophically demeans that value, transforming it into something that is easily disposable. It commodifies the very building blocks of life. It dismantles the commons by enforcing private ownership. It replaces citizenship with consumerism. It hustles us toward extinction and ecocide with a jingle in our heads and a shopping bag in our hand. It endorses endless war, endless distraction and the rape of the natural world, because these are the only things that will sustain its existence. It is self destruction, writ large.

The malignant tide that brought us to this place is rising fast. Centuries of plunder and exploitation are rendering the oceans and the planet barren and fallow. Soon it will be impossible for any human being to traverse this landscape unsullied, where the snares of a beleaguered ecosystem are ubiquitous, the currency of the state is violence, and the native tongue of its leaders is cruelty. In fact, the established plutocratic class is getting nervous. They do not have a plan outside of maintaining their current campaigns of plunder, distracting the public, and constructing a police state to insure their power and wealth remain intact. So it is a fair assumption that their well deserved paranoia will spark even more heavy handed repression and violence.

But more people are beginning to shake off the shackles of endless fear mongering and war drumming imposed on them from the powers that be. More are beginning to tire of the vapid celebrity worship, the car-wrecks of cruel humiliation that pass as entertainment, and the empty promises of fulfillment and wholeness that feckless cupidity and consumerism offer. More are beginning to see through the lies.

It is unclear if our species will weather the coming storms, droughts, social unrest, police state violence, corporate plunder and threat of nuclear war. Indeed our right to go on is questionable given our long history of horrific treatment of the most vulnerable among us, and the countless species with whom we share this planet. But one thing is certain; no one will be able to take this journey unmolested. Even as it is being decimated, we are all inextricably connected to this marvelous world. And perhaps, with that in mind, we can turn away from the self-indulgent madness of our time and appreciate what is left and realize just how good we had it.

Kenn Orphan 2014

The company you keep, the atrocities you ignore.

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Few in the civilized world would ever see the beheading of a human being as anything less than abject evil. A state that executes scores of people every day, many on charges of apostasy or sorcery, routinely imprisons and tortures people with different ethnicities or religious beliefs, and has been implicated in supporting various terrorist factions throughout the Middle-east is deserving of the most scathing reproach. The state that I am referring to in this instance is not IS (Islamic State). It is one of the United States biggest allies; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

There is a veritable mountain of evidence documenting the ongoing, systemic brutality of the House of Saud and the medieval theocracy it imposes. The Kingdom stones women to death for witchcraft or for being unaccompanied. It amputates the limbs of men accused of stealing. It crucifies anyone displaying a religious symbol that is not Wahhabist (ultra-fundamentalist Islam). Immigrant workers, too, are not spared from the savagery. Treated as slaves with no rights, they are routinely raped, beaten and murdered with impunity.

It would be accurate to designate the IS as fiendishly barbaric. Yet when it comes to denunciation of the tyrannical House of Saud for routinely carrying out the same atrocities, and doing so for far longer, the United States is curiously quiet. There may be paltry criticisms here and there, but nothing tantamount to the priggish blustering we see recently emanating from Washington regarding IS. This is for an important reason.

Within the halls of empire such hypocritical rants are essential to advancing its interests, which are unequivocally tied to its wealth and power. The American empire is an expert at the art of spinning atrocities to align with its foreign policy objectives which line the pockets of the weapons and fossil fuel industry. And with a corporate media in tow, the job is anything but difficult.

Once again we are witness to the ratcheting up of war rhetoric and the endless war machine working itself into a self-righteous frenzy. Once again the corporate media dutifully serves its masters in regurgitating state narratives as absolute truth. Once again we are doused with collective amnesia as they court the doom of war. And once again we are chided for daring to remember the last time they lied to us, and the tremendous cost it exacted.

Kenn Orphan 2014

The Earth and Her Raging Fever

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From a months worth of rain falling in a matter of hours, to wildfires devouring the lush rainforests and the icy Arctic tundra, we are witnessing records being broken one after another with each passing day. One does not need to be a scientist to see a shocking increase of extreme weather events. Yet, still, denialism persists. “We must grow the economy!” “Drill, baby drill!” It is madness on an epic scale.

The earth doesn’t care about our economy. She has no use for our political protestations either. She responds only to our folly. And she is groaning from the injuries we have inflicted on her. She has a fever; and if she does not treat it soon the results will prove dire for her future.

No greater visual exists to demonstrate her malady than the Alberta Tar Sands. It is a blight that covers an area the size of Florida and can be seen from space. It is a cancerous tumor, a melanoma on the skin of the earth that continues to grow and metastasize, spewing its noxious breath into the atmosphere while being fueled by the fallacious myth of infinite growth on a finite planet.

The West continues to be mired in a corporate fantasy world, drowning as we toast our good fortune. All the while the real world, that every species relies on for sustenance and survival, is withering and suffocating before our eyes. Those who call attention to the ecocide are often maligned and marginalized, living as exiles from the Kingdom of Eternal Optimism. The oceans are acidifying, intractable drought threatens our food and water supply, floods threaten our cities. We are facing extinction; not just of countless other species but of our own. Yet there is little to no alarm or pause from the mass media and popular culture.

We may be alone in this universe, but it is unlikely. Perhaps it is filled with other species who made it as far as we did and survived or even thrived. Or perhaps it is littered with the bones of long dead societies who had similar aspirations. We may never know. What we do know is this, the planet that we live on is rapidly changing before our eyes. The earth, our only home, has a raging fever. And she will not wait for our over indulgent deliberations. Her prognosis is good though. She is going to survive her disease. For humanity, however, it isn’t looking so good.

Kenn Orphan 2014

Photo Credits:

Alberta Tar Sands, once pristine boreal forest. Photographer Peter Essick

Alberta Tar Sands at night. Photographer Garth Lenz

Pristine Alberta boreal forest before destruction/National Geographic

Our Shared Humanity

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Following the execution of an unarmed black youth by a police officer, images of the over the top militarized response in Missouri toward an entire community have gone around the world. Even the press has been targeted. Many in Gaza have taken note of this, and have offered much appreciated support and advice to the besieged people of Ferguson. For instance, Gazans, via Twitter, advised protestors on how to dilute the acerbic sting of tear gas. This should not be surprising in the least. After all, the Palestinians know better than most of how to cope with the brutality of state violence.

Gaza is an open air prison where 1.8 million people are surrounded by walls, barbed wire and sentry towers; and where they are subjected to collective punishment, humiliation and dehumanization by an occupying military. Their diet is strictly controlled, their water is mostly contaminated. And when they try to fish or farm they are routinely fired upon. They understand what it is like to be in captivity with no voice.

Ferguson is a microcosm of the institutionalized systems of racism that have been permitted to fester and entrench themselves within the American landscape. It is a visible manifestation of the pernicious segregation that never completely dissolved. And so it naturally has parallels to other marginalized and disenfranchised communities the world over, including Gaza.

Solidarity in the struggle against tyranny between two different peoples is irreproachable. It is the recognition that ordinary people anywhere in the world not only wish to live in peace, but demand social and economic justice for their communities. When we finally realize that our strength lies in our interdependence, and is the only answer to state violence and oppression, the powerful tremble. They should. Because this kind of non-violent resistance is formidable. And the legacy of our shared humanity endures far longer than their brutality ever could.

Kenn Orphan 2014

(Photo is of two women attending a vigil in Ferguson, Missouri/Twitter)

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