The U.S., as it stands, is not the leader and in fact is currently the antithesis for bringing world peace and ending world suffering. We are living, as we’ve had for a long time now, under the weight of a capitalist democracy where the few who hold the deepest pockets press their shallow motives on the many. We still live in a world where the relationship between a suzerain and its vassals exist. We invade and destroy other countries in order to maintain our geographic grip on resources, whether by installing vicious dictatorships and supporting them from the side or our use of pure military might to coerce those who we deem to trespass against us.

The U.S., as any entity holding and wanting to maintain its hegemony, will heavily use deceptive language to invite its domestic uninformed masses to agreeing with its dark intentions on foreign affairs. We should be extremely wary of someone or systems of culture that urge us to go against another group. We, as a nation, ignore the Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and have seemingly replaced it with, “Do anything unto others in order to profit and keep the facts hidden because what is out of sight is out of mind.” As much as the U.S. would like you to believe by changing history, history is immutable. We cannot erase the atrocities and senseless killings and chemical warfare we’ve done in Vietnam, the installation of a brutal dictator in Indonesia, the huge devastation on Japan after we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our grip on Latin America¹ and currently the awful situation caused by our support of Israel’s crimes in the Middle East.

Often times we will attack first on the premise of “national security”², but red flags should go up when we realize the U.S. has the most advanced weapon systems in the world. We maintain our superpower status and fear that every nation is out to get us. There is no threat to our “national security” that warrants the excessive expenditures on weapons or building of walls. If we have “terrorists”, which is a misnomer, it’s because we created them both abroad and at home. However, domestic terrorists are soon forgotton under US amnesia. You can’t expect the U.S. to use its drones to kill civilians, attack hospitals and schools, weddings, etc. and not expect its victims to be bitter towards you. I would not like any other nation, or more realistically the U.S., to have its drones, piloted by someone in the Nevada desert, fly over me with missiles. Would you? Humans deserve better than to be subjected to the detrimental effects of war. Attack first syndrome is a trait of war strategists out of touch with reality and a national failure and a willing denial to seek diplomatic avenues. To be “proud” for “killing the enemy” and thus serving the “duty to your country” is language used to hide the simple fact and serve as justification to self-preserve moral integrity. Misleading language is a necessary device to create cognitive dissonance, since it can be hard to justify blatantly killing other humans or killing others via trade blockades.

There is no reason for aggressing and starting war, or rather, the reason doesn’t benefit humanity and benefits only those whose business thrives during wartime. Who benefits? Directly we can see that the arms and “defense” industry does, that is, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, United Technologies Corporation, etc. Once we’ve gained control of a foreign area using our “advanced” weaponry and installing an “American-style” democracy, we can let Halliburton, Exxon, and other resource giants come in and delegate how energy gets dispersed and at what cost. The cost to our planet is not a concern to them. Let’s stop looking down and leave the dinosaurs in the ground and instead up to the Sun whose existence and energy is abundant for at least another 5 billion years. We can also look to viable wind energy along the coasts. It’s a sad thought to consider knowing that Earth could be a lifeless planet caused by warring tribes using their “intelligence” to create powerful weapons to kill one another over ownership of dirty and ancient resources. We can think of better things to do with our limited time here on Earth. Cooperation could occur rapid once the perceived incentive is greater than working in silo. Cooperation is the utmost necessity when planning the allocation of resources.

There is hope and not in the sense that is thrust upon us by the majority of our politicians. We can start to make change from the bottom up and that starts with ourselves and our relation with each other. It is a struggle, because the forces and systems of domination are strong. These systems are pervasive and make their way into our culture. They are designed to pit us against one another and help guide us to trample over each other for the non-existent carrot held by a shadowy golden cladded white hand. When you subject a complex human to substandard conditions, there is no doubt that the instinct to survive will set in. Often times, in these unfortunate and harsh conditions, civility and care towards our neighbor will take a backseat. Under these circumstances, a human will have to decide whether their needs take precedence over another’s. This is a bad situation to be in, because no human should have to make this decision especially when there is enough to go around. We can see this is urban slums, where the business and corporate sector has made decisions and maintains an inhumane environment. We know crime rates are the highest in slums, but we shouldn’t willingly declare it’s because the people in it choose to be there or they are inherently bad or are lazy and don’t work “hard enough”.

Capitalist culture seeks to make the accumulation of material wealth the end of all that is. Everyone is a victim so long as capitalism is reigning. It teaches and fosters a “want” culture at the expense of other’s needs. Sustainable consumption is natural and good, but things start to go sour when the resources for the people are held in the hands of the profiteering few. Profiteers are named so because they want to make a profit at any cost, and ironically spend a lot of human lives along the way; low wage labor for example. For them profit is power, because it can buy people so long as people are dependent on a resource held in another’s hands. It’s a bad situation for anyone to have to do things they don’t want to in order to survive. A culture built around this notion is devastating to many and beneficial to the controlling few. When we organize, we will shine a light when so many of us are in darkness. Power exists in the shadows and “politics is the shadow casted by big business”. But as we begin to take the necessary steps in taking back our power and right to live, we will transform because we would not be in a state of dire need and an emergent phenomenon will undoubtedly occur and our collective memory will become less about fear and more about love and cooperation. What a society can build from this notion, I think, is better than the current situation. It starts not with assuming we were ever “great” or that we can “make america great again” since that is based on a non-extistent America. Our history shows us that we can be compassionate, but it’s also riddled with a long road of sorrow. We’ll find traces of would be idols whom are forcibly hidden by the capitalist state. Power is not new and changes its mask as time moves. We’re in it for the long haul to the end to the capitalist state that grinds so many of us.