Rape! Rape!! Rape!!!

Last evening, November 10th, I heard a news story on television that indicated that Florida Power and Light had been granted an eighteen per cent increase in the rates it could charge consumers.

As I contemplated this development I became more and more incensed. In the fifteen years I have lived in South Florida I have witnessed numerous examples of the predatory proclivities of every type of individual and organization in this area, but the more I thought about it I realized that this was by far the most reprehensible, most blatant, most savagely vicious attack on consumers that I could personally attest to.

It is nothing less than an act of economic rape by a powerful public utility which has palpably and miserably failed to fulfill its responsibilities to its customers. The fact that this increase was granted while some consumers in South Florida were still without electricity, was salt in the gaping, agonizing trauma inflicted on the millions of consumers in this area who have no alternative but to rely on FPL for electricity.

What Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma have done is strip away the mask of democracy that obscured the monstrous, predatory, tyrannical, wholly corrupt visage of the governmental bureaucracy. It is clear that the government in Florida is totally incapable of regulating this public utility. It is obvious that the Public Utilities Commission that is directly and specifically responsible for regulating this monolithic virtual monopoly is owned by FPL.

I think that this increase was granted with indecent haste, even if a hearing of FPL’s application had been scheduled before the advent of Hurricane Wilma. Consideration of this very substantial increase should have been postponed, in the light of the calamity for consumers and enterprises that occurred in the aftermath of this hurricane - because of the fact that there was no electricity - no electricity for nearly one hundred per cent of consumers in Dade and Broward Counties.

There has been no outcry about this act of rape, likely because the major media houses care more about the revenue they would lose if they became the channel for protests - if FPL stopped advertising in any media house who dared to raise serious questions about this palpable travesty of justice.

I do not believe the tragic state of affairs that exists in South Florida can be remedied by breaking the virtual monopoly that FPL has on providing electric service. What is required is that we confront a much more fundamental issue, whether populaces have the means to hold those who govern them accountable, the basis for a functioning democracy?

I believe such means do not currently exist, and I know why they do not exist. In the middle of the last decade of the Twentieth Century I attended Broward County Community College in a failed attempt to extricate myself from the vicious circle of poverty that has been my lot since I came to live in South Florida. During the period I attended that institution I witnessed most of the Instructors exhibiting the same attitude displayed by the management of FPL, they wished to be paid to teach while they only gave the appearance of teaching, that institution collected the fees paid by students while failing miserably to educate them in any of the attitudes or aptitudes that would provide for those students the possibility of happiness. In fact, not only did they fail to educate, the vast majority of Instructors at the Davie Campus of BCC, adopted an approach that was corrupting and corrosive of the moral character of students.

During a course in Marketing from which I withdrew, I witnessed an Instructor reading the answers to a quiz to be held the following day to the class, and indicating the answers and the page of the text where these could be found. And still the class failed to achieve high grades.
I witnessed in a course on Public Speaking that fifty per cent of the class could not read. In a letter lamenting this grave situation to the Head of the Communications Department dated February 20th, 1996 I declaimed about the so called learning process at BCC:

Where it was supposed to teach students to perceive social reality, it creates delusions. Where it was supposed to create attitudes and aptitudes the application of which would foster independence, it perpetuates dependency. Where it was supposed to liberate the wretched of the earth, victims for hundreds of years of unbridled capitalism, it causes them to internalize and take as part of their intellectual makeup attitudes equivalent to the manacles and shackles that so long festooned and chafed their bodies.

BCC is graduating students who are qualified only to perform tasks while lying on their backs or on their bellies, or, kneeling where those whom they serve have an excellent view of the tops of their heads.

They are being prepared for low paying ‘service’ jobs, where they toil endlessly on a treadmill of poverty and negative circumstances. Or, deal drugs or participate in other criminal activities. Always believing that their teachers did the best for them but that their condition is what they deserve and all that they are worth.

Education become mind destroyer, perpetuator of dependency, and pacifier all in one neat bundle.

Fort Lauderdale is the scam capital of the nation and the Faculty at BCC is involved in what has to be the sweetest scam of all. A scam that causes teaching to be so easy, one in which so many impressionable and vulnerable young people respect and depend on you. Even if some crazy old guy rats on you, you will still have TENURE.

During my stint in politics I thought I observed beings who plumbed the depths of human depravity. I revised that estimate after observing the relations between drug dealers and addicts. After seeing what Instructors are doing at BCC under the guise of respectability I am again revising that estimate.

I include in this indictment the minority who are teaching college level courses at BCC. They are guilty because of their silence, or worst because they tell students, in graphic detail about the fraud being perpetuated against them, but never speak out in forums where this information might make a difference.

If the populace in South Florida had access to an education that would transform them from the state of being talking animals and elevated them to the condition of being thinking animals, does anyone imagine that the millions in South Florida on whom such suffering, misery and deprivation was inflicted in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma by the loss of electricity, would stand still for this rate increase?

I suggest that if this region contained a bare majority of thinking animals the CEO of FPL, instead of looking forward to a gigantic rate increase, allegedly to cover the increased cost of fuel, would be preparing his resume - having found himself among the ranks of the unemployed. I suggest that a Governor who nominated a Public Service Commission who granted a rate increase in these circumstances would be recalled, and the members of that Commission would find that would never again hold any post serving the public, not even as lowly dogcatcher.

This was not a ten per cent failure of the electric transmission system, it was not a twenty per cent failure, it was not in any sense a partial failure, it was a total failure. Can we believe that a Company who made a profit of upwards of Seven Hundred Million Dollars in 2004 could not have done better than total failure - if they had cared enough to be prepared for the possible eventuality of a natural phenomena that annually and predictably affects this region?

The operative word here is ‘cared.’

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the thousands of families who are homeless in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma. Why has this happened? In a State which reputedly has the strictest building code? Why did some buildings survive the one hundred miles per hour gusts across the State, while others did not? Why did the stadium in New Orleans that lost its roof in Hurricane Katrina find itself in this exposed, precarious situation, when it built to withstand much higher wind velocities? Could it have anything to do with corruption, could contractors have paid Government Inspectors who are supposed to ensure that building codes are adhered to, to look the other way as they performed shoddy work? Do birds fly, will the sun come up as usual tomorrow?

