Can we get past power struggles?

Power. A quarter of a million years of Homo sapiens and we still devise all of our relationships with each other on the acquisition and exertion of power over each other. Individuals over groups. Groups over governments. Governments over each other. Whether or not this is fair or even wise is a question never asked. Nor is the question ever asked what the ultimate fallouts must inevitably be from these forays into the human rights of others and their reactions and retaliations.

In the Middle East, one group of religious extremists persecute and kill another group who will do the same if their positions are switched. Then a world super-power decides to exert power over both by intervening in a political dynamic of which it has no understanding and therefore no notion of the nature or extent of what will follow. The concern is power. Their possible future power over us. Our power over their oil. Our loss of power in the international dynamic over loss of face.

Here at home, the followers of the “money is power” cult have engineered the accumulation of such a huge portion of the financial resources of the economy that what remains sends one child in every five to bed hungry every night. This will, of course, worsen as their de-facto control of government reaches for more by killing the entitlement programs and eroding the regulation of cost cutters, monopoly finaglers, etc.

And we call the other creatures beasts.

Harold R. Pettus

Everett

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