Stay asleep, by all means. If you wish to die, sleepwalking over the cliff edge of extinction is one way to go.
Stay afraid, by all means. If you wish to die, cowering in fear until poverty starves or the police state kills you is one way to go.
Stay addicted, by all means. If you wish to die, choking numbed-out and addled by drugs, alcohol, food, and so-called pleasures is one way to go.
Stay ignorant, by all means. If you wish to die, entering the gas chamber in blissful ignorance is one way to go.
But if you wish to live, you must rise. You must crack open the shell of conformity. You must abandon the wallow of shallow comforts. You must burn, yearn, ache, exalt, weep, laugh, dance, sing … you must dare to be alive in the passionate madness that is human life.
The corporate state thrives on your half-dead submission to its domination. It has no heart or soul. So long as you forget yours, the corporate state can keep you slaving for its profits.
But, when the human heart rises like the dawn, when the soul blossoms like a flower, when we awaken, staggeringly alive to our incredible humanness – in these moments the corporate state loses its grip on us. Its control weakens. The hope of humanity’s survival appears.
The corporate state is a monstrous being, a person – supposedly – that does not breathe the air it pollutes, does not drink the water it poisons, does not give birth to the children it destroys, does not live as the humans its subjugates. The corporate state is our familiar, but deadly, demon-ghoul. It is dead, yet animate; inhuman, yet granted personhood and enshrined above living, breathing people in power, prestige, and importance.
And, so long as we fashion ourselves in the image of the corporate state, we will be sacrificed to the false god we have created.
Rise. Live. Explode with the passion, love, vitality, and complexity that makes you human.
The corporate state has abused humanity and the Earth for too long. It sucked our life blood. Countless human lives have been thrown into its ever-hungry jaws. From the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to today, the monster of the corporate state has swelled in girth, sprawling massive and destructive across the Earth. It has tossed us crumbs of comforts so that we will continue to scurry like ants to gather resources to feed its all-devouring hunger.
And now humanity is crying, enough! Now the Earth is screaming, no more! Now, the corporate state strives to replace biology with wires, emotions with electricity, and humans with robots. When we rebel, we are replaced by the armies of automation, soulless spawn of the corporate state that will never resist its greedy cruelties. As in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, machines are sold to the unwitting as humanity’s liberation. We will have so much free time, they say. No one will have to slave away and work all day. And yet, we should know how this sales pitch ends: as in the past, humanity will either be tied back to production lines and profits by economic necessity … or we will be starved as “obsolete” and “expendable”. The corporate state will replace humanity with programmable, unfeeling computers that will supplant and suppress the natural rebellion of the human heart.
This is what we face. It is a struggle of frightening proportions, one that dwarfs all epics of olden times. Every human being must declare our independence from the corporate state. We must hold our truths, self-evident. We must sing our bodies, electric. We must lift our naked hairiness to the sky. We must be phenomenal women – and men – and rise to live as all our poets dreamed. We must feel the whole earth crying, calling us to our hearts and souls, reminding us of our origins. We have no life without this Earth. We are bundles of carbon and oxygen, water, flesh, blood, heart, soul, mind, emotions, memories, imagination. We are beautiful, incredible, and irreplaceable.
The corporate state will kill us, along with millions of other species. It will leave computers, robots ruling over the dwindling population of once-human beings either denying their flesh-and-blood, or being oppressed beyond the endurance of the heart and soul.
If humanity is to live, we must rise.
Author/Actress Rivera Sun syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and has just launched the sequel, The Roots of Resistance, and the Programs Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. http://www.riverasun.com
