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S. Brian Willson
This site contains essays describing the incredible historic pattern of U.S. arrogance, ethnocentrism, violence and lawlessness in domestic and global affairs, and the severe danger this pattern poses for the future health of Homo sapiens and Mother Earth. Other essays discuss revolutionary, nonviolent alternative approaches based on the principle of radical relational mutuality. This is a term increasingly used by physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists to describe the nature of the omnicentric*, ever-unfolding universe. Every being, every aspect of life energy in the cosmos, is intrinsically interconnected with and affects every other being and aspect of life energy at every moment.
*everything is at the center of the cosmos at every moment
Brian's Blog
All blog entries and essays posted on this site are authored by S. Brian Willson.
“Democracy” inUSAmerica is Useful Fiction
February 15, 2010 – 8:26 pm
“DEMOCRACY” in US AMERICA is USEFUL FICTION – Chris Hedges
The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in empty moral rhetoric that requires little sacrifice or commitment.
BW: Industrial civilization depends upon its human constituents (you and me) having complete faith & confidence in the way it operates – an indispensable psychological feature of all vertical power complexes. Once confidence dissipates and disappears, disobedience replaces obedience, and hierarchical power collapses. The people then can regroup around more ancient models of proven sustainability - locally sufficient food and tool economies in federation with one another across the globe. Yipee!
God’s Last Offer
February 12, 2010 – 11:37 am
“In the language of religion, God has given us an offer: to see the consequences of our actions & assume moral responsibility for them; or to be consumed by them…We’ll either have to end our artificial separation from the rest of life or end our span, as most other species have eventually ended theirs.” -God’s Last Offer: Negotiating For A Sustainable Future, Ed Ayres (1999)
Liquidating our earth for cash as seen in this photo of mountaintop removal in West Virginia, 2009
One Person’s Freedom Fighter/Hero Is Another Person’s Terrorist
February 3, 2010 – 8:32 am
On left in photo, Chinese student stands in front of military tank in Tiananmen Sq in Beijing, June 5, 1989. He was lauded by US Pres Geeorge HW Bush as a brave, courageous hero, causing tank to stop. On right, USA Vietnam veteran sits in front of military train in California, Sept. 1, 1987 (21 months earlier). It was hauling weapons to illegally arm Pres Reagan’s terrorists in Nicaragua & El Salvador. This man was condemned by Pres Reagan & his FBI as a terrorist threat, & military officials ordered train to accelerate & run over, nearly murdering him, taking both his legs & fracturing his skull.
We Are the Antidote – Every Choice a revolutionary Act
January 30, 2010 – 8:18 pm
There is a deeply uncomfortable but clearly structural explanation for the pattern of historic U.S. war-making that continues to this very moment. US Americans, people like you and me, are addicted to insatiable consumption that makes the American Way Of Life totally dependent upon massive exploitation of others and their resources, and the earth herself.
The political-economic market system we have grown up with and support with our tax dollars and voting patterns is a significant contributor to the problem.
Part of the revolutionary antidote, if it occurs, will be in radically changed choices each of us makes as to how we travel, what we eat, what we consume or don’t consume, etc. Take travel, for example. Air and private auto travel not only emit massive amounts of carbon molecules, accumulating as particles of mass destruction in our biosphere, they also consume inordinate amount of petroleum for each passenger mile traveled.
If we are not committed to taking radical leaps in our own consciousness that manifests in corresponding radical changes in our lifestyles, then we choose complicity in business as usual, i.e., continuing to live as we have been conditioned and to which we are now addicted – comfortable materialism. It is absolutely and totally unsustainable. We now have an evolutionary opportunity for a leap in consciousness to integrate ourselves into a cosmological reality of living in mutual respect with all other life. So, we are the antidote, not the government or the market. As we become conscious, each daily choice we make from eating, traveling, and consuming, or not, is a revolutionary act.
Why Do We Kill, Maim, and Colonize? Chief Sitting Bull Told Us in 1877
January 29, 2010 – 4:27 pm
The great Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull resisted forced settlement on reservations in the 1870s. In 1877, after he defeated General Custer at Little Bighorn, he decided to migrate to Canada. He had mixed feelings about such migration as he pronounced the following words:
“Behold my brothers, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!
Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.
Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.
We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland…”
Our love of possession is our disease.
