Steal Back Your Life

If you're young, don't volunteer yourself into the armed forces, even if you're jobless. Better you should be scrambling for some crumby job than giving your life away for a few barrels of oil that will probably never materialize anyway. And be thankful there's no draft.

Get out of that straitjacket of a suburb, while the getting's good. Get back to the city, to a walking neighborhood where you can get to the store, the hardware store, the post office, etc. on foot. Donate the beater to Father Joe. Forget the price of gas, the price of oil. You'll guess what they are easily enough gauged by the prices of everything else you buy.

The earth can support its present population only if some are starving while others prosper, and only if we continue our ecologically destructive ways. It could support a population half as large if we lived harmoniously with Spaceship Earth only if we embrace vegetarianism, or near-vegetarianism. Steal back your life from the forces of fossil-fuel derived fertilizers and pesticides and the fossil-fuel burning machines that make agribusiness possible.

The purveyors of slow death tell us we asked for suburbia, for cars, for agribusiness, for Wal-Mart, for more and cheaper stuff at any cost. I don't remember asking for any of that.

Lots of people are banking on Obama, but I don't have a lot of faith in political solutions. I'm sure Obama is well-intentioned, but keep in mind that he has to work with the powers that be -- the corporations and the Pentagon and the alphabet special interests such as the AMA and the NAR and all the other movers and shakers who put us here, where we are today, or in other words, the very people we now must force to relinquish our lives, so we can steal them back and make them our own once more.