Earth Day – March 20, 2010 – Integrity Will Set You Free
Surviving & Prospering in the New Economy
At the stroke of a moment, the 40th Annual UN Peace Bell Ceremony will take place. This is the Real Earth Day, Saturday, March 20, 2010, at 1:32 p.m. EDT (Equinox). The mission and vision statement for the real Earth Day was not some sappy after-school program, with tee-shirt, but a challenge to live our principles with lives framed with integrity. Peace, Justice, and Care of the Earth.
Those who planned it and participated were life-long proponents for clean water, clean air, and transparency. The issue was not political in 1970, both Republicans and Democrats were involved.
If you thought Earth Day was in April you swallowed a corporate lie perpetrated that 1970 with the blatant use of the same name by a group of corporate hires. Read the story here. All of us need to be more discerning. Lies are destroying everything we built. Read The Wrong Kind of Green, in The Nation, just yesterday.
Some few have known and tried to warn us. We did not listen until our own ox was gored.
Today is the direct result of that lie and all the lies, the manipulation, and the lack of conscience by a relatively few. Today you see the outcome of unbridled appetite and greed, a lack of conscience and integrity, by those same few. Most of us, the overwhelming majority, do the right thing most of the time.
Together we, the many, can change direction. Integrity and discernment is all we need. Uncounted people today are drawing on their own integrity as they fight for you, even when you do not know it.
Today an elderly man is sitting in solitary confinement in the Los Angeles Jail because his integrity makes it impossible for him to say the words which would immediately release him. In his mind is justice for all of us. He will die for his integrity, for you.
Prominent anti-trust attorney Richard I. Fine was sentenced to “coercive confinement” in the L.A. Central Men’s Jail for an indefinite period of time to silence him. He has now been 60 days in solitary confinement and has been in jail for over a year. Fine was handcuffed and shackled, lead away to jail from the court house, on March 4, 2009. Judge David P. Yaffe gave the order. The court wants him silenced on their ongoing schemes to use the court system for their own profit. They have been attempting to coerce Fine into submission, but failed. Richard Fine is determined to reform the justice system.
Don’t expect the media to cover Fine’s heroic challenge of corruption. Taking over the media, converting it into an extension of corporate PR, was an early strategy, now reaching its fruition. Journalists should have been the first to see this and take a stand. Their own standards mandate it.
They failed to exercise integrity.
If we want change we need to do it ourselves and begin by understanding the entirety of the problem we face.
Our world is melting around our ears, caused by this same lack of integrity, installed as the operational formula in our institutions. Integrity is the tool which helps us survive and prosper – if it is used. Integrity includes a refusal to accept lies as truth and so profit from lies. Integrity is an insistence on knowing, not accepting assurances without all the facts.
The awakening of our common humanity challenged generations past to see what was possible and never settle for less. Yet even as we have stretched, innovated and labored, reaching for the vision which is America, we have harbored a devil within. Today the full realization of psychopaths as individuals without conscience, incapable of integrity, is sinking in.
We reject gluttony, sexual deviancy, self-indulgence. These attributes along with the lies and manipulation which simulates emotion, characterize psychopaths. Yet who have we trusted to lead us?
Turn your eyes to those occupying positions of trust in government and corporations. These are occupied by all too many who will do anything to get what they want. Psychopaths are drawn to the nexus of power, they can be charismatic and will tell you whatever you want to hear to achieve their ends. They simulate emotions along with mouthing words of honor to deceive as a matter of routine.
Today experts believe many of our institutions are psychopathic in operation. Dr. Robert Hare, psychologist and world renowned expert in psychopathy, originated testing for psychopathy, common in criminals. Testing is now routinely used for applicants in various service professions such as firefighters, operators of nuclear power plants, police officers and teachers.
