Flames of Hope Still Burn Bright

In the spirit of the New Year, where new beginnings emerge and past transgressions fade away, and in light of doom and gloom times, I thought it appropriate to take a small break from the reality enveloping our lives and instead write about Hope. Hope for the future, for the salvation of the United States, for our children and the world’s collective will to live in peace and happiness. We live in times that are difficult to bear or contemplate, on the verge of corporate takeover of our lives and the future of our children. Greed and selfishness are all-encompassing, odiously becoming 21st century virtues to strive for, slowly splitting apart the fabric of society. Corporate media spews propaganda and ignorance twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We are led by a village idiot, of that there is no doubt, a puppet to the great Leviathan that is destroying the cherished principles this nation once stood for, spawning death, destruction and suffering around the world that will in time have karmic repercussions.

Yet in spite of this, in spite of the daily erosion of freedoms and liberties and democratic institutions there lies that which cannot be erased or manipulated, that which remains free inside our conscious, and that is the principle of Hope. A Hope that lies deeply ingrained in us all, in our unyielding belief that these times are but a blip on the radar screen that will disappear with the dawn of a new day and the continuation of a new year. Hope, that great and noble human trait, sprinkled with utopian visions of the way humanity ought to be and idealistic dreams of how this world can indeed exist, cannot be touched by Bush or Ashcroft or Cheney or the whore called corporate media. Hope is ours to keep and spread, to store away until the day when our faith gives way to reality and reality launches us powerfully into a new course of human understanding and way of living.

Like a virus, Hope is easily spread from host to host, its level of contagious infection dependent on the level of Hope existing in the person. With the arrival of a new year Hope is at its highest point, illuminated in the faces of those who believe in its power to inspire and endure. Only with the passage of the months, as cold gives way to warmth, as dreams give way to reality, does Hope transform to passivity. The high mountain peak that once shone for miles on end as a beacon of Hope slowly becomes the vast desolate desert of negativity. The intrinsic cynicism of the Bush administration causes Hope to dwindle and dreams to shatter. Keeping Hope alive during these times is an odyssey that becomes harder the more we realize the trouble we are headed towards.

With each word Bush speaks, with each action he takes and with each policy implemented it is easy to lose both Hope and sight of that which in the darkest corners of complacency still burns bright. The human spirit cannot be extinguished either by edicts or power addicts, by one man or a cabal of charlatans. Those at the top of the mountain eventually must come down, and, in the case of autocrats, their path down the steep slope is one of bumps and bruises, turmoil and implosion. For the end result of their wicked actions is the accumulation of negative energy, of action and reaction, cause and effect, of karma growing ever bigger with each facetious wave of their destructive wand until the day arrives when it unleashes so much bloated negative energy back at their faces of contempt and their policies of destruction to render them powerless and impotent. It is only a matter of time, and action.

The bright Flames of Hope must pass forth from hand to hand, coast to coast and person to person. It cannot be allowed to flicker out and die. The cabal of miscreants sends blizzards and tempests of fury and corruption trying to extinguish the collective fire that inside us refuses to relinquish both dreams and wishes for a more just and equal world. The cartel of cronies, having not an ounce of understanding or interest between them for the common people and seeing in us nothing more than mere plebians from which to harvest their wealth and power, emphatically grip the sledgehammer of enslavement tight with both hands, smashing it down on the Flames of Hope. Again and again they strike, sparks lighting up the night sky in their vain attempt at sequestering us from what rightfully belongs in our domain. With each strike our freedoms, liberties and democracy are eviscerated more and more, sending shockwaves of fear throughout forests, valleys, mountains and rivers, eroding our Hopes and aspirations that have been ingrained in our national psyche for generations. Our fear makes them stronger; it grants them more power and audacity to continue leaching us of our once-proud happiness and way of life. We must not stumble, we must not hesitate; we must not give up or relegate ourselves to a future that need not exist in a world nobody wants to contemplate.

The United States is the next step in human evolution, an amalgam of diversity, living together and becoming one indivisible human race. We are the pioneers, the experiment, the first world region to be fully integrated as one world, as one people. From all corners of the globe we are from, of different skin pigmentations and ethnicities we belong, yet here we are, one and all, the future living in the present, a world breathing together, in harmony, in the same nation. At no time in human history has a broad sample of all the peoples of the world gathered to call a nation home. We have formed a world society; we have formed the future today. We are but the first, but by no means the last. We are the next step in human civilization, that time not too far in the distance when the concept of a nation will be but a brief asterisk in history, made extinct by the progress of time much like the tribe, the clan, the city-state, feudalism, monarchy and empire.

