National and international news has been very revealing of late. Just stop and look at what is going on around us right now. From destroying our water resources and pumping so much garbage into our air that our climate is already changing, undoubtedly past the critical tipping point, ruining two of the three fundamental categories of “things without which life is impossible,” to adulterating that third category, our basic food supplies with killer pesticides, antibiotics, and plastics, not to mention all the prescription drugs also permeating our waters, our life.

And all for what? Profit...some rich mofo, corporate, monopolistic, international banking or other cartel/trade organization, imperial capitalist, masters of war, feudalistic plutocrats.

Then there are the wars to support their malevolent greed, the killing of innocents to steal their birthrights to health, happiness, education, a productive existence (by their standards, not ours). All this in the service of our totalitarian masters, who've stolen everything else already, the current ruling classes of the world.

What powers this paradigm? How is it that eighty-five individuals own more wealth than the bottom three-plus billion inhabitants of the planet? Those eighty-five own half the wealth of the planet while those of us who supposedly are about humanity, empower them by quietly turning a blind eye.

People are dying, the whole planet is dying for the profit of those few legends-in-their-own-minds. None of them is any better or has any more intrinsic value than anyone else born on our mutual home, Planet Earth. What they have they've “earned, the old-fashioned way,” off the backs of those they've sold, and out right murdered, for their own greedy advancement.

What powers it all? Why, it's our basic beliefs, conditioned into us from cradle to grave, propaganda, and
indoctrination from our institutions and their leaders, a view through colored glass, secular and religious. And regardless of their denials, both are political in the extreme. The whole purpose is to keep the ruling class, the rich and powerful in control, to keep the “rabble” codified, cowed if not content with their spiritual and material impoverishment. And millions have died, and continue to die, to perpetuate the charade.

I read this in one of Christopher Hitchens's books; it certainly applies here: "...Whenever you hear that people have begun killing noncombatants intentionally and indiscriminately, ask yourself what dogma stands at their backs. What do these freshly minted killers believe? You will find that it is always...always...preposterous. ..."

Thanks to the Snowden and Manning leaks we now know (as has been long suspected) that our own government is intentionally targeting and killing noncombatants. And they are doing it in our name. This inexcusable paradigm persists because we turn a blind eye to it, perhaps for fear that we might be the next noncombatants targeted. So what outrageous, preposterous dogma do they and we mutually believe that permits this murder and exploitation to continue. We'd better really think hard about it because we're all complicit if we don't try to understand it... and change it.

It is definitely time for a new paradigm.