I Am Horrified By Our Values

Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash

Recent news and our reactions to it says awful things about us.

A healthcare CEO, the father of two and chief executive of a company that denies healthcare to sick people to maximize profits, was shot to death in Manhattan.

I understand that this was a brazen act, and dramatic video of it was caught by security cameras. This is a story. But this is not the only story.

What happened to people denied healthcare is also a story. We don’t have video and don’t know the names of these people. But it’s a very, very important story.

So is the story of how the United States, alone among major industrialized nations, is the only one with for-profit healthcare.

And what about OTHER stories, one’s that were lost in the dramatic Manhattan murder mystery? I see that a gunman in California shot and wounded two elementary school kids, and those kids are in critical condition.

Do you even know that happened? I barely heard about it. I haven’t seen much about it in the news and I don’t know what happened to those children. I don’t hear any calls for gun control, even though the United States has incredibly weak gun laws and effectively guarantees the proliferation of deadly weapons. And it’s the only country with mass shootings so common that most of them don’t even make the news.

It’s as if we are saying, “f-ck the children! Look at the CEO!”

How Hard Is It to Value Life?

We are great at picking sides, and putting people into the column of “good guy” or “bad guy.” But we need to see more clearly if we want to fix things.
I think we get some kind of thrill raging against a perceived enemy. This adrenaline high is enhanced when we do this in groups. We become groups of feel-good moralists. But even when the moral sense is on target—yeah, that CEOs company does terrible things—we are still making a mistake.

We are attacking people and letting the systems continue. We need to do the exact opposite.

We need gun control. We need universal healthcare. We need to value children and not guns. We need to value people and our planet and not money.

We need to be motivated by love and not anger.

The 63% of Americans who identify as Christian? Their founder urged us to love one another, love our enemies, and be kind to foreigners and strangers. Where are they? Show me the love. I’m not seeing it.

A majority of American voters, so many of them loudly proclaiming their Christianity, chose a rapist as their president. Many claim that they were motivated by inflation. Does that ring true to you? Or does that sound like someone who’s making up an excuse because the real reason didn’t sound defensible?

What is the moral standing of people who held up signs cheering the deportation of 20 million people, and voted for a rapist and a felon as president? Nobody at that convention held up a sign about stopping inflation.

Don’t Preach. Demonstrate With How You Live.

We live in a sick civilization. We aren’t as bad as we seem. We behave badly because we don’t know better. There are carrots for bad behavior and sticks for virtue.

We need to shut down the sick civilization. We have a society based on elevation of elites, a society of servitude to a small group. Our society rewards greed, and excuses cruelty in pursuit of “success.”

This is capitalism. This is communism. This is dictatorship. This is every system that exploits and abuses people, and that trashes our planet. All of these systems of elitism are the same. The main difference is who gets to be the elites.

We won’t be good people under these systems. Any of them. They are all sick systems. They all need to go.

Our Obedience Is The Only Thing That Allows Evil to Continue

The murdered CEO of United Healthcare will be replaced by another guy. The system continues. The biggest change is that the world has another widow and two orphaned children. This is nothing to celebrate.

CEOs may get security details and for a few weeks, while the media covers the story, some healthcare companies will offer a few highly publicized concessions to their customers. These will disappear when attention shifts elsewhere. Nothing will improve. Nothing.

Murder and anger and hatred solves nothing. And it rots the soul of the hater.

Voting doesn’t work. Protest doesn’t work. And violence doesn’t work.
What works? Withdrawal of our support. What makes this effective? The elites NEED US to do EVERYTHING for them. The “powerful people” depend on us and when we refuse to obey, they are finished.

That’s when they take a plane to a country that harbors failed despots. This happens all the time. We need to make this happen big time now. We can.
The mission of The Saners is to harness nonviolent noncooperation to prevent climate collapse, and build a sane and humane society—replacing the failed dying civilization that we are suffering under today.

We expect that, with each inevitable climate shock, more people will join our movement. We understand that it will become increasingly obvious that “world leaders” in government and industry are out of their depth, that they are failing and on the verge of implosion.

But timing matter. The sooner our movement grows and speeds the change, the less the permanent damage to our planet, and the better future our species (and the other species with whom we share this Earth) will enjoy. We need YOU. Right now.

Please read about The Saners at WeAreSaners.org and sign up at WeAreSaners.org/join.