Image by Emiliano Bar.
“Indeed, it is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
than for a rich person to
enter the kingdom of God.”- Luke 18:25
I spent two years in prison for something I didn’t do. Actually, it doesn’t matter that I was innocent – it didn’t make me any better than the other prisoners. Sure, my fellow prisoners were convicted of murder, rape, child molesting, kidnapping, robbery, fraud, and so on. Still, I was no better. None of us are, and I’ll prove it. Also, I quickly realized that, with very few exceptions, none of them deserved to be there. Most of them were victims of our sick society – victims of poverty – which is required by capitalist societies and perpetuated by our governments whose every action only makes us less safe and less healthy. They were victims of a society that explicitly targets the poor and non-white communities. (White-collar crime – which is what rich people do by definition – is almost entirely ignored.) Many of my fellow prisoners often suffered as children from exactly the kind of traumas that poverty promotes and which promotes street crime. They were largely sorry for what they had done, and just needed support, love, rehabilitation, and the chance to make things right – things that prison could never provide and was never designed for. And it was abundantly clear to me (as it had been for my entire adult life) that the abusive and torturous prison environment does not help society in the slightest. Prison is just revenge, and revenge is immature, unwise, and just plain stupid. That’s why the more we imprison, the more violent and dysfunctional society becomes.
We need to also consider that, while those in prison have caused some sort of harm, the harm they caused absolutely pales in comparison to the harm caused by political leaders, CEOs, the billionaire class, the wealthy – and the judges and prosecutors who uphold their power in the courts – people who are celebrated by our society! These are the sickest, most depraved, and most monstrous people on the planet, whose actions cause billions of people to suffer – yet the police don’t go after them. (Nor will they ever.) Consider:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow demented politicians and generals are blowing up innocent women, children, and men each and every day. They are committing genocide. They are purposely starving the entire Palestinian population of nearly 2 million people, who have been stuck in the concentration camp of Gaza for decades. Meanwhile, they’ve been brutally repressing and oppressing the Palestinians of the West Bank, too. (The media just ignores them.)
American (Trump, Biden, etc.), Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, and European political leaders, those spineless, self-serving narcissists, have been enabling Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing for decades by giving them billions of dollars of weapons and failing to do anything. They are all just as guilty.
With very few exceptions, every nation’s leaders serve the rich and oppress the poor. They suck the blood of the poor to increase the wealth of the rich. They try to increase poverty at every turn. Those rare few who try to help the poor (Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Salvador Allende, Thomas Sankara, etc.) are immediately targeted for assassination. Democrat or Republican, those in Congress serve the rich. (More than half of them are millionaires.)
As you’d suspect, most of what the rich and powerful do equates to murder and child abuse:
The U.S. government’s refusal to implement universal healthcare, keeping American medicine among the most expensive and worst in the OECD, is murder and child abuse. It is killing people each and every day.
Increasing military spending and cutting taxes for the rich – while half of Americans live in or near poverty – and meanwhile cutting social services such as Medicaid, Head Start, and SNAP is murder and child abuse.
Cutting environmental protections is murder and child abuse. It will sicken and kill millions of people.
Oil companies routinely pump toxic chemicals into the ground, poisoning groundwater that people depend on. This is murder and child abuse.
Doing absolutely nothing of any meaning regarding climate change is murder and child abuse. This inaction has already killed millions of people. Continuing inaction will kill at least one billion people.
Thus, subsidizing the fossil fuel industry trillions of dollars every year is murder and child abuse. And therefore, fossil fuel company executives and shareholders are all guilty of murder and child abuse.
Mining is murder and child abuse – because it destroys the Earth, requires impoverished workers and communities, destroys indigenous communities, and it poisons rivers and the land. Mining will never be healthy or sustainable.
“Renewable energy” is murder and child abuse – because it relies on mining and fossil fuels, and is a great big lie that changes nothing about our highly-destructive way of life. It will only speed up the destruction of life on Earth.
Building more cars and more roads is murder and child abuse. Cars have already killed 60-80 million people. Nearly everyone on Earth breathes poisonous air because of cars.
The manufacture and use of pesticides and herbicides is murder and child abuse. These highly toxic chemicals are put on food and fed to children! The executives and shareholders are all guilty, as well as the politicians who refuse to ban these dangerous chemicals.
The continued use of industrial processes using and spreading lead, mercury, and arsenic (i.e. virtually all industrial processes) is murder and child abuse.
Drenching everyone in wireless radiation (from cell phones, 5G, DECT phones, etc.) is murder and child abuse. They were rolled out without any long-term safety tests, and the majority of independent studies show a wide range of dangers to our health. The fact is, there is no safe level of radiation, whether ionizing or non-ionizing.
The existence and use of phones, tablets, laptops, and all electronics is murder and child abuse. They require resource wars, extraction and toxic chemicals to produce, are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, and their use dumbs us down, depresses us, alienates us from each other and nature, and above all, serves the interests of the military and ruling elites in further establishing a police surveillance state. It’s not “how you use it” that matters. That’s a lie. Every technology is a reflection of a certain mindset and certain values. That mindset is of domination, oppression, exploitation, destruction, and genocide. If you want the internet and smartphones, you’re also going to get nuclear missiles, endless war, a police state, and a poisoned planet. (It’s no wonder that half of young people would prefer a world without the internet.)
In short, the world’s prisons contain the wrong people. The worst criminals on the planet are those we vote for, those we celebrate, those we watch glorified on TV, and those we long to emulate. If anyone should be locked up, it is them.
But in fact, we are all guilty. We have a distorted view of “criminal.” We are very polite, very civilized, we go to work, send our kids to school (never thinking that schools are part of the problem), we go to parties, go to the beach, watch TV and movies, we sit in restaurants and make witty comments, somehow believing that we are innocent and better, when our every action perpetuates and promotes war, destruction, exploitation, oppression, and the poisoning of the Earth – when our every action accelerates societal and ecological collapse.
That is why none of us are any better or any less criminal.
Okay, so we’re all guilty. What should we do then? Just as we should do with anyone who breaks the law, the only healthy response is restorative justice. In other words, how can we make things right? How can we make things right for the decimated and impoverished communities around the world? How can we make things right for the planet? How can we make things right for current and future generations? And if we approach it this way, there is only one thing to do: to stop living the way we are, and to stop those in power, those rich, psychopathic elites, who will do everything to stop us from living in a fair and healthy world, and who would rather enslave us all and destroy life on Earth than give up their wealth and power.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges said it best:
“The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown…There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is revolt.”
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.