Governor Bush told us on television that Florida was the State best prepared to withstand the onslaught of a hurricane, and that protestation replete with consolation and morale building support was repeated, time and time again, in the days while Hurricane Wilma dallied in the Caribbean, and even as she finally deigned to traverse the Gulf and make landfall in Florida.

Free public transportation was provided for those who needed it to take them to safe havens. Disaster relief teams and emergency medical teams were on standby, ready to go where they were needed. As were linesmen and others who were ready to restore power and deal with other eventualities. Truckloads of supplies of ice, water and food were staged in Miami and Jacksonville so that no one would suffer the pain and discomfort of intense hunger or thirst. Elements of the National Guard and the Police Force were on high alert so that the chaos that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans would not be repeated. A State of Emergency was declared in a timely fashion, as were calls to evacuate low lying areas. Yet despite all these efforts and preparations the net result was what has become the norm with every disaster, they were again - too little, too late.

Is this palpable and pervasive inability to contend with a contemporary environment so replete with disaster, confined to the Government and people of Florida? I suggest that it is not, I suggest that this is a worldwide phenomena.

Among the nineteen terrorists who staged the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were individuals who were trained to fly four engine passenger jet aircraft in the USA. All the evidence that this catastrophe was imminent was ignored. Among the dots that could have been, but never was connected was a report by an FBI agent which was never deemed important enough to be given serious consideration. So the efforts of those responsible for the security of this nation were - too little, too late.

In retaliation for this attack the USA has brandished steel and attacked Afghanistan, but Osama bin Laden remains at large, and Al Qaeda continues to be capable of launching at will and with impunity terror attacks. American soldiers on the ground in that country completely frustrated at the seeming impossibility of coming to grips with the will-o-the-wisp of Al Qaeda forces are reduced to committing acts of sacrilege in the vain and ever receding hope of provoking a confrontation and winning a major victory in a war on terror that has become, with each passing day, more and more, an exercise in futility. Its only positive effect is when it is brandished like a weapon by ruthless, wholly incompetent politicians who use its to coerce continued support from a terrified populaces. The invasion launched against that country and the attempt to punish Al Qaeda can be accurately described as too little, too late.

President Bush contrived justifications to attack Iraq with the hidden agenda of bringing about a regime change. He has a tiger by the tail, unable to hold on, he has no way to let go. As he vacillates and equivocates the Allied Forces sink deeper and deeper into the morass and quicksand of an insurgency that daily grows more daring and powerful. The powerful drift of an undeniable, unquestionable and seemingly inevitable logic of events and circumstances takes the world nearer and nearer to odious prospect of a Shia Government in Iraq masterminded behind the scenes by Muslim Fundamentalists. A government that will be in control of the second largest pool of oil on Planet Earth. And, the even more abhorrent and potentially dangerous future of a Crescent of Muslim Fundamentalism precipitated by an alliance between Iran and Iraq. President Bush is exhorting Americans to stay the course, when to stay the course will mean establishing in Iraq a government more hostile and potentially damaging to American interests than the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein ever was, or ever could be. Yet another example of the human propensity for actions that turn out to be too little, too late.

In South East Asia a tsunami swept on to beaches in several countries and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. An unprecedented and wholly destructive tragedy that could have been averted by the installation of an early warning system, similar to the one that is currently in place to detect and give warning of tidal waves unleashed by seismic upheavals and disturbances in the Pacific Ocean. Yet another example of the human race taking action that is too little, too late.

Prime Minister Blair focused on his personal agenda for a summit of world leaders and neglected and disdained to provide security for British citizens and allowed free and untrammeled access for a small group of terrorists who sauntered into the subway system and on to a London bus to wreak havoc and cause untimely deaths. Yet another example of lack of foresight and gross, criminal irresponsibility that resulted in a situation where security forces were acting too little, too late.

Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma come ashore and ripped away, for all who dare to bestir themselves to see, the mask of democracy that has concealed and obscured the dread and insensate visage of contemporary Absolutism. An ideology that is very much alive and standing behind the curtain ready to again come to center stage and assume a major overt role in a nation that dared to boast that it had established a powerful tradition of liberty and freedom. Will history document our attempts to stop the regression to this traditional form of government as being too little, too late?

Why is it that everywhere around the world humanity is perennially and ineffectually responding to disasters, natural or man made, in ways that can always, predictably be described as - too little, too late?

Can it be that politicians in all the democracies, like Karl Rove, have come to the opportunistic, entirely self serving conclusion that winning elections is an end in itself, and not the means to the end of creating functioning democracies?

Can it be that this attitude has spread worldwide and has begun to have a pervasive, crippling, debilitating, and deadly effect on every initiative? Has everyone come to think that it is sufficient to brandish steel, that it is completely unnecessary to have attainable, realistic goals and clear cut, well defined means of achieving these objectives when one declares war or engages in any other important enterprise, to avoid precipitating horrific and wholly undesirable consequences?

For years I have felt completely isolated and alone, an unlikely, untalented and occasionally underfed Hercules carrying the burden of all that is rational, logical, and intelligent on his shoulders. I felt that I had been completely deserted and without aid or succor, I have been having a crisis of faith. But lately I have seen in the unfolding of events a glimmer of hope, that I am not alone in my quixotic enterprise, that somewhere there is a powerful force intent on teaching humanity the same lesson that I have been trying unsuccessfully to communicate for several years. The quirky, unbalanced assertions attributed to President Bush constrains me to be quick to proclaim that I hear no voices, see no visions, nor have I had any messianic mandates or experiences.

But how can Governor Bush, or any sane, rational individual, remain obdurate and oblivious and fail to give credence and very serious consideration to my hypothesis that there is a vast difference between concept and precept, after his protestations that the State of Florida was better prepared than any other State, to weather and endure the onslaught of hurricanes, was followed so very quickly by a wholly destructive, and unmistakably tragic turn of events?

