Atheist Meditations

Sometimes I wish I could go back to being one of the numb sleepers. One of the many who listen to NPR with an ear for that 'liberal bias', and treat MSNBC as a more 'honest, corporate media.' Folks who have every image and story about the world carefully monitored so as to avoid the truly horrific sensation of grasping reality.

Yesterday I was fucking listening to Democracy Now, and Amy Goodman took the last quarter of the program to talk with guests about something other than the violence in the Middle East and the Bush Administration's rape of our environment and economy. The topic was the Congo, 'a vast land of mineral resources, with a bunch of black savages running around on top of it.' Turns out there are even more scare resources in the world than my civ's battle for in Sid's world. Coltan, a mineral which conducts heat excellently, and is found in all of our fucking cell phones, PS2s, remote controls, and laptops. Between this mineral, the diamond mines, and the uranium - the poor people in the Congo never had a chance to run their country without violent interference from the outside world.

Like one commentator once said, 'The people of Iraq are cursed by the vast stores of Oil underneath their feet. It's like a magnet for suffering.'

So the bad men from the Rawanda Genocide (genocidaires - they actually have a fucking name for these types) flee prosecution across the bordor into Congo, but when the Rawandan military follows them, they don't go after these genocidaires - nope, they actually work with them for the purposes of securing valuable mines and other resources. Armed groups spring up all over the place, all you need is an international corporation willing to deal for your access to a resource, and the willingness to force children to murder their own parents and force them into your fucking child army - and you're fucking in business. You've just become an international trading partner.

Any mature student of war knows that the creative drive for the sort of violence that will drive another man to suicide is a fundamental human trait. Our species has tried to use violence to cow others since we fell out of fucking trees, and there ain't no seperations between 'civilized' and 'barbarous.' What is happening in the Congo is not because they are a race of savages - the acts committed there are no worse than the one's committed countless times by White, Christian, American settlers every time they came across a group of squaws in the 'Untamed West.' No different from the vengence Russian soldiers took on German women when they came in from the East.

In the Congo right now, as groups fight over who gets to provide our multinationals with diamonds and metals, the atrocity de jour is to gang rape the competitions women and then shoot them in the vagina. You have entire hospitals right now filled with victims of such violence. In one province alone, there has been 45,000 rapes within a years time.

I swear, if you could somehow inject into the heart and mind of an American Hausfrau an understanding of the suffering our fasination with shiny stones has caused to other human beings - she would rip her own fucking finger off to get that diamond away from her body and her soul.

Assholes in the corporate media are always talking about 'consumers voting with their dollars.' They love that fucking goofy ass notion of this fusion of the mythical 'free-market' and democracy. That if consumers do not like the behavior of a particular market player, they will 'vote with their dolla's' and begin to choose another company for their material goods.

Too bad the magical 'free-market' requires participants who 'make rational choices in their own best interest.' Cuz we ain't got a culture that glorifies rationality, and our media has been presenting the 'consumeristic act' as a climactic moment of emotional gratification for generations. If the tobacco companies could game the system so effectively that 25% of our population still 'chooses' to spend almost five bucks for a fucking pack of reds - I'm not optimistic for the poor savages in Africa, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

After all, we are the species that made an economy out of the enslavement of other human beings with just a few weak words of encouragement from our 'men of God.'

Give me that shiny new cell phone, the little girl whose hands were chopped off to terrorize those who might have gotten in the way of extracting the requisite minerals; she couldn't text messege all that well anyways.