For centuries we have portrayed the wolf as a horrific beast, writing fables about its cunning, viciousness and dangerousness. Yet there are very few examples of it ever attacking humans.
All the while we ignore the fact that the most foul predator on the face of the earth is ourselves – the human animal and his lust for power and greed. Throughout our history, we have used our large brain very rarely for the good of our kind. The majority of our time has been spent in the quest to slake our thirst for money and power. Using countless, horrible methods of torture (from the rack to boiling pots of oil to burning at the stake to waterboarding) we have sought to bend others to our will, whether it be that of political conquest or religious conversion.
All the while, the oligarchy like a boa constrictor slowly squeezes the populace and consumes it by inches. How does it maintain power? While it may come to power through war, it maintains it by controlling the necessities of life – water and food. People have been killed over these, starved into submission.
How does one get control of food? You can’t store it because it rots. Ah, the seed! The seed, when easily and properly stored, will last for centuries, as archaeologists have found. When I was a young lad on the farm, we saved our seed for the next year. That is no longer possible, as our agribusinesses have genetically altered the seeds and patented what should be a product of nature.
Agribusiness sells food surpluses to the people. We pay them with our tax money after our own taxes subsidize their business. We the people pay twice. The surplus is then shipped to Third World dictators and they sell it to their people or it rots on the docks.
It is nice to have worked for an international company and to know friends around the world. Their comments and knowledge never make the news or history books, but they have enlightened me around a table of drinks in the back yard. But my sources are dwindling every year as the Christmas-card list gets shorter.
How easily we are led. We have just finished celebrating a supposedly Christian but actually pagan holiday by emptying our purses and maxing out our credit cards. How is it that we can be stampeded into this furor of purchasing nondescript items we would never think of buying for someone any other time of year?
Many, many years back I asked an elderly Native American on the Crow Reservation in Montana whether she knew how her ancestors celebrated this holiday before the white man came. The best she could say was that there was no special day for the giving of presents. It was done on the occasion of visits to people’s homes.
Yet we have completely bought into the idea that in order to show love for someone we must buy them presents galore every December. We watch the news and see the corporations crying crocodile tears because Christmas sales were “only” up 2 percent this year instead of the 3.9 percent they wanted. We aren’t doing our part to support the CEOs’ luxurious lifestyles!
One would think because we read history we would soon learn not to make the same mistakes. Yet, unlike the maligned wolf, we keep falling into the same traps over and over.
We fawn over people with money in the hopes that some of theirs will trickle down to us. Well, few really great people that cared about the poor or middle class died wealthy. The rich people we revere, whose names we give to halls and buildings – Carnegie, Rockefeller – are those that pillaged the resources of this and every other country they entered. Whether it was minerals or men, everything they found had to be conquered.
The oligarchy supports overpopulation because it means more labor, fewer jobs, desperate workers and the demeaning of those at the lowest strata of society. We have tasted of the fruits of wealth but are being kept from enjoying them.
The unions have been destroyed – not by riots, gunfire or other violence, but by corruption from within, taking their portion of wages, stating it would be invested for the workers’ retirement. How is it they managed the top 1 percent’s retirement so well and the masses’ so poorly?
Retirement is gone, Social Security is struggling, Medicare and Medicaid are overburdened. As with the boa constrictor, once he has fed on his prey he can rest and follow the trail of his next meal.
When asked what the signers of the Constitution had given us, Benjamin Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Two hundred years later, we are about to give it away. The framer of the Constitution knew the main embodiment of the nation was the middle class.
To the Second Amenders: While you’re worrying about your guns, they are shoving it up your buns.
Galen Larson writes from Montezuma County, Colo.