How can anyone fail to see that the response of the human race to any and every disaster is always too little, too late because of a pervasive intellectual and ideational failure, a failure in the capacity for THINKING AND PLANNING?

How can anyone fail to see that the world is, and never will be, how we need it or want it to be?

It should be abundantly and unmistakably clear to every concerned individual that the world is as it is, and that we must accept and confront this reality as awesome and monolithic as it may be; to come to grips with and harness for the common good the forces that have been unleashed during our lamentably violent and sanguinary history. But it is not.

For the umpteenth time I remind my race that:

Human behavior is learned; precisely that behavior which is widely felt to characterize man as a rational being, or as a member of a particular nation or social class is learned rather than innate.

The field of human learning covers phenomena which range all the way from the simple, almost reflex, learning of a child to avoid a hot radiator, to the complex processes of insight by which a scientist constructs a theory. Throughout the whole range, however, the same fundamental factors seem to be exceedingly important. These factors are: drive, cue, response and reinforcement. They are frequently referred to with other roughly equivalent words - drive as motivation, cue as stimulus, response as act or thought, and reinforcement as reward. (Dollard 25)

I dare to suggest that we are always and perennially too little, too late in our response to problems because the intellectual approach that we employ is ‘the simple, almost reflex, learning of a child to avoid a hot radiator.’

Our actions are prompted by interests, by our wants, not by the facts that together constitute the existing reality. Governor Bush and other politicians cannot perceive the criminal incompetence of FPL because of the substantial donations this Public Utility makes to their campaign war chests. We learn the hard way.

We learned every lesson implicit in the experience with Hurricane Katrina the hard way; both those who prepared for Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Wilma were seized with the monumental mistakes that were made in the environs of New Orleans. What nobody could do was find the imagination or engage in the creative thinking that might have allowed them to perceive that generators might be needed in the event of a massive failure in the electric utility. I am sure this lesson will be learnt for next Hurricane season, when some other deficiency in our preparation will present itself.

We will house those who were made homeless in South Florida, but no one will accept that what is necessary in confronting any problem is its adequate description. To downplay the role played by governmental corruption in the destruction of the housing in which were located thousands of Florida and Louisiana residents is to ensure that the problem will never be solved and that we repeat the past, over, and over, and over, again.

Replacing these dwellings will increase the budget deficit; as will the cost to the Floridian economy precipitated by the loss of electricity; as will the massive cost of rebuilding and restoring the city of New Orleans. We seem unable to confront the notion that if we had built according to the building code, if we had had the moral will to engage in rational, well planned and safe development these costs would have been minimized and reduced, diminishing the burden that will be placed on future generations by our seemingly unlimited capacity for learning every lesson of existence - the hard way.

Because of the stupor and mindlessness induced by traditional ways of thinking, attitudes, irrational beliefs, illusions and outright delusions deeply embedded in our culture we always seem to need to run into the electric pole at a very high rate of speed to perceive that it is there.

In a previous piece, published on the web site Lovetrain Central entitled Fulminations On An Evil Ideology I attempted to raise the following issue:

The whole world is aware of the efforts of the British Security Forces subsequent to the attack, nothing has been said about their efforts prior to the attack. Were they on high alert? Were there stepped up patrols at airports, at train and subway stations, at the port of London, and other prime targets for terrorists?

If they were not Prime Minister Blair has failed miserably in his most important duty - to ensure the physical security of the citizens who elected him. A prudent Prime Minister as the summit approached would have instituted checkpoints, installed barriers, have Security Forces perform random searches and establish a highly visible presence that might have given pause to the four bombers who casually waltzed into the Subway Stations and on to the London bus.

All the frantic efforts are meaningless now, they cannot help those who are dead or injured as a result of the Prime Minister’s dereliction of his primary, fundamental duty. The professional and diabolical terrorist groups will not strike in the near future, they will wait patiently for another occasion when this nation or that lowers its guard. There will be no one to prosecute because these were suicide bombers.

I copied the piece that included the abovementioned quote to the following newspapers, as a matter of fact, I religiously copy all my pieces to these newspapers, organizations and individuals, they are on my e-mail list, so I designate them as recipients and copy and paste:

American Friends Service Committee Anchorage Daily News Belfast Telegraph

Birmingham News Herald Boston Globe Daily Mail Daily Star Daily Express

Jamaica Observer John McCain The Mirror New York Daily News New York

Times San Diego Union Tribune San Francisco Chronicle Sojourners

The Telegraph The American Thinker The Common Denominator The Gleaner

The Independent Jerusalem Post The Observer The Sydney Morning Herald

News night (BBC) The Wall Street Journal Tucson Citizen United For Peace

I feel constrained to emphasize that I am trying my best to get the message out. But this issue, as has been the fate of every issue I have tried to focus attention on, was completely ignored. Is this a valid issue, an issue much more urgent and critical to the prevention of future terror attacks than for example, the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction?

I claim it is, because there is a dire and pressing need to make individuals however powerful and important, accountable. If politicians, teachers, police officers, business and religious leaders know they can depend on the media to gloss over and conceal their mistakes, no matter how damaging and destructive, where will these important individuals, whose decisions affect, positively of adversely so many lives, find the motivation to develop programs that improve societal functioning, that redound to the common good?

The Media, more specifically the paparazzi, prey on celebrities. In concept they do this because freedom of expression is critically important for the functioning of democracies, in precept they are only engaging in an invidious, pervasive, all embracing form of gossip, which can be little distinguished from a wholesale invasion of privacy, and, on numerous occasions is palpably slanderous and libelous - because this sells newspapers and improves ratings.

Where investigative journalism would be meaningful and contribute to function, and, possibly result in positive changes, the truth is buried and never sees the light of day.

This is not the only possibility. These media houses are inundated with material which must be read and the wheat of publishable material separated from the chaff of drivel and hot air. I can readily imagine a lowly editor sifting through this material discarding my pieces because they do not meet the criteria which are embedded in the system.

Also, there is the massive resistance to change. Journalists who have access to the media, to the awesome power of contemporary media, have all attended the same colleges or universities, and are wholly dependent on their employers for their daily bread. Ideas from independent sources while not shunned, are given little credence among individuals who uniformly and mistakenly believe they know it all, and encourage participation to create the form but never the substance of democracy. So the beat of obfuscation, and propaganda, and outright deceit, and destructive lies, goes on, and on, and on.

