If one blogs long enough, one eventually runs into the problem of continually repeating oneself. And that is what I feel like I am doing now. The world, by that I mean the people of the world, is pursuing self-destruction in two ways. One way is the new nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Russia and the desire of others to obtain WMDs. The second way is that our way of life is so damaging the environment that we are condemning even our immediate descendants to more difficult lives if not the inability to survive. And it looks like too many of the world's leaders are not willing to do enough to arrest that destruction until it is too late--which might happen soon.
If you listen to the Noam Chomsky lecture included in this post (click here for the lecture and proceed to the 10:12 mark of the video), one of the solutions to these problems is to obey the law. Here he is referring to the U.N. Charter which was ratified by our government and thus, because of The Constitution, is the law of the land. And that Charter prohibits the use of force or even the threat of force to resolve conflicts.
In addition Chomsky also notes that the proliferation of nuclear weapons could advance if the U.S. does not follow U.N. resolutions that it sponsored.
As for the environment, Chomsky notes that many other nations have taken significant efforts to stop the destruction of the environment. He gave an example of how Saudi Arabia is trying to reduce its impact on the environment while the U.S. almost stands alone by not taking significant steps address climate change. And we need to do that because of all of the observable signs that point to how man-caused climate change is closer to us than just appearing on the horizon.
In the end, there is one reason why the Americans are allowing their nation to participate in activities that both make the use of nuclear weapons more likely and destroying the environment. That reason is the reluctance to change. We don't want to change from feeding the military industrial complex with more and more contracts. We don't want to change from America's imperial role in controlling the parts of the world that it can. And we don't want to change from a way of life that is destroying the environment.
Especially regarding the last reluctance to change, we have, for a long time, lived in what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "thing-oriented" society (click here for the reference). In such a society, gadgets, profit motives, and property rights are counted as being more important than people. And King went on to say that for as long as we are such a society, we will suffer from racism, materialism, and militarism. And here is the point, we have really never converted to a person-oriented society in order to eradicate racism, materialism, and militarism.
So if we haven't changed in order to eliminate those three problems, do we see any hope that we will change in order to avoid self-destruction? And if we continue stay the course, who will we blame when we come closer and closer to our self-destruction?
If we are not going to change, then what is the point of life? Is it to live for our own pleasures until the end while denying the harm such living does to others? Our reluctance to change seems to be at odds with how we prefer to see ourselves. For we prefer to see ourselves as the 'land of the free and the home of the brave.' And despite that self-image and the fact that freedom implies the ability to change, we are very reluctant to change. And now that our survival depends on changing, our willingness to change will determine our fate.
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