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Edited on Mon Jun-23-08 07:37 AM by Echo In Light
This: George Carlin also talks about how we as individuals have abrogated our responsibility to the Earth by turning it over to 'those in control'. "I think we've turned everything over -- mankind in general, not just our culture -- to the high priests and the traders. Everything was turned over to those who wanted to control us through mysterious beliefs... They twisted and distorted that into these narrow, superstitious belief systems, where you have this invisible man in the sky who's judging you.. And then the traders, the businesspeople, the commercial, the merchant class, they turned everything into acquisition and ownership, to having the latest thing... We're given many choices to distract us from the fact that our real choices have been diminished in number. 35 flavors of popcorn."
Carlin is a cynic about our current situation. "There's no real enlightened self-interest", he says. "I don't think recent wars have anything to do with spreading democracy and giving people free choice, because there are no free choices... There is an ownership class in America... People say, What about the antiwar movement and Vietnam? Yeah, how long did it take? And it didn't happen until the ownership class decided it was no longer in their interest. Same thing with the civil rights movement... People are dreaming if they think they have rights. They've never had rights. There's no such thing... These are privileges, temporarily granted to the people to keep them placated so that the market economies can function."
And people say, Oh, your conspiracy thing. Listen, don't be making fun of the word "conspiracy". It has meaning. Powerful people have convergent interests. They don't always need a meeting to decide on something. They inhabit the same clubs. They sit on the same boards. They have all this common ownership and they are very few in number. They control everything, and they do whatever they want. two-party system keeps the people at bay. They give them microwaves, fanny packs, sneakers with lights in the heels, dustbusters, to keep them distracted, keep them just calm enough that they're not going to try something.
You know, of course, that he doesn't think it's that hopeless. "Scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist. That really rang a bell with me. Within me there is this flame of wishing it were better, wishing people had better lives, that there was more of an authentic sharing and harmony with nature. So this thing that sometimes reads as anger to people is largely a discontent, a disappointment in what we have allowed to happen to us as a species and as a culture."
Carlin's prognosis for the future reflects this ambivalence -- cynicism tinged with idealism:
Some sort of cataclysm will alter this thing. There are too many people... I'm a little bored with the almost Christian fervor of . I do like vandalism, by the way -- spiking the trees and vandalizing the SUVs, that's fun. But the idealistic sitting around kind of bores me. But I also understand that Earth is an organism and that life is completely interdependent, everything upon everything... We will always overstep. We will always use our brains to our self-disadvantage, ultimately. And there'll be a tipping point. Either it'll be environmental, or one of these lovely germs will get loose... And then the systems will be compromised enough, and the numbers reduced, so that there will be -- not a fresh start, because it won't be that -- but a regearing. Maybe there'll be 100 thousand people left. Maybe there'll be 10 million... I have no idea. But let it be violent, and let it be funny. That's all I ask.
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/08/25.html
George Carlin comments on 9/11 Truth and the NWO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pow5_UYKaJ8 |
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