And the fact is, the truth hurts, it deeply offends. One of the reasons why I feel so isolated is that no one I have knowledge of, or access to, understands the intrinsic nature of the truth, and the difficulties involved in practicing this discipline. If I were to stop to think for a minute about the negative consequences of telling the truth I would be unable to tell the truth, because there is, and has been, in my personal experiences so much misery, suffering and pain the certain and inevitable consequence of daring to describe the existing reality.

There are so many obstacles, monolithic obstacles hedged around describing or criticizing the status quo - loss of employment, loss of family and friends, loss of access to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, poverty, and, most of all, loneliness. If I began to focus on these things I would be lost sucked back into the whirlpool of despair, oblivion and endless tragedy that is coercion based culture.

If I begin to tell myself I will not tell the truth because it would offend or cause shame and humiliation to my favorite daughter, or a dear friend, or because I would lose my job, or be subjected to the other penalties I have suffered more times than I can relate, I would be totally and completing relinquishing the hope of a better world because the prerequisite to solving any problem is its accurate description.

Can no one understand the interior dimension of the despair implicit in my predicament as I attempt to precipitate positive developments and improved function? That it is impossible to tell the truth sometimes, or about some individuals but not others, opportunistically, or only when it is popular - if the objective is to improve the quality of life of human beings, and take action that will result in improved societal functioning?

Can anyone see that the dogma of Christianity, Marxist theory, Egalitarianism, Social Welfare Ideology, Conservatism, Liberalism, Humanitarianism, all became popular because they had powerful ethical content, and all came to be utilized by individuals to obscure the fact that they were unable to CHANGE, that they continued to be agents of coercion based culture, that they were completely incapable of demonstrating in their relations with other human beings the values of honesty, justice, intelligence, truth and love? Can anyone see that the solution to our problems is transforming these timeless concepts into the precepts that inform prompt action in our everyday existences?

Some weeks ago, four days into Hurricane Wilma’s aftermath, I encountered a friend of more than twenty years in a Jamaican restaurant in Coral Springs, Florida as I waited for a hot meal. I had not had a hot meal or a hot cup of tea in those four days and was willing to risk that I would get food poisoning from spoiled meat to remedy that lack.

We exchanged telephone numbers and he promised to communicate with me when a very close friend from my past would arrive in South Florida, on his way back from Venezuela. I knew, even as I proffered my number, that I would wait in vain for that call. My former friend is upset with me, though he has never communicated this to me in so many words. I surmise because I owe him money, but more because I have written a work of ‘fiction’ which is likely to reveal and lay bare his numerous affairs and infidelities.

As an aid to my ongoing attempt to expose the intrinsic nature of human beings let us together examine an excerpt from a speech by Senator John Kerry on October 26, 2005 at Georgetown University:

The Truth About How We Got Here:
The country and the Congress were misled into war. I regret that we were not given the truth; as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq. And knowing now the full measure of the Bush Administration’s duplicity and incompetence, I doubt there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority they abused so badly. I know I would not. The truth is, if the Bush Administration had come to the United States Senate and acknowledged there was no “slam dunk case” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, acknowledged that Iraq was not connected to 9/11, there never would have even been a vote to authorize the use of force -- just as there’s no vote today to invade North Korea, Iran, Cuba, or a host of regimes we rightfully despise.

I was not misled at any time by any item of the justifications contrived by the Bush Administration to garner support for the attack on Iraq. In my initial assessment I mistakenly believed that the war was about oil, I overestimated the commitment to the common good of the President. Having said this, I managed to develop ideas adequate to the reality about this incursion.

To document this I quote from two pieces that were published on the web site voiceofpeace. The first was entitled A State of Perpetual National Insecurity and was published on March 3, 2003. It contained the following quote:

As I write the United States of America is invading Iraq. The Bush Administration has justified this incursion by saying that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. The question immediately presents itself, if Saddam Hussein has such weapons, why is he not using them? He must be willing to gamble that the sight of hundreds of body bags filled with dead Americans will sap the will of the nation, one already deeply divided about whether this war is necessary, and allow his dictatorship in Iraq to survive. Yet American troops are advancing with little or no opposition, and with relatively few casualties - except for those that are inflicted by 'friendly fire.'

It should not take a brain surgeon to conclude that the national personality of Iraq could be likened to noisy, yapping dog, all bark and no bite. The army of Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, this adventure likely prompted by a delusion about their ability to wage war, but failed to show up for battle when confronted by Allied Forces in the Gulf War of 1991, it was political and not military considerations that saved the regime of Saddam Hussein then. In the decade that followed this debacle, Saddam Hussein and Iraq has talked a great fight, but has never done anything to back up this talk - except when confronted by poorly armed, defenseless citizens of Iraq. If the Iraqi forces do better on this occasion it is because the USA has succeeded in cornering Saddam Hussein, leaving him, his family and his cronies no means of retreat or survival, and is now paying for this strategic gaffe with the lives of its citizens.

Why has the United States of America, with its advanced and vaunted military technology, especially in the field of intelligence gathering, accepted the delusion about the dangers posed by Iraq as fact, to the point where this war became necessary?

Is it possible that the search for weapons of mass destruction is just an excuse for an attempt to gain control of the oil in Iraq? Is it possible that thousands of bombs and missiles have been launched at the defenseless and barely resisting populace in Iraq to lower the price of crude oil in the American economy?

In the following month of that same year, I wrote a piece entitled Living In Truth in that was published on the same web site. It contained the following:

The threat posed by Saddam Hussein and Iraq, is a figment of the fevered and deluded sensibilities and imaginations of those who compose the Bush Administration, and, as a result of propaganda, has become real to the ignorant, benighted alumni of the American Public School System who know little Mathematics or English, much less about the esoteric of History, modern or ancient, and who can learn nothing from episodes in the human past.

