Three Things Young People Should Know to Save the World Sunday, 16 June 2013 10:58 By David Swanson, New. Clear. Vision | Op-Ed Imagine writing a story about a village that faces possible destruction, and for the most part the people don’t do anything to prevent it. That’s not how stories are written. That’s the world we live in and fail to recognize. We are being instructed to sit at a desk and zap the earth to death, and we’re compliantly zapping away. Only the zapping doesn’t look like zapping, it looks like living. We work and eat and sleep and play and garden and buy junk at the store and watch movies and go to baseball games and read books and make love, and we don’t imagine we can possibly be destroying a planet. What are we, the Death Star? But a sin of omission is morally and effectively equivalent to a sin of commission. We need to be saving the earth and we’re not doing so. We’re allowing global warming and other major environmental destruction to roll ahead. We’re allowing militarization and warmaking to advance. We’re watching the concentration of wealth. We see the division of society into castes. We know we’re building prisons and drones and highways and pipelines while closing schools and condemning our grandparents to poverty. We are aware that we’re funding multi-billionaires with our hard work while fueling mass suffering, bitterness, rage, frustration, and violence. We see these worsening cycles and we sit still. Don’t sit still. Sitting still is mass-murder. Don’t obey anyone who tells you to sit still. Don’t search for a leader. Don’t sell your conscience to a group or a slogan or a political party. Don’t listen to me unless something I say makes sense. This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 06:52:54 +0000
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