George Carlin – About Things That Matter

Just this morning I received an appeal from a colleague of mine at OpEdNews where I’m a senior editor. He begged those on his mailing list to please vote for Kamala Harris. He said that allowing Donald Trump to be elected would be disastrous not only for the United States, but for the world. So, please, please vote for the sitting Vice President.

Believe me, I completely understand where my friend is coming from. I too dread the thought of four more years of yet another Trump presidency. For that reason, I’d never vote for him. Neither would I ever vote for a Republican. They’re just too much in the pockets of our country’s richest 1%.

However, I’ve come to realize that the same has become true for the Democrats. They too serve the interests of that same 1%. They’re just Republican Lite. With their colleagues across the aisle, they’ve formed a kind of Uni-Party.

I mean, like the Republicans, the Democrats have shown that they don’t really care about working people, except at election time. The Blues like the Reds care only about their donors.

Think about it: neither party gives a damn about what you or I think concerning Palestinians, raising the minimum wage, fairly taxing the rich and corporations, universal health care, free college tuition, homelessness, cancellation of debt for college graduates, gun legislation, nuclear arms control, closing federal lands to oil interests, a green New Deal, repairing our country’s collapsing infrastructure, high-speed rail, or solving the root problems of immigration. The list goes on. Yes, Democrats sometimes pay lip service to such issues. But that’s about as far as it goes.

Moreover, Democratic foreign policy is indistinguishable from the Republicans. There’s hardly a sliver of difference between them on Israel, Ukraine, or China. Nothing about diplomacy and its inherent need for compromise. Instead, for both parties, foreign policy has been reduced to three elements. Everyone must follow U.S. directives or face bombing, sanctions, and/or regime change. That’s it! Bombing, sanctions, and regime change.

(To give him his due however, at least Donald Trump has promised to end the Ukraine nonsense – the issue that has overridden everything else for the Biden presidency since 2022. Since that time, the U.S. has spent more than $175 billion on Ukraine. $175 billion!! That’s enough to solve all the problems listed above. But all the while Democrats have joined Republicans in claiming that there’s not enough money for addressing those issues – not even for FEMA in the wake of Helene and Milton.)

What I’m saying is America has become a failed state. Its system is not worth participating in. Bent on having our 4.5% of the world’s population controlling the entire thing, it’s completely corrupt. Moreover, completely controlled by money and the military industrial complex, it can’t be reformed. Even if Democrats wanted to address the problems listed above, the Republicans would never let them. Realizing this, instead of owning their working-class identity, the former have decided to become more like the latter. Republican Lite! The result is a completely frozen irreformable system.

And don’t tell me that we can vote ourselves out of this mess. Again, the system won’t let us. I mean, no one’s even talking about eliminating the Electoral College, are they? So, we keep getting “leaders” unsupported by the country’s majority. Seven “swing states” determine the whole thing reducing the rest of us to mere spectators. We’re left wondering which sock puppet the voters in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania will choose. I live in Connecticut, a solidly blue state. Why should I vote? It’s all a charade.

But here let me slow down. None of what I’ve written so far represents my decisive reason for sitting out this election. It’s simply this: I CAN’T VOTE FOR GENOCIDERS.

Can you?

For me it’s a moral issue. I just can’t do it anymore than I could have voted for that mustached man in Germany nearly a century ago.

For me, apartheid is non-negotiable. Settler colonialism is non-negotiable. But above all, GENOCIDE IS NON-NEGOTIABLE. I can’t support any government committing genocide. And that’s what a Harris presidency promises to continue. So will a Trump presidency.

End of discussion.

But who knows? Perhaps a Trump victory will at last cause Democrats to ask themselves why. It might drive them to realize that Republican Lite doesn’t cut it for working people. It might lead Democrats to unabashedly become the party of Roosevelt’s New Deal, of election reform, higher wages, universal health care, a Green New Deal, just taxation, loan forgiveness, defunding Israel’s genocide, nuclear disarmament, and enlightened immigration policy (that connects asylum seekers with failed U.S. policies such as the War on Drugs and the North American Free Trade Agreement).