But there are monsters still at large in the modern world. The actions of the Bush Administration, of the United States of America, and the coattail riding, Blair Administration in Great Britain, are likely to have precipitated repercussions that they, in their mindless, opportunistic belligerence have overlooked. They are likely to create in every Arab nation, soon or late, a Government composed of Muslim Fundamentalists, a Government similar to the one that now rules Iran, a veritable Crescent of extremism.

Whatever may be said about the previous Bush Administration they considered and avoided actions that would have the effect of changing the balance of power in the region. The dangers inherent in the creation of political dynasties is real, whether in the Caribbean, in India, or in the United States of America. Norman Manley, former Premier of Jamaica, was an honorable man, an erudite man of massive intellect, yet he sired two sons, one who became psychotic when he was invested with power, the other who was a hopeless, incurable alcoholic.

Democracy is beginning to look more and more like the Absolutist Regimes that preceded it. The status quo of Absolutism is slowly reasserting itself everywhere.

The question that arises is, how were members of Congress so easily misled? A partial answer to that question is that the majority of the American people were in favor of the war, and most members of Congress did not have the courage to swim against the rising, irrational tide of seeking revenge for 911 against everyone and anyone even if they were innocent.

Another major contributing factor was the xenophobia and patriotic fervor ignited in the wake of that attack by the pronouncements and propaganda of the Bush Administration.

But this is not the whole story. I believe that there were other interests besides self preservation operating in the minds of members of Congress. Senator Kerry must have believed that if he did nothing to self destruct, like taking a seemingly unpatriotic and antiwar stance by casting a vote against invading Iraq, he could rely on the incompetence and failures of the incumbent President to assure his victory in the upcoming election.

But whatever the causes, the justifications for this failure, the fact is that the Congress in belatedly changing its position with regards to this naked act of aggression against the Iraqi people is again responding - too little, too late.

Also, how was the American electorate so easily misled by the spin about President Bush? How could Americans be so easily duped by someone who had never made a success of anything he has attempted in his entire life? How could he have been projected by sensible individuals to act diametrically opposed to his past record in every endeavor and be successful as President? And, not create the terrible mess he very predictably has made, as he attempted one of the most difficult jobs on Planet Earth? How could they elect a man whose only legitimate claim to fame was that he was the son of a former President?

The fact that President Bush is now enjoying his lowest approval rating ever, and that support for the war is rapidly waning, is yet another phenomena that can be described as - too little, too late.

I would be remiss if I did not include in this very iconoclastic diatribe targeting every human institution, another ideational sortie against one of my favorite symbols of coercion based culture, the Roman Catholic Church.

A previous piece I wrote Fulminations on an Evil Ideology contained the following paragraph:

Would it be iconoclastic and heretical to suggest that if there are depredations by homosexual Roman Catholic priests that there are also depredations by heterosexual Roman Catholic priests, that thus far have not been exposed? It is a measure of the hypocrisy and corruption that pervades and taints contemporary existence that there is a rush to beatify the Pope on whose watch these horrific crimes against children occurred.

For the edification of my readers I present an edited, truncated version of a news story that appeared within a few days of my pronouncement on “The Front Page” of the Daily News under the caption “Scandal Priest Resigns Post:”

A 79-year-old monsignor named as “the other man” in a Westchester County divorce case resigned Thursday as rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the New York Archdiocese said.

Cardinal Edward Egan accepted Msgr. Eugene Clark’s resignation despite Clark’s denials that he has been carrying on an affair with his 46-year-old private secretary, the church said.

“He offered his resignation for the good of Saint Patrick’s and the Archdiocese” the statement said. “He will not be celebrating Mass or the sacraments publicly until this matter has been resolved.”

At the DeFilippo’s home, neighbors were shocked by the seamy allegations, which were laid out in signed statements to the Eastchester Police by Defilippo’s husband, his 14-year-old daughter and his wife’s sister.

In one of them, DeFilippo’s daughter said they were at Clark’s $2 million vacation home in Amagansett when she “observed them both in the Jacuzzi together with Laura on Monsignor Clark’s lap.”

“Laura had her bra on and he had no shirt on,” the statement from the father said. “Laura told [her daughter] that this was perfectly normal.”

Through her lawyer, DeFilippo denied cheating with the cleric. She has been ordered by a Westchester judge to stay away from the family’s house until at least Aug.22. Her husband claimed she threatened to stab him after he told her about the tape.

The fact that the monsignor owns a $2 million dollar vacation home supports another contention that I have made - that religion has become a big business.

In this piece in which I hope to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that in my relentless search for the truth about the human condition, nothing is sacred, that I am blissfully unconcerned about destroying illusions and delusions about every individual and institution - including my solitary, much maligned self. I am constrained to confess that for most of the years of my early adulthood I was an atheist. The version of Christianity that was inflicted upon me as I grew up was too rife with inconsistencies and hypocrisies, too illogical, too irrational to garner my unqualified belief or acceptance.

I am now certain that to increase its popular appeal, the Christian dogma was fundamentally and radically changed, diluted and tainted. Instead of emphasizing telling the truth it focused on possession as the way to grace. Thus, it morally and spiritually degenerated and gravitated gradually but inexorably downward, over the centuries, losing touch in precept with the original transcendent revelations of the man called Jesus until it eventually became what it is today, just another tarnished and wholly corrupted institution of coercion based culture - instead of fulfilling its mission to be an agency of change.

I suggest that the social system aided and abetted by human culture, the conscious and unconscious premises for thinking and action, socializes and conditions every individual to be unable to develop and apply higher mental processes to social and political problems, and is the major factor causing the universal human response to adverse conditions and situations to be - too little, too late.

The social system, as I define it, is composed of the totality of learning circles, the totality of drives, cues, responses and reinforcements. The attitudes and patterns of behavior that are most amply rewarded are those that are practiced and becomes the dominant culture.

Every individual is conditioned at an early age to be diplomatic and obfuscate with regards to his or her inadequacies, and, about the inadequacies of others. Certain inadequacies and limitations of the culture of child rearing, as exemplified by but not limited to the palpable incapacity of parents to teach their young a socially acceptable means of satisfying their innate sex drives; and, sibling rivalry; ensure that the child will make inappropriate responses and experience intense guilt. The inescapable irrationalities and criminalities that pervades the larger society outside the home creates the likelihood that the maturing child will have negative experiences and possibly traumas that must be consigned to the unconscious.

