Confronting American Nightmares

A dozen tsunamis are rushing toward the American shoreline as the great American consumer fills its mind with Black Friday sales on Chinese plastic. As a citizen that has partially broken free from the brainwashing corporate consumerism propaganda, I have trouble sleeping at night because our collective future is so deeply endangered. Our current societal design is completely unsustainable, and drastic systematic changes will imminently be forced upon us for mere survival.

Among the crises that keep me awake at night, many of them will be easy to alleviate once reality becomes increasingly blinding in clarity.

One of the greatest nightmares for the conscious citizen is war and mass killing that the government conducts in our name. In addition to over 700 costly foreign military bases, we are engaged in multitrillion dollar wars for corporate profit and are spending over $1 trillion per year on military “security.” This fear-sustained spending exceeds that of the rest of the world combined, and the consequent retaliatory hatred and economic damage warrants renaming the Department of War to the Department of Insecurity. Ending these counterproductive policies will become easy.

Eliminating weapons of mass destruction, mines, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and other civilian-slaughtering weapons globally, and especially at home will also become straightforward.

Ending our massive $12 trillion national debt by reinstating Republican President Eisenhower’s tax rate on the superwealthy, and by slashing gratuitous military spending will also become easy.

Eliminating massive corruption and corporate profiteering from our healthcare system will also be simple when single-payer is finally realized.

Saving and improving democracy from corporate plutocratic rule will also become easy once we abolish commercial mind control and indoctrination into the Church of Mindless Consumerism.

Dealing with global warming will also be relatively simple once we begin seriously transitioning to a wise, conservation-minded, energy efficient, and solarized economy. Saving the rainforest from insatiable appetites for beef will also help.

Slowly reviving and conserving massively depleted global fishing stocks will also be accomplished, but with inferior gene pools.

Stabilizing the unsustainable global human population with a humane two child policy encouraged through education, contraception, and other incentives will be simple too.

However, the nightmare that keeps me awake all night is that of petrochemical-based agriculture. A whistleblower from the International Energy Agency recently said we have reached peak oil, and U.S. officials have been pressuring a distortion of the figures. Even with distortion, it is estimated we will reach peak oil in the next decade or two.

This means oil prices will skyrocket way past the $4 per gallon record. The cost of fossil fuel-based fertilizer and pesticides will also increase drastically, and unsustainable petrochemical agriculture will eventually die.

Considering that food is our most vital necessity after water, this is the most serious problem. How are we going to feed our massive and growing global population? There are ideas about how to do so, but compared to the other solutions, they will not be easy.