Don’t hold your breath though. And buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Text: “My Thoughts Do Not Mean Anything”

Welcome to Episode 18 of A Course in Miracles for Social Activists. I’m your host, Mike Rivage-Seul. I’m a liberation theologian, social activists, and longtime student of A Course in Miracles. On this podcast (for reasons outlined in Episode 3 we’re understanding ACIM as written specifically for North Americans living in the belly of our imperial beast.

From that viewpoint, A Course in Miracles calls us to quit attacking the world’s poor and to stop believing that they are attacking us. Whether they live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, Cuba, Russia, Syria, Somalia, or China, they are not our enemies. They are our sisters and brothers.

Towards understanding that message more fully, today’s ACIM lesson can be very powerful. It asks us so-called “Americans” to face the fact that (as the lesson puts it) “My thoughts” (about such people – and everything else for that matter) “do not mean anything.” The lesson asks us to clear our minds of all falsehoods (i.e., of ALL our brainwashed thoughts without exception) and even to make our own the prayer, “Release me, Lord, from all that I now believe.”

Is that radical enough for you? “Release me, Lord, from all that I now believe.”

By inspiring that prayer, Lesson 10 calls attention to the fact that we are all quite thoroughly propagandized – especially, I would say, by religion and white supremacist American history. For instance, we’ve been instructed from childhood in a religious mythology that would have us accept a story like the following:

God is an old man in the sky watching our every move.
If we disobey his commands, he will judge, condemn, and punish us for all eternity, torturing us in a lake of fire causing the worst pain imaginable.
He (sic) is especially concerned about sex.
That is, he gave us a sex drive second in power only to the instinct for self-preservation.
Yet he will punish any sexual thought, word, or deed outside the marriage context with the hell just described.
And this God, who (according to these beliefs) threatens to treat us as only a pathologically cruel parent would, somehow loves us!
[George Carlin is especially eloquent on all of this (though rather scatological, I must admit). For a good laugh and a dose of truth, check him out].

As for our political beliefs, we’ve been taught (with equal problematics) that:

Our country’s founders were extraordinary even saintly men.
Even though they committed genocide against the original inhabitants of the land our so-called Founding Fathers stole.
And even though the nation’s fortunes were built directly on the backs of millions of kidnapped and enslaved Africans who worked without pay for nearly 300 years (1619-1865), who were subject to formal segregation for another hundred years after that, and who still describe their condition as second class.

We are also taught to believe that our country is a force for good in the world even though it remains (as described by Dr. Martin Luther King) the “greatest purveyor of violence” on earth.
And despite all our election riggings at home (through voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, bought elections, etc.) – not to mention routine interference in other countries’ elections – “we” are somehow authorized to pontificate about democracy throughout the world.
And even though in the last 20 years we’ve fought seven wars against Muslims (killing well over a million of them in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia, Somalia, and who knows where else?) we can lecture the Chinese on their alleged “genocide” of Uyghurs “imprisoned” in re-education camps one-sidedly vilified in our mainstream media.
(Again, as George Carlin might remind us, all of this is no less B.S. than our unquestioned religious beliefs.)

In any case, you get the idea. Lesson 10 wants us to clear our minds of all the false ideas that plague our thinking processes – i.e., it asks us to provisionally discard EVERYTHING we’ve been taught to believe – especially religiously, politically, and historically!!

So, following the lesson’s direction, try to spend a minute or so five times today reminding yourself as random thoughts occur to you:

My thought about ____ does not mean anything.

Then add:

“This idea will help to release me from all that I now believe.”

Try it.

We’ll move on to Lesson 11 next time. Till then, this is Mike Rivage-Seul wishing you well and God’s abundant blessings.

Tag: George Carlin

The Coming Election: I’m Sitting This One Out