When men and women eventually confront the necessity of making a living, to be successful they are required to make responses that are completely inconsistent with the values to which most had been inculcated while growing up. They confront the stark reality of immoral institutions in the workplace, for example pilfering, pork barrel politics, the ’sheet’ in police stations, sexual exploitation, and on and on and on. With the consequence that more and more experiences are repressed and consigned to the unconscious.

Eventually this results, for the vast majority, in intellects that are lamed and underdeveloped, like a muscle that has atrophied from lack of use, unable to contend with certain aspects of life. Most individuals are blind, not only when in love but for very similar reasons, to ever increasing components and aspects of the human experience.

They spend most of their lives in a state of high drive, they experience intense fear; guilt; the goading of sex; frustration; humiliation and shame, unconsciously, and have not any means of reducing these motivations.

They are trapped in an all embracing and pervasive system of dichotomy and ambivalence, in the vast and increasing difference between concept and precept in their lives. Some have committed acts that are so diametrically opposed to the values they socialized to espouse that they can never, never admit to themselves or anyone that they are guilty of this or that behavior, and have passed beyond redemption.

This is, and has been, the seemingly unchangeable, completely pervasive pattern for human existence nearly everywhere on Planet Earth since the beginning of time.

I was socialized to these social and cultural traditions, that are as ancient as the human story, but was able to break with the past because I had never done anything so reprehensible that I could not admit to it.

I suspect that if I had done murder; or engaged in any serious criminal activity; or found myself in a position of wealth or power that admission of inappropriate behavior would have eroded or destroyed; I would never have been able to reject and painfully and agonizingly strip, layer by deeply embedded layer from my consciousness the attitudes and patterns of behavior that together constitute and perpetuate coercion based culture.

I began to diverge from the human cultural concourse when I plumbed the depths of despair as I contemplated the sere future of becoming a visitor in the lives of my children, and decided to tell the truth whatever the consequences for the rest of my life.

Eventually after several decades, I achieved moral consistency and a fragile unity between concept and precept in my life. I became responsible for my actions.

I remember after more than a year of being unemployed, after resigning from my job with a major union in Jamaica, that I no longer had the means to satisfy my sex drive in socially acceptable ways and began to prey, as I had attempted to do during adolescence, on the domestic helpers in my employ.

One helper resisted all my sexual advances and importunes. I searched her belongings and used the very small quantities of rice I found as an excuse and pretext for firing her - so that I could hire someone more amenable to satisfying my lust.

I am mortified by having behaved is such a monstrous fashion, my skin crawls at having to admit that I so exploited another human being, but I make the admission because I know that to do otherwise, to repress this, to cover it up, would be the first step in the easy downward path back into the jungle. I know, beyond a shadow of doubt, that to repress anything would be the thin edge of the wedge that would eventually bring crashing down the edifice of freedom and independence I am trying to construct in my life. I know, beyond doubt, that totally rejecting lies, deceit and obfuscation is the price of freedom.

As I wrote this piece I was tempted, sorely tempted, given the precariousness state of liberty in the world, to avoid anecdotes that contain references to sex. I found I could not do this, I will never again repress, or avoid thinking or writing about the fact that I have an innate sex drive - despite the fact that I have abstained from sex with women since the 23rd April, 1993, without doing anything illegal, that would, if discovered, cause me to be consigned to some custodial institution. Because one of the lessons human beings must learn is that they are conditioned as children to locate sex in the closets of their minds, that they are socialized to be unable to articulate their feelings or experiences in this area, in a deliberate, albeit unconscious attempt, to cause them to be easy prey for the adults surrounding them. This was not, and is not an accident.

I wish to state that no human being can understand human nature without understanding what they themselves are capable of. I contend that the human race will never overcome the widespread, pervasive sexual abuse of minors by punishing offenders, that this evil can only be reduced and eventually eradicated by removing sex from the closet. Nor can AIDS be successfully combated without changing traditional, dysfunctional attitudes toward sex.

I contend that this is true in every area of human experience. No individual can perceive inadequacies of others without confronting their own inadequacies. The same blindness, the same mechanism for remaining oblivious about the immoral actions that are required for survival in every social system on Planet Earth, is the powerful inhibition to perceiving the real, destructive nature of actions of the other.

To be a success, to survive, every human being is required to engage in acts of predation on others, or to be a silent, passive recipient or observer of acts of predation. The same mechanism that creates unawareness, and is therefore permissive of these acts diametrically opposed to the consciences of human beings - also insulates them from reality and causes their responses to urgent, life threatening stimuli in the hostile environment this mindset inevitably creates, and perpetuates - to be always and perennially too little, too late.

I am not in any sense unmindful of the fact that I am repeating the principles, the strictures and dictums inherent and implicit in the Parables and Message of the man called Jesus. Every forward step, every revelation in my journey of discovery of the social milieu in which I exist, increases my respect and veneration for this individual who told the truth until it made Him free, in an environment so untamed, so uncivilized that men routinely carried swords on their hips.

I am exhorting every man and woman alive to embark on this journey of discovery of themselves and of the world, this very arduous and difficult journey to independence and function, knowing full well how difficult it is, because only if a bare majority of human beings in every society complete this journey, this pilgrimage, can we create functioning democracies and remove and release humanity from the treadmill of suffering, despair and tragedy that has been our lot since the beginning of the human story.

I wish there was an easier way, a way less replete with hardship and suffering, but there is not.

The problem of creating positive and enduring social change is that to walk the road to freedom a human being must confront, not the inadequacies of another individual or of a distant authority, they must come to a realization of their own intrinsic nature, of what they are habituated to doing and contrive being conscious of doing. A mental mechanism that is deeply embedded in the social structure, one that obscures from all actors in the social drama patterns of behavior that are necessary for survival.