While lecturing to a convention of cops in Newfoundland, Hare posed another application for testing, as reported in Fast Company Magazine by Alan Deutschman , “Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?” The screen suddenly transitioned from faces of sex offenders and Mafia Hit Men to, “top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron.” Hare continued, “Why wouldn’t we want to screen them?
Dr. Robert Hare coined the word, “corporate psychopathic,” and has since written the book, “Snakes In Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work,” Paul Babiak, Ph.D. and Robert D. Hare, Ph.D.
Look at government. Is what you see any different? No.
Psychopaths have no emotions. Their brains lack these functions neurologically, according to research by Kent A. Kiehl, PhD at the Mind Institute whose work with criminals has been highly revealing. They see you as prey, not as people. Who but psychopaths would send your children off to war on claims they knew as lies?
While psychopaths continue to grab for power and money others struggle to do good.
In Nigeria a man, Francis Bosah, is looking for help with a problem which is confronting people around the world. This morning I received an email from Francis asking for my help. What he needs is tiny. Read the email and what is needed here.
In the wake of WWII chemical companies, now losing profits because overt war had ended, converted their factories from weapons of war to pesticides. Today the level of pesticides is poisoning the Earth as the residue of the war for profit shows up in toxic levels in autopsies from all parts of the world. People are dying, the unborn are not safe and neither are our elderly.
Francis wants to stop this in his country by replacing the use of pesticides with natural, non-impacting solutions. If he were starting this campaign alone it would be impossible. But Francis found an ally who had already produced alternatives to every pesticide now in use.
Steve Tvedten, a former exterminator, lost his uncle and baby son to the toxic effects of pesticides, nearly dying himself. Giving away his company, he committed himself to providing alternatives. His book, is available for free online. Read it for yourself and use it as have tens of thousands now living healthier lives.
Americans believe in the power of the individual. In these three men you see power exercised with integrity.
The vision which is still America conflicts with the business plan for engorging corporations with our stolen lives. Psychopaths are drawn to power. The point of conflict is integrity. Normal people have limits, things they will not do for power. From the member partners of the Federal Reserve, to Big Oil, and on to, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it on leaving the White House, the Industrial Military Complex, they are eating out our substance. See it now.
We did not see this clearly before. They always knew what they were doing.
Each Spring the real Earth Day brings with it the opportunity to remember the opposition will do anything to win. Lying and murder mean nothing to the kind of people who displaced the integrity of the real Earth Day. The death of your baby girl from an injection? Your uncle abandoned and starving on the street because of the nightmares which haunt him from Iraq? These are just corporate write offs.
It is all about money and power for them.
This Earth Day commit yourself to understanding what is confronting us. Stop settling for assurances. Notice what is happening around you. Listen as they mouth the rhetoric which once moved you and remember it when the reality emerges. Learn to see the greed lighting their eyes. Instead of following, live your integrity. Judge for yourself – and at the moment when the Earth turns towards renewal in the Northern Hemisphere, remember, we are human because we feel, we love, care, and hunger for the vision which moved generations to become Americans. The vision is still true.
Blurb
Integrity demands consistency from all parts of our lives. If you turn your back on wrong you have no integrity. If you fail to speak up, act, do, don’t expect to be free. Integrity is the price of freedom
No More Regular Guy-ism
It was revealed recently that President Obama’s bad cholesterol has gone up 42 points since 2007. Apparently, his diet is not as healthy as it was before. He’s also still smoking. His Republican adversaries did not leak these revelations. His Press Secretary didn’t begrudgingly admit them. On the contrary, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs implied that this proves that the President is not an effete eater, someone Republicans might describe as a latte-drinking, salad-grazing liberal. “You guys think he eats carrots and celery,” said Gibbs. “There’s more cheese burgers, fries, and pie than you previously knew.” The subtext of that, of course, is that Obama isn’t just this Harvard-educated lawyer who’s a great orator. He is also a regular guy who likes unhealthy food and smokes even though he knows he shouldn’t. Why is it so important for politicians to be thought of as regular guys?
