Awakening to a beautiful future
Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf and some other American Indian elders believe we are in the moment of history referred to in Hopi prophecy as The Great Purification, after which will come The Renewal. Some Christian thinkers believe we are in the period referred to in their prophecies as The Tribulation or The Apocalypse, which is to be followed by The Millennium or thousand years peace. Clearly Earth is in a moment of great oppurtunity and crisis. Being the dominant species, we seven billion humans' decisions are integral to what will happen. Should we use our mushrooming communications technology to get everyone the world over to transition to a loving future - in which we recognize all life as one - the new age may see many of us alive today.
If we don't awaken from our negative dog-eat-dog assumptions - such as that the country most able to do violence is the one that dominates; or that in order to be successful you have to make a lot of money; or that in order for us to eat we have to treat plants and animals as if they were things; or that the world's resources must be fought over to get our share; or that we have to have so many weapons to protect ourselves from each other; or that we can't feed everybody - we are by our zombie-like automatic assumptions and actions going to prolong and expand this time of apocalypse and purification till most if not all of us are dead.
Before making YOUR assumption that I'm being overly dramatic, be open-minded enough to watch this recent speech by Dr. James Hansen - one of the world's top scientists - who was silenced by the Bush administration and who is so driven by his own sense of responsibility that he was willing to get arrested to get public notice of our government's refusal to take rapid climate change seriously:
If you knew what I know
by James Hansen
http://350.org/en/node/28117
Our future is flexible. It's not set in stone, for instance, that we need to continue eating parts of other animals for our protein. The corporate lobbyist-driven agricultural industrial system has, through subsidies, made it almost impossible to avoid: meat; added sweeteners; added salt, antibiotics, growth hormones and other chemicals; ersatz (fake) bread; genetically modified food (which, not having co-evolved with the human organism, causes allergic reactions), chemical dyes (politely called "food coloring"), industrially caused diseases transported via an oil-addicted transportation system (over enormous distances, of course, the better to waste precious gasoline for profit). Even the health food industry has been subverted by the quick money dirty type of business people. What is marketed as "tofu" (a fermented food made from soybeans) is not really tofu because they skipped the health-giving fermentation part (for the money, of course). Also due to the lobbyists, fresh vegetables are more expensive than meat.
The true American Indian tradition teaches that all animals, plants, and even things are alive. The best scientific and Judeo-Christian thinking leads to the same conclusion - The Universe is a living manifestation of God. When we get through this modern dark age I believe we are in, it will not be necessary to participate in causing the suffering of other creatures in order to feed ourselves.
As an example of one of the many progressive scientific advances which have been obstructed by the status quo mindset which the money system enforces, cultured meat is a biotech advance which allows the fermentation culture of animal cells without having to grow the other unused body parts - so that the animals don't have to be raised then killed; only the protein or whatever other nutrient we want to produce is being grown and harvested. Winston Churchill understood and advocated for this possibility many years ago. In addition to lessoning the suffering of livestock, fermentation processes to produce food offer some backup food security; having played our part in the extinction of larger species of life, we are now needing to rely more on the microbes. Bread, nutritional yeast, yogurt, cheese, alcohol, are all fermentation products. Now, if we humans work together as one family, we can use appropriate biotechnology to produce: new foods so we can stop trying to enslave nature; and new feedstocks for energy production so that we don't have to war over fossil fuels and be addicted to massive centralized poisonous power production such as at nuclear power plants.
If we don't awaken from our negative dog-eat-dog assumptions - such as that the country most able to do violence is the one that dominates; or that in order to be successful you have to make a lot of money; or that in order for us to eat we have to treat plants and animals as if they were things; or that the world's resources must be fought over to get our share; or that we have to have so many weapons to protect ourselves from each other; or that we can't feed everybody - we are by our zombie-like automatic assumptions and actions going to prolong and expand this time of apocalypse and purification till most if not all of us are dead.
Before making YOUR assumption that I'm being overly dramatic, be open-minded enough to watch this recent speech by Dr. James Hansen - one of the world's top scientists - who was silenced by the Bush administration and who is so driven by his own sense of responsibility that he was willing to get arrested to get public notice of our government's refusal to take rapid climate change seriously:
If you knew what I know
by James Hansen
http://350.org/en/node/28117
Our future is flexible. It's not set in stone, for instance, that we need to continue eating parts of other animals for our protein. The corporate lobbyist-driven agricultural industrial system has, through subsidies, made it almost impossible to avoid: meat; added sweeteners; added salt, antibiotics, growth hormones and other chemicals; ersatz (fake) bread; genetically modified food (which, not having co-evolved with the human organism, causes allergic reactions), chemical dyes (politely called "food coloring"), industrially caused diseases transported via an oil-addicted transportation system (over enormous distances, of course, the better to waste precious gasoline for profit). Even the health food industry has been subverted by the quick money dirty type of business people. What is marketed as "tofu" (a fermented food made from soybeans) is not really tofu because they skipped the health-giving fermentation part (for the money, of course). Also due to the lobbyists, fresh vegetables are more expensive than meat.
The true American Indian tradition teaches that all animals, plants, and even things are alive. The best scientific and Judeo-Christian thinking leads to the same conclusion - The Universe is a living manifestation of God. When we get through this modern dark age I believe we are in, it will not be necessary to participate in causing the suffering of other creatures in order to feed ourselves.
As an example of one of the many progressive scientific advances which have been obstructed by the status quo mindset which the money system enforces, cultured meat is a biotech advance which allows the fermentation culture of animal cells without having to grow the other unused body parts - so that the animals don't have to be raised then killed; only the protein or whatever other nutrient we want to produce is being grown and harvested. Winston Churchill understood and advocated for this possibility many years ago. In addition to lessoning the suffering of livestock, fermentation processes to produce food offer some backup food security; having played our part in the extinction of larger species of life, we are now needing to rely more on the microbes. Bread, nutritional yeast, yogurt, cheese, alcohol, are all fermentation products. Now, if we humans work together as one family, we can use appropriate biotechnology to produce: new foods so we can stop trying to enslave nature; and new feedstocks for energy production so that we don't have to war over fossil fuels and be addicted to massive centralized poisonous power production such as at nuclear power plants.
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 9:29 AM
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