Yesterday, on the 23rd November, as others were preparing for Thanksgiving, a holiday I knew I would spend alone, I was preparing myself mentally for writing this piece, for engaging in another hopeless episode in a seemingly interminable exercise in futility; for crafting another wholly ineffective onslaught on the status quo. As I ate in the lunchroom at work I idly looked through some discarded pages of a newspaper, and chanced upon the following article. The longer I perused it, the more it imposed itself on my consciousness; I came to the realization that this piece encapsulated the difference between the reality that I see, and that perceived by other human beings. That from my perspective this article contained a candid, open, completely opaque admission of all that I was trying to communicate in this piece, not knowing what they say, they say it:

What democracy has degenerated into after a few centuries of its practice in the United States of America is a social system in which the needs of the majority of the people are least and last considered. Consider the fact that in the effort to balance the national budget, social programs, misguided and ineffectual as they are, are axed while military spending increases. Military spending, for example on the Star Wars project, that is funded year after year even though it is no closer to fruition than it was when it was conceived and initiated, more than two decades ago.
Deliberate upon the consummate irony of the fact that spending on the war in Iraq which never has had the slightest possibility of contributing in the slightest to improved national security or the common good; which is near certain to place the second largest pool of oil on Planet Earth in the hands of interests wholly inimical to the interests of citizens of the United States of America; which in fact distracts effort and resources from solving the problem of contemporary terrorism; is given greater priority than dealing with urgent domestic issues.

For a few months of election years, voters in America are courted. They are courted mostly through the electronic media. The candidate most likely to win the election is the one with the biggest war chest, who is therefore most capable of buying television commercials.
This funding is providing by the large conglomerates, like FPL, as the article inserted above candidly admits, who donate money to candidates whom when they are elected, demonstrate their appreciation for this patronage by permitting and facilitating predation by these same conglomerates on ordinary men and women.

Candidates funnel these funds back to their patrons, by giving it to the companies that own and operate the electronic media, to pay for television commercials. These companies, are for the most part, subsidiaries of, and fully owned by those same big conglomerates. Everybody gets what they want, except ordinary men and women who are duped into casting their votes and paying their taxes - which creates the organizational power of the Parties who field these candidates.

I feel constrained to discuss the term organization strength as it pertains to political parties. This is composed of those who receive the benefits of the pork barrel, those who receive the benefits of government jobs and contracts, either directly or when these are bestowed on members of their families. They canvass, promote the party line and the candidate, solicit donations and contributions, pass out fliers, run campaign offices and provide other services for political parties secure in the knowledge that if their party or candidate wins, and attains office they will be rewarded from the pork barrel.

I believe that the campaign of former Governor Howard Dean was hijacked by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party because he was an outsider, beyond their control. They passed the word down the chain to those whom they controlled through the pork barrel that he was unelectable, and this opportunistic, self serving notion affected the thinking and actions of those who composed the party’s organizational strength within the State, those who had access to, and could influence registered Democratic voters, denying Governor Dean the nomination that was nearly within his grasp.

The hierarchy of the Democratic Party was wrong, as opportunistic, self serving individuals often are, it was Senator Kerry who was unelectable, as it turned out. The reason I bring this up is to record the hope that Chairman Dean will realize that he cannot reform the Democratic Party, that his tenure in his sensitive position will result in him becoming a party insider, in corrupting him. Which may cause him to be elected in the future but will have made him useless to the nation, to be unable to serve the common good.

I hope he will abandon the hopelessly corrupt institution that is the Democratic Party and use his ideas and organizational skills to create a new beginning for politics in this nation.

What Hurricane Wilma has done for everyone who dares to see beyond their interests, their conditioning and socialization, is demonstrate that the end result of this state of affairs, of a pretend democracy, is a situation in which very few will benefit.

What happened when Hurricane Wilma came ashore, is a microcosm of the total abject failure of government by opinion poll, of big, of democracy that serves big money interests, that should be a salutary lesson for everyone and anyone who remained unconvinced after the debacle in Louisiana. If these huge conglomerates can buy off politicians with donations to their war chests, and so insure their profits, whatever the quality or reliability of the product or service they supply, whether this be a missile that can knock another missile out of the sky, or, the supply of electricity, what will be the source of motivation for them to provide quality products or reliable service? The major oil companies may take part in the charade of being on the mat before Congress but they know its all for show, their massive profits will remain untouched, now and in the future, because he who pays the piper calls the tune.

The total failure of the electricity supply affected everyone in South Florida, the rich, the poor, the sick, the lame, just everyone. Many businesses still have not reopened, some never will, affecting the owners of these enterprises and those whom they employed. Entire families died from carbon monoxide poisoning because they were without electricity and purchased generators which they could not safely operate.

Can anyone see that in schools, colleges and universities, in churches, in hospitals, in the economy, in the family, in every aspect of social life, nepotism, cliques, good old boy systems, venality and corruption, is having a completely disastrous effect on function?

I am not asking any human being to supply any of my needs, even the need for recognition. My most cherished aspiration during my adolescence and young adulthood was that I would receive a Nobel Peace Prize. I could never, ever accept that accolade because President Bush was nominated for that honor, convincing me that it has become a political football, like much else, and no longer rewards or has anything whatsoever to do with merit. This is true of every reward that any human being could provide, I am too seized with the reality of the intrinsic sere depraved nature of human beings to fail to view with a very jaundiced eye any offering or gift.

The truth is that I sincerely believe that the vast majority of human beings, in precept, are philosophically and culturally much more like the creatures that are on display in zoological gardens or those that inhabit the rapidly diminishing jungles on Planet Earth - than they are like me.

If I were to be brutally frank, I would have to confess that I live a solitary existence because I believe that after interaction of any duration the vast majority of human beings must perceive me as easy prey; because I have been made free by the practice of the discipline of truth, and as a consequence, have committed to using positive reinforcements in my relations with other human beings.

I believe that most human beings are resigned to being talking animals, they are unwilling to make the effort that would cause them to be thinking animals. The least dangerous of the mass of humanity around me I see as puppies and I do everything in my power to avoid having them lick my face.

