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Conscience Article continued from last page. If we look deeper into human injustice, we discover that we are its unwitting beneficiaries, from cheap labor in China to lower taxes on gasoline. Most of us even help to finance it through our taxes, investments, purchases, etc. Such are the pitfalls of Oneness; not only are we all interconnected in a single spherical biosphere, almost all of us now also participate in the global karmic circulation of money and its inseparable shadow, poverty. Our nation was founded on the “self-help” principle; the U.S. Constitution provided the tools to alter its own provisions if enough citizens take part in the process. In successive waves of citizen activism, generations of volunteers have ended slavery, won the vote for women and blacks, improved wages and working conditions, ended segregation, and regulated pollution. But most of us take these historic gains for granted, unaware that we can lose them if we relax our vigilance. The same forces that colonized the world under the “help-yourself” principle are still alive and busy, colonizing our very psyches through entertainment and advertising, re-engineering citizens into consumers. The result is a resurgence of colonial economics under a new name: “development.” This Orwellianism means the same thing for “underdeveloped” nations as for natural ecosystems: exploitation by profit-making machines called corporations. The World Bank makes loans for both kinds of development, devastating both the land and the economies of its “client” nations. Then the International Monetary Fund steps in with a program of “structural re-adjustment,” maximizing resource extraction and minimizing government services. Most former colonies have now been re-colonized through a permanent burden of debt. The World Trade Organization and its “free trade” agreements are designed to eliminate “barriers to trade” in member nations - along with democratic self-determination. Most of the barriers eliminated so far by the WTO's secret panel of judges have been democratically-passed laws to protect workers, communities, and the environment from abusive corporations. Fortunately, another wave of citizen volunteers is rising. Since 50,000 of them took to the streets of Seattle in 1999, this new worldwide coalition has converged for similarly massive demonstrations in Washington, DC; Chiang Mai, Thailand; Melbourne, Australia; Prague, Czech Republic; Quebec City, Canada; Genoa, Italy, and other places. In each case, their nonviolent tactics were met with a textbook example of what they had come to protest: secrecy, exclusion, media disinformation and police brutality. The press has focused almost exclusively on a small fringe element who target corporate property (in the “terrorist” tradition of the Boston Tea Party). But with the help of the Internet, more and more people are realizing that life on Earth is in trouble, and we can't count on governments, corporations or media to save us. We'll have to get out in the streets and do it ourselves. On Sept. 28, the World Bank will meet again in Washington, DC. The new coalition will be there. Some are longtime activists in various causes who have finally found each other. But most are young, idealistic children of the baby-boomers - the generation that stopped a war, then dropped out to raise children, join the rat race, and begin an inner spiritual search. These young people are clear-eyed, courageous, nonviolent, and remarkably conscious. I highly recommend that you meet them. The
Atlanta Mobilization for Global Justice will take Atlantans to Washington
for Sept. 28.
For information, or to donate: 770/310-4816 or eternalwaste@hotmail.com. Atlanta poet Stephen Wing is the author of Four-Wheeler & Two-Legged: Poems. |
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