From Maggie Zhou, MA delegate to GPUS, to the peace contingent gathering for the 10/2/10 One Nation Working Together march in Washington, D.C.

Brothers and Sisters,

We are here today because we are angry at the multitude of problems that our government is responsible for, the many ways the system has failed us, and we recognize the root causes of all these problems are the same, and therefore they require common solutions.

Many of us here are peace activists.  For nine years, we have been trying to stop the ongoing US wars for oil and for the expansion of the military-industrial complex.  In fact, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are epicenters of the larger war we’re waging against Mother Earth & her children.  It is where our death-dealing empire bombs the planet, drill her, bleed her for her oil, poison her with radioactivity, and rape her out of the life she had, the innocent lives of men, women and children, and the fertile soils that once was the food basket of the Middle East.

But, there are many other epicenters in this larger war against Mother Earth.  A massive hemorrhage was just inflicted in the Gulf of Mexico by one of the worst perpetrators in this war.  Mountain Top Removal coal mining has been denuding, defacing & poisoning the beautiful mountain ranges and streams of Appalachia and the entire coal country.  Hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, for “natural gas” extraction, has been poisoning our groundwater, and consequently food production, anywhere it touched, and it’s taking over America with a vengeance.  Looking around the globe, the gazillion mines where we humans extract the insides of Mother Earth & poison her outside with it, the many shopping malls and pavements and parking lots we built in place of her life-giving forests and grasslands, the many dams we built that chokes the life out of her ecosystems, the diversion of her rivers & streams & precious groundwater reservoirs for monoculture, chemical-laiden farming operations, and now devastatingly, the crazed worldwide expansion of “energy crops” for biofuel, biomass & biochar production…  

Even things we’ve come to take for granted, like the flushing of the toilet that dumps human waste along with our toxic chemicals into sewage that enters our rivers and eventually the ocean, instead of returning the vital nutrients back into the soil like nature has always done, like the many ancient civilizations have always done.  These are all less visible epicenters of the war & destruction we’re waging against our Mother planet.

As a consequence, our planet is drawing her last dying breath.  Much of what we have done causes vicious cycles of self-amplification of their effects.  The Arctic sea ice is pronounced to be on its death spiral, leaving dark ocean water to absorb more sunlight and heat up faster.  The Arctic permafrost has already begun thawing and releasing massive amounts of methane, with an unimaginable quantity of frozen methane time bomb on the verge of being triggered for release.  Warming causes drought, desertification, crop failures, biblical flooding, infestation, forest die-offs, and massive wild fires.  It alters the pace of the seasons, and causes mismatch of natural rhythms between flowering & pollinators, between predator & pray, between mating season and food availability for the offspring, threatening full-scale ecosystem failure.  These are all positive-feedbacks, or vicious cycles that amplify global warming, ecosystem collapse, and planetary destruction.  Civilization is literally at the eve of a total collapse, and such events are expected to be sudden and non-linear.

Yet, our species’ collective wisdom is beholden by the greed of capitalist fundamentalism, which dictates an endless quest for profit, “growth”, exploitation and domination, at the expense of the poor, the weak, the less aggressive, the indigenous, and nature itself, worldwide.  Even in the name of “climate action”, what is being done is more toxic uranium mining for nuclear energy, more destruction of boreal forests for tar sand oil, more offshore drilling and coal mining for the sake of “energy security”, and new ways for bankers & traders to profit from a new commodity called carbon credits, and carbon offset credits, new ways for transnational corporations to do land grabs & evict indigenous peoples – ostensibly for “forest protection” or for bioenergy crop plantations …  Even in the name of philanthropy, and foundation funding for progressive social movements, the consequences are more accurately described as blunting, or neutralizing, these movements, as such fundings have a way of steering our movements away from seeking the radical changes that are needed, and towards a pattern of compromising & making slightly more palatable the status quo.

Brother & sisters, we have no choice but to fight back.  We need to take over our destiny, or else we’ll end up precisely where we are heading.  The first thing we need to do is reaching out to all those who are suffering.  The lost jobs, lost homes, lost healthcare, lost schools, and lost lives of service men & women are just a prelude to what is to come, in a future of unimaginable suffering, chaos, and destitute, as long as corporate greed is allowed to control our government, our economy & our military, as long as we as a dominant culture, as a dominant species, continue our cancerous “growth”, and continue to place ourselves above nature.

So how do we stop that greed?  How do we prevent our government & our military from destroying our future & killing our planet?  I see two general approaches.

One, work within the system, jam into and expand what little democratic space still available in the electoral & legal systems to try to elect & legislate & sue our way into dramatically transforming the nature of the current system, into a society whose economy is not based on profit, but based on serving the common good, true democracy, and ecological wisdom.  The Green party approach represents such a vision.  Unlike the democratic and the republican parties, all Green party candidates do not accept money from corporations, so they are truly free from special interest influence.  Some of us from the Green party are here today, with flyers that highlight our vision.

The other general approach I see is a massive social uprising, to force a system change.  The system will no doubt respond by harsh oppression on dissent, by ever increasing surveillance, raids & intimidation, by mass entertainment media functioning as an opium for the populace, and by massive propaganda machine employing divide & conquer, and dis-information strategies.  The system will try to control the internet, arguably our most efficient tool in outreach and dissemination of information, and will try to snuff out any sparkling of a popular rebellion.  We know that our government is not above state sponsored terror, and this administration is no exception.

In this age of electronic surveillance, satellite tracking, wiretapping, secret prisons, drones, and snipers, both of these two approaches face the task of overcoming an extremely technologically advanced, ideologically crazed, emotionally hardened, and morally ruthless bureaucratic system, controlled by a super rich elite class.  To fight that, we must get creative, VERY creative.  We must get technologically savvy (WikiLeaks is a shining example).  We must go back to the grassroots where all our strength ultimately comes from, and get used to knocking on doors and establishing that direct human contact as our grassroots foundation once again.  We must resist the temptation of easy grants at the expense of our messages and values being tempered or co-opted.  And, we must act with utmost urgency, because the planetary clock is ticking, and although I can’t go into a detailed scientific discussion here, I can tell you that we have practically run out of time.  Most importantly, we must act with solidarity, across the issues and historical differences, we must be brave, and we must remember that any bureaucracy is run by human beings, who ultimately share this very same planet and its fate (although they don’t recognize the nature of our shared fate!).  They have souls that can potentially be moved, and, they make mistakes.

Yes, our challenge is unimaginably high.  But, as someone once said, “If we don’t try the impossible, we will be left with the unthinkable”.