This reference has as its context an Jamaican adage, “if you play with puppies they will lick your face.” I have had the experience of actually witnessing this occur. I was picking up my children at the domicile in Mona Heights, Jamaica that they shared with my former wife. The domestic servant she employed was searching for their shoes to finish dressing them when her face was wetly licked and her slightly gaping mouth explored by the tongue of a puppy who was hidden under the bed. As a consequence of witnessing that hilarious event this proverb has had a profound and enduring impression on me and currently informs my very limited social interactions.

Nor is the problem of attaining wealth beyond my intellectual capacity. I include a link to a work of fiction The Passion of an Ordinary Man which I have been writing for nearly two decades, which I have not finished because if I did, I might become rich and no longer have any motivation to engage in the excise in futility of leading my race out of the jungle of its irrational attitudes and beliefs. I have provided a link to the first three chapters so that anyone who cares to can form their own opinion on the validity of my assertion that I could write the truth solely from memory under the guise of fiction and never worry about money again.

This is an act of pure altruism, in the most meaningful and best sense of the word. As a matter a fact, I am deeply committed to the principle of personal autonomy; I would not work as relentlessly and assiduously as I do, to encourage a Bedouin tribe to desist from wandering the desert.

Nor would I, on purely moral grounds, encourage a primitive tribe in New Guinea to eschew cannibalism, though I would be interested in ensuring that they did not eat me.

I would be happy and content to abandon the talking animals that populate South Florida, indeed, those that inhabit the entire USA to their ideational, philosophical and intellectual condition of easy, casual promiscuity and hypocrisy; a mindset which prompts them to prostitute themselves, mentally, philosophically and emotionally, every now and again in election years for a plethora of unfulfilled promises because of the dubious stimulation that they derive from the repetition of material as patently fraudulent as the Swift Boat Advertisements, to allude to a pertinent example.

I would just give up - but for the inevitable disastrous consequences for the entire human race that I perceive.

Instead I labor on, armed with the hope that a bare majority of human beings in this society can learn to think and plan. What I am simply encouraging human beings to do is to exert themselves to transcend an existence of perennially learning the hard way, and embrace the mindset implicit in the following, as I demonstrably have done:

In the classic conception of drama - as in the theoretical phase of a scientific study - the will of the actors was confined in the shackles of determinism. The outcome at the final curtain was predetermined by the opening up of the drama in the first act, accounting for all the conditions and causes of later developments. The protagonist carried his ultimate fate in his soul, while he was groping for his destiny. In life, while the drama is still unfolding - as in the practical phase of a study, when policy inferences are drawn from value premises as well as from premises based on empirical evidence - the will is instead assume to be free, within limits, to choose between alternative courses of action. History, then, is not taken to be predetermined but within the power of man to shape. And the drama thus conceived is not necessarily tragedy. (Myrdal 35)

If I may use the powerful metaphor for positive change implicit in the foregoing quote as the foundation on which to build my conception of reality, I would advance the hypothesis that humanity became habituated to the use of force when it had no other choice, as the race struggled for survival in a ‘state of nature.’ Because of this experience a world view was deeply embedded in human culture, this perspective made human existence very similar to an unending tragedy, one in which every human being carried his ultimate fate in his soul, while groping for his destiny. Calamities and disasters in varied and various forms were visited on humanity over and over again because this mindset when applied to reality always has tragic consequences in the long term. Socially and politically, the human race had no future, just the past happening over and over again. But there is a way to remove this mindset from the human consciousness, if an individual tells the truth he will be free.

As I have proved beyond doubt. The truth no longer threatens me, instead of living always with the intense fear of exposure, that the mask of the concepts I pay lip service to will be stripped away to expose the immoral and primitive reality of the way I live in precept - the truth has become the most valuable thing in my life, it has redeemed me, it has made me capable of love, it has created an epiphany in my life.

What I am saying is simply this, there is a high price you pay for fitting in, for marching to the powerful hypnotic beat of coercion based culture, it can be likened to the action of a very corrosive acid eating away at your problem solving capability. Every deceit makes you more deluded, as the gap widens between concept and precept in your life, between what you think is right and functional, and what you do; the gap is also widening between what you perceive and the existing reality. This is true for everybody, to some degree, and is the reason why humanity cannot solve any social or political problem.

The fact that we adopt a diametrically different world view in the physical world ensures that there are very few problems in that milieu that we cannot solve - if we make the effort.

I ask you to imagine a world in which we had connected the dots and caught the terrorists before they hijacked the airplanes that leveled the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and damaged the buildings that housed the Pentagon.

Imagine a world in which there had been no invasion of Iraq.

Imagine a world in which there was an early warning system in place in the Indian Ocean that would have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Imagine a world in which when Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma came ashore the populaces of the affected regions were ensconced safe and secure in buildings and at locations that were able to withstand those storms, if the electric transmission systems had been maintained so that they could withstand the hurricane force winds.

A world in which this occurs is not an unattainable vision. It is within our intellectual capacities, what we must do is close the gap between concept and precept in our lives, and so begin to perceive the reality of our existences.

I offer to my race, a way to do this. All I have said is not meant to tear down or destroy any individual or institution, it is designed to emancipate and liberate every human being, to provide for them the possibility of happiness. I lead by example, I have no academic qualifications beyond being a High School graduate, but perusal of the material on this web site is conclusive and incontrovertible proof that anyone who practices the discipline of truth will be free, will attain independence and the capacity to solve the problems that human beings must encounter as they run the marathon of life.

The fundamental issue is how we view other human beings, whether we see them as prey, or whether we see them as beings that we should attempt to understand and respect.

As long as we see them as prey, and ourselves as predators, the competition will continue, and in the marathon of life some individuals will always be left far behind.

If we see them as our brothers and sisters worthy of our understanding and respect, and even of our love, then no one need be left behind. If we can learn to cooperate we shall overcome.

Bibliography

Asian Drama - An Inquiry Into The Poverty Of Nations by Gunnar Myrdal. A Twentieth Fund Study published by Pantheon in 1968.

Personality And Psychotherapy - An Analysis In Terms Of Thinking And Culture by John Dollard and Neal E. Miller published by McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc. 1950.

All rights reserved, copyright retained.

William E. Virtue

vox_pacis@hotmail.net