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