It was revealed recently that President Obama’s bad cholesterol has gone up 42 points since 2007. Apparently, his diet is not as healthy as it was before. He’s also still smoking. His Republican adversaries did not leak these revelations. His Press Secretary didn’t begrudgingly admit them. On the contrary, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs implied that this proves that the President is not an effete eater, someone Republicans might describe as a latte-drinking, salad-grazing liberal. “You guys think he eats carrots and celery,” said Gibbs. “There’s more cheese burgers, fries, and pie than you previously knew.” The subtext of that, of course, is that Obama isn’t just this Harvard-educated lawyer who’s a great orator. He is also a regular guy who likes unhealthy food and smokes even though he knows he shouldn’t. Why is it so important for politicians to be thought of as regular guys?
Obama really went over the regular guy line when he sat down for a lunch in Savannah, Georgia with a plate piled high with fried chicken, beans, sweet potatoes, greens, and macaroni and cheese. The worst part wasn’t what he was eating (the regular guy food). It was when he turned to the people there and said, “Don’t tell Michelle.” That’s good old-fashioned wink-wink, nod-nod, scratch your belly, manly punch to the shoulder Regular Guyism. At least he didn’t say, “Don’t tell the old lady.” Who does he think he’s kidding? Does anyone believe that he and the First Lady really have that kind of “I’m the king of this castle” marriage?
Of course, he’s not the first President or Presidential hopeful to try to cloak him- or herself in Regular Guyism. Dukakis in the Jeep and Hillary Clinton throwing back shots on the campaign are just two examples. George W. Bush was a master at Regular Guyism. Here was a man who was born into a wealthy, powerful, political family of the Northeast. He went to college at Yale, and got his Masters Degree at Harvard. But I never heard him allude to any of these things. He passed himself off as an outsider to politics and a “regular guy.”
Those running for office don’t put on airs, they take them off. Intellectualism and even intelligence are often mocked and rarely thought of as good qualities for a President. Some pundits feel that Scott Brown, the new Senator from Massachusetts, was aided in his election by the fact that he drove an old pickup truck – a “regular guy” vehicle.
I don’t buy into Regular Guyism. I don’t want a President who is just a regular guy (or gal). I want a President who is special. I want a President who is consumed by the unbelievably difficult job he has and not one who is consumed by the rumors that McDonalds will soon be bringing back the McRib. I know it’s heresy in America, but forget a pickup truck. It wouldn’t bother me if a President didn’t even know how to drive, and majored in French in college -– as long as he was dedicated to keeping our country safe, turning around the economy, and keeping Americans free and equal. I’m not turned off by a President who is educated. I want a President who is smarter than the average guy on the street. Let’s face it, would you want a President with my intelligence and personality? I wouldn’t.
To many people, having the very traits that they might admire in others are things they reject in political candidates. They see those who are highly educated, who seem overly serious, and who love things like the arts as “phonies.” And they don’t want a phony for a President.
Ironically, what actually happens is that the candidate or President who doesn’t want to appear to be a phony becomes a phony as he pretends to be a Regular Guy. The Republicans would be better off exposing Obama as a phony Regular Guy than wasting their time on things like insinuating that he’s not really a citizen or that his wife’s arms are too muscular. Let Mitch McConnell or one of those guys stand up and say, “I’ve got news for you, America. Obama is a phony. He might pretend to be a regular guy, but he’s not. He’s actually a brilliant, articulate, capable man who cares about our country’s problems far more than he cares about who will win the next Super Bowl.” Then just watch Obama’s popularity drop like it’s never dropped before.
Lloyd Garver has written for many television shows, ranging from “Sesame Street” to “Family Ties” to “Home Improvement” to “Frasier.” He has also read many books, some of them in hardcover. He can be reached at lloydgarver@gmail.com. Check out his website at lloydgarver.com and his podcasts on iTunes.