The day is fast approaching when we will call ourselves citizens of the world, not of a nation. An era when what affects one affects all, when to assist one region is to assist us all. The inevitability that is the fast evolving human civilization is leading us in that certain direction when our planet will be our nation, when all the people’s of the world will be our fellow citizens. When that day arrives – history has been pushing us toward that end since the beginning of time – we will no longer be separated, national rivalries will cease to exist, war-like leaders will be made obsolete and the betterment of the peoples of the world will be made a reality. The inevitability that is the coming together of the entire human spectrum is happening in the US today. This vast experiment is the tip of the iceberg, and it must not be allowed to melt and disappear because underneath lies a monolith ready to spread the Flames of Hope to a world in desperate need of a stalwart light to follow through the bewildering maze that is the dark and ominous passage of the present.

The next stage of our development will be the grandest of them all because in order to survive as a species, the coming together of the world will be a necessity. It will be our only salvation, and it will unite all those who have been purposefully segregated by the powers that be. Through the communalism of the world our humanity will experience its greatest revitalization and the Flames of Hope will burn bright, illuminating the planet for all to see. It will be our greatest moment.

Equality and Justice will prevail, fraternity among peoples will lead to understanding, and those at the top, those who have been using, abusing and exploiting the masses for time eternal will finally kneel down to the gods of justice and equality as karma makes its unpleasant presence known. From then on, the nations of the world will unite as one, national flags, those symbols of segregation and division, will be eliminated, giving way to one united world symbol of humanity.

The Flames of Hope burn bright knowing that BushCo will eventually fall, disappearing from the expansive history of the world, being nothing more than a second in the twenty-four hour clock that is human history. The pestilence will pass, as it always does, the malignant cancer will die and the entire world will rejoice as it purges the wretched disease from its surface. History will once more repeat itself, excreting the waste that created so much trouble, suffering and decimation back to the shithole it crept out of. The principle of karma does not disappoint.

The well of Hope is eternal, a spring of life that does not dry. It provides life, sustenance and warmth, a belief that malevolence will be eradicated like the scourge that it is. Hope gives us confidence that while the short run is full of traps and pitfalls, trials and tribulations, the long run sees the effervescent sunset of the neocon loonies and the corrupt Bushes disappearing over the twilight horizon. It sees Cheney being hunted by pheasants into a pit of black gold, Rumsfeld being devoured by inner demons of past and present and Ashcroft carrying his ignorant fundamentalist log of wood up his personal Golgotha from which he can sing his psalms of forgiveness for the chaos he helped create.

Flames of Hope see balance returning to the planet as the corporate Leviathan is defeated by the will of the people and the power of the united. It sees air, land and waters free of the toxins and pollution that are destroying man and land. Hope returns to normal the crap that today constitutes food, gladly provided by the Leviathan, that serves only to fatten us up, filling our bodies and arteries with future disease. The Flames of Hope burns the Leviathan to a crisp, as people worldwide rejoice at having their chains of servitude torn apart, free once more to live meaningful lives of happiness.

Burning brighter and brighter, growing in size and power, the Flames of Hope reaches six billion humans, guiding us through the dark caverns of Washington D.C. and the cold abyss of feeble leadership. Like a million bats reaching for the freedoms of a night sky we erupt out of our dark cave in a giant symphony of fraternity and solidarity, reaching deep into the halls of Congress and the White House, reclaiming the land that once belonged to the people and the principles that once made this nation great, replacing the power and greed addicted prostitutes at the top with an assembly of scrupulous and honorable representatives that place the interests of the citizens above their own.

The power of the people, united, as one, will sweep over the oligarchy and the Leviathan. Great tidal waves of discontent and of peaceful revolution at the hands of the citizenry will make the giant corporate beast melt and wither. It will make of Bush a silver spoon fed crybaby returning to Crawford to despoil yet another entity that has the misfortune of getting touched by his hands of perpetuating failure. We can wish of Flames of Hope burning bright, reducing to ashes a shriveled and dry Bush in a powerful manifestation of might.

