Gary Null and Richard Gale

Progressive Radio Network, May 12, 2022

For the past five decades, I have been a consumer and social activist, an investigative reporter and a national radio host. Over the years I have organized and led dozens of demonstrations to expose the crimes of corporate and government interests. I had always believed that taking the initiative to bring to public awareness the faults and failures in our nation would engender constructive change.

However, increasingly over the years little has changed to reverse the acceleration of our entire civilization’s decline. Deep reflection and introspection consistently raises an essential question.  What went wrong?  For example, after promoting the benefits of adopting a plant-based diet for half a century, I now question whether even five percent of the population has embraced a vegetarian philosophy and is committed to following it.  The US is the most morbidly obese and overweight nation per capita in the developed world. Our life expectancy has lessened and many children born today will not outlive their parents. We are a nation with widespread inequality and buried in colossal debt at every level of society. Even the professional class, who are highly educated, find themselves in a precarious situation with the new recession due to runaway hyperinflation and its uncertainties. When the economy was growing, the emerging elite embarked on a mad spending spree that they believed was necessary to maintain an unrealistic standard of living.  Now with the pandemic and Biden’s sanctions against Russia backfiring, millions in the professional class are unable to service their debt. They have been spending more than they earn. But it is not just the upper middle class and moderately wealthy who struggle to remain financially afloat.  The entire government — federal, state and city — has been on a massive spending binge as well.  The White House is dumping billions into fighting Covi-19 and a war already lost in Ukraine. Yet, none of these government expenditures have benefited either the country or its citizens.  As a nation, we are both economically and morally bankrupt. 

Nor is anything crucial and necessary being done to reverse global warming trends and protect the environment. The Trump administration signed cruel orders to destroy the remaining ecological fragility that we all depend upon. In fact, four of the world’s most polluting nations — Brazil, China, India and US — have inexplicitly witnessed an increase in greenhouse gas emissions during pandemic lockdowns. Although politicians readily raise their concerns about the environment and human life, their actions speak otherwise. To the contrary, Marx’s nineteenth century warning about infinite capitalist growth goes unheeded:  grow the economy in the name of progress by depleting whatever natural resources are available in order to prevent the GDP from falling. 

As a result, for decades the warnings of many conscientious environmentalists, economists and scientists have been unfolding rapidly.  The planet has entered positive feedback loops that likely cannot be slowed. Politically correct speeches to feed hope and secure false promises do not affect climate tipping points such as the loss of polar ice and glaciers. Every wise environmental activist and educator who has repeatedly forewarned that we must modify our lives and embrace a more austere and spiritual perspective has been ignored or mocked. 

Rather than fund efforts that are in critical demand for the survival, well-being and sustainability of future generations, there are always other priorities: a national government to overthrow or wage a war against, increase defense budgets, revamp our nuclear weapons arsenal, and pass huge bailouts to corrupt private corporations and banks.  A Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a president who spoke about hope and change, but was directly involved in escalating America’s wars overseas and overthrowing legitimate, elected governments. Then this was followed with a president who was functionally illiterate and another clearly struggling with senility. 

But what is especially sad is that the American citizenry willingly participates in and contributes to this charade. As a society we have crossed the Rubicon into a marsh of irrational hostility and negative emotions. At this moment, we witness both sides of the left-right political divide screaming about their victimhood while actively participating in society’s destruction. And yet there are no massive mobilized protests against the most destructive elements in our culture as if they are unimportant.  Renewable energy, access to healthy foods, banning toxic chemicals in everyday household products that are otherwise forbidden in other countries, the institutionalization of cancel culture and government-sanctioned censorship, an illegal surveillance state, a justice system that indentures the poor, fifty million Americans living in poverty and a thoroughly corrupt medical system — none of these seem important enough to warrant millions to march on Washington. Even humanity’s survival is inconsequential. 

Nor are these crises hidden. They are publicly known. However most Americans are so desensitized, so disconnected from perceiving reality, that they are incapable of realizing how the government adversely impacts their every nick and cranny in their lives.  So despite the fact that iatrogenesis (medical error and prescription drugs) kills far more people than the SARS-2 coronavirus, or that elections are bought by the highest bidder, nothing will change. Bush and Obama removed habeas corpus, our Constitutional right to have access to a fair trial, and yet nobody seemed to notice. 

Despite the decades I have spent educating people about how to live a happier and healthier life few will even demonstrate against their own unhealthy habits and behavior. Instead of running away from crises, we are doing everything to the contrary to magnify the problems. So if the environmental and social crises continue to spiral out of control, understand it is because America is only exceptionally pathetic. The nation has quenched its illusions and stupor far too long on Aldous Huxley’s soma. Now its intoxicating effects are giving rise to an explosion of hatred, rage and self-serving narcissism in the streets, classrooms, corporate boardrooms, and the sitcoms staged in Congressional chambers. We must cease believing that the bureaucrats and technocrats in Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street will ever save us. The elite can afford to wall themselves away in Jackson Hole, Wyoming or a multi-million dollar yacht; but for the remainder of us we live in a Mad Max world.  And our negligence, ignorance and hubris have brought this emergency upon ourselves. 

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” wrote Martin Luther King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” It is our deep ignorance about not knowing ourselves and appreciating our intrinsic interconnection with each other and the environment that perpetuates the suffering around us.  This includes our attachments to whatever accomplishments and failures we experience in our lives, which lead either to superiority complexes or apathy and depression. Nevertheless, even if there is only five percent of the population that is truly awake, free of the cult of woke culture, and conscientiously aware about the causes and effects of the current crises and catastrophes, that still represents approximately 18 million people. That itself is sufficient to wage a conscious revolution to bring about constructive transformation. The oligarchy of neoliberal capitalism now governing the country will not change by itself. It will require very radicalized and impersonal forces to foment it to change from within. Each of us has within ourselves the capacity to make substantial changes. It requires the courage to break free from the shackles of both blind conservative nationalism and the liberal globalist promises of Big Brother. Our true enemies are irrational, dogmatic beliefs and faux liberal values, which equally keep us enslaved to a system that only serves its own interests and dehumanizes us to collateral damage to the system’s failings. All imperiums ultimately collapse. Although the US is in its rapid decline, it is within our means to not be a victim when it sinks completely.