:: meanders ::
souvenirs from the space-time continuum

"YOU MAY BE AGAINST war, you may be a pacifist, you may be a chronic protestant -- always with a flag protesting against war, against violence. Naturally you can say, "How can I be held responsible?" But life is a complex phenomenon. Your protests, your pacifism, your fight against warmongers is still part of war; you are not a man of peace. And you can see it when people protest -- their anger, their violence is so obvious that one wonders why these people are protesting against war. They should join some camp in the war -- they are full of anger, rage. They have just chosen to have a third camp behind a beautiful name -- "peace". A good mask, but inside is the same anger, the same rage, the same violence, the same destructiveness against anybody who does not agree with them. They are contributing as much violence to the atmosphere as anybody else. They may be talking about love, but they are also saying that you have to fight for love. You can choose beautiful words, but you cannot hide the reality." Osho, speaking on the meaning of Krishnamurti's "You are the world"


image from space.com

The issue of globalization is complex. The present cycle is but yet a return of similar cycles, the two most recent having been the just before the turn of the century and the rise of Industrialism and the railroads and just after the turn with the blossoming of radio and consumerism. A far earlier episode is the European Renaissance globalization, wonderfully chronicled in the Niccolo novels of Dorothy Dunnett. There are of course countless others, and not all with Western roots. Ghenghis Khan "uniting" the vast Mongolian tracts, the Ottomans "uniting" disparate peoples into an Empire whose domain spanned the 13th through 20th centuries. No period in time is left untouched, each golden age but a thin verneer tarnished by the deeds before and after.

What I have found troublesome about many of the anti-globalization proponents and arguments is not the intent, but the almost single-minded hatred for and laying blame on the USA. It is a blindspot of collosal proportions. It is one more abnegation of personal responsibility in the dangerous guise of a worthy cause.

"TO ACCEPT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY will change you, and your change is the beginning of the change of the world -- because you are the world. However small, a miniature world, but you carry all the seeds.

If you want to change the world, don't start by changing the world -- that is the wrong way humanity has followed up to now: Change the society, change the economic structure. Change this, change that. But don't change the individual.

That's why all revolutions have failed. Only one revolution can succeed, which has not been tried up to now -- and that is the revolution of the individual."