The sands of time are ready to indulge us in another one of those great leaps forward, when man thrusts ahead in a logical next step in civilization’s evolution. When humanity decides to expand its dimensions great things usually follow. We have reached, therefore, that era in time when we must cleanse from our great Earth that trash that is helping rot all that we have come to know and cherish. The evil that is materialism and consumerism is slowly making us all dead men walking. It is raping and pillaging the beauty that once was, transforming our only home into a scarred and barren emptiness devoid of wonder and greatness, pussing from its bowels all the poison we have injected into its once healthy body. Materialism is changing humanity, making us selfish beings intent on acquiring everything we don’t need and disposing of all we do. It is making us users of mind altering pharmaceutical drugs, our unhappiness being drowned out in the cocktails of stupor we so eagerly purchase as we try to escape the misery that our materialistic world has entrenched us with.

Working perpetually longer hours every year for the perceived benefit of higher wages and a better, happier life, we slave ourselves for the few elite exploiters who care not an ounce for our well-being. Our lives suffer, we are made less happy and before we know it our once vibrant energies have dwindled with the advance of age. In the end, a life worth living has been relegated to a life worth working, years of sacrifice gone and squandered. Our own personal lives have been laid to waste, sacrificed to our corporate masters. We only live once, we should take advantage of it. All people die, not everyone truly lives. We must truly live. Under the current exploitative system, we live to work instead of working to live.

In the meantime, our children get educated by a corporate media that has become parent, teacher and role model to them, inculcating them in the virtues of materialism and consumption, trained to produce and consume, to not question authority and to never think for themselves. Before we know it they have grown up right in front of our passive eyes, transformed into obedient worker bees, blindly obeying, believing and following what their corporate masters command.

The system has gone awry, the infection of greed has immersed itself into everything once deemed good and anything now prospering as bad. The Leviathan wages war on the masses; longer hours, more stress, less wages and benefits; sacrificing lives for work; government laws and regulations are enacted in favor of corporations at our expense; pollution is slowly killing many of us from inside; our children are growing up obese and sick; unilateralism, cronyism and corruption run amok; we are indebted for life, our savings have been gobbled up by the Kenny Boy Lays of the world. Flames of Hope and solidarity are together our only salvation from this behemoth and the oligarchy that runs it.

United we must stand, saying enough is enough; the masses becoming a monster one-hundred million times greater than the corporate Leviathan will never be defeated. Taking our country back from the grip of autocracy is only possible united in spirit and energy, putting aside our differences and interests for the benefit of mankind.

A new era of human understanding must be born. Flames of Hope must give way to a willingness to make hope reality and reality perpetual. We are ready for a new Renaissance, a rebirth in humanity and in our mental perception of how we treat each other, and the planet. Resources must be shifted away from death and destruction, away from the militarization of the globe and towards opportunity, equality and education. Peace, not war. Equality, not injustice. Assimilation, not exploitation. Fraternity, not divisiveness. Solidarity, not selfishness. We are ready to launch a new civilization, a new understanding of how to live. It is time to take a giant leap forward by disposing of the backwardness we have been living in for too long. Flames of Hope are reawakening from their long hibernation, ready to light the way to a new tomorrow. Our present leaders know not what they do, they are but a few. Why allow them to bring us all down with them when we can all climb to greatness together?

Our primitiveness has supposedly been over for centuries. We must prove it. If we remain as we are, primitive and animalistic, unable to control our animal instincts and urges, eventually we will destroy each other. We do not stand a chance if we revert to our old ways. The symptoms of our disease are too strong, their attachment to us inescapable. Only a rebirth, a Renaissance, similar to the one in Middle Ages Florence, full of energy and optimism, absorbed in confidence and vision, can release us from these Dark Ages we are presently encapsulated in, being led to extinction by those who do not know what they are doing.

We must move away from unsustainable carbon energies and towards those everlasting of the sun and wind. The technology is there, the resources unlimited, the horizons prosperous. Advancing in time means advancing away from our primitiveness in energy extraction. Black gold will destroy us all in fiery hurricanes of unfettered nuclear power. Our transportation must shift away from gasoline. It is time to retire the internal combustion engine. The interests that be will fight for its continued use. Too much wealth is to be made; too much power to be accumulated. We must fight harder to make antiques of this technology that has served its purpose. The future is now; sun and wind await us.

A new appreciation for the planet we inhabit must be created. Mother Earth must stop being despoiled and raped. She is slowly hemorrhaging to death, and she is beginning to cough up the malignant tumor called humanity. Her immune system is fighting back, trying to extract us from her surface. Global warming and the destruction of the world’s forests and oceans will soon unleash consequences we are not ready to understand. We must respect our only home, we must save it and its creatures, of which we are but one. A new understanding of Earth and how it functions is of paramount importance.

It is time to break free from the rusted iron shackles that have for too long gripped us in servitude and subjugation. The Flames of Hope are ready to shine brilliantly, guiding our society to a more just, equal and enlightened fusion of humanity. Free of exploitation and abuse, free of hatred and racism, a world of all for one and one for all. Flames of Hope desire to discard those whose aim is to divide in order to control, those whose power lies in ignorance. Their kryptonite is education and knowledge, the potion that disintegrates them into dust is an awakened populace tired of being misled and lied to.

For too long the scourge has used the system that has been in place for millennia for their own selfish reasons, killing opportunity and talent, drowning opposition and revolution, engendering poverty and suffering for the exploitation that inherently fattens their bank accounts and expands their power. The new Renaissance must eliminate these symptoms of our disease through the enlightenment of billions. Education is the cure, the vaccine we need to inoculate ourselves from the pestilence we have created and the creation that is exploitation.

The Bush must burn, the Flames of Hope must be allowed to ignite, free to prosper, free to warm the world in its entirety, free to take the inevitable next step in human evolution. An Enlightenment and a Renaissance have been trying to come out of the shadows of human forgetfulness, knocking on our door ready to unleash a new chapter in our history, desperately wanting to save us from ourselves by erasing the vices and evils that we have spawned during the last six hundred years.

The Flames of Hope, however, must arise from the will of the people. They cannot spark on their own. Only we can initiate what we want to achieve. Only we can ignite the Hopes and dreams of humanity. Putting aside all we have been inculcated with, drawing a blank foundation, erasing and remedying the fruitless brainwashed education ingrained in us since birth is a good start. We must challenge all we have ever been taught, questioning authority and the history we think to be true, turning upside down the society we have grown accustomed to, that same organism that to our detriment we keep alive and that effortlessly endangers millions. We must question leaders and the dogma that benefits no one except them. A new solution must be implemented, through the collective brainstorming of the entire human species, that in essence defends us from ourselves and sets in motion a mechanism that will transform human interaction and understanding, making of our society that which it is capable of achieving, and prospering in.

Our future is together, as one, one planet, one people. It is inevitable, the path our civilization has been evolving towards since we left the jungles of Africa. Our world is now a giant village, we are all part of the same tribe, of all shades and colors, beliefs and views. Our diversity, if managed right, will be our salvation. If we allow ourselves to degenerate into what a few at the top have in store for us, we will not survive. We will become the first species to self-implode, driving ourselves into extinction, leaving the world to the cockroaches and the scorpions for them to become the next species to rule the planet. The inevitability that is human communalism is upon us, the time to change our ways has arrived. Let us fulfill our destiny, now rather than later, before the errors of our ways send us all on the path of the dodo.

As we progress on the clock of time, Hope must not be allowed to dissipate. The Flames of Hope must always burn brightly, warming us from inside, keeping alive the dreams and goals of humanity, allowing progressiveness to dominate human evolution and lasting long enough to pass the strong Flames of Hope to our children. It is they who inherit this world; it is they that must live in our mistakes, trying to correct the error of our ways. To them the Flames of Hope must burn brightest, and we must insure that they become heirs to a better world than exists today. If not the degeneration of humanity will continue, and the road to extinction will be made that much easier.

It is time to awaken from our decades long slumber. Humanity is ready for a new Renaissance, a new Enlightenment. In fact, we need a new rebirth, a deviation away from our present course and towards principles of peace, equality and justice, fraternity, solidarity and love. We must follow and embrace the principles of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jesus and Buddha and others like them. The rascal warmongers must not be allowed to infect us with their brand of humanity.

Our animal instincts must be controlled, our primitiveness abandoned. There is such greatness in our species and civilization, and we must realize that the future is together, in celebration of our diversity, in appreciation of our differences. In the end, we are all humans, we are all the same species inhabiting the same planet, and today, more than ever, we need to realize that we can no longer escape the consequences of our actions and that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. We are killing ourselves, our humanity and our future. Our great indifference must instead be turned to great action. A new Renaissance awaits us; a new human Enlightenment that changes our reality for the betterment of all who inhabit the Earth. Only the Flames of Hope can save us from becoming another dominant species fossilized for posterity to record.

The confidence that Hope engenders is the salvation that awaits us; as long as Hope exists the Flames will not extinguish and their brightness will lead us to the Promise of a new day. Flames of Hope Still Burn Bright, waiting for humanity's call to action.