Guardians of Human Wrongs

By Missy Comley Beattie

It’s a light bulb moment. This decision to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the oil “spill” in the gulf.

Can’t you hear the brains storm?

“What should we do?”

“I know. A commission. A bipartisan commission.”

“Brilliant.”

Of course, we already understand the genesis of the debacle? It’s our culture of greed, the materialism of contemporary life, oil dependence, and indifference to war.

It’s why British Petroleum has donated oodles to political candidates for the “right” to rape our ecosystem and avoid the consequences of criminal activity. This is not dissimilar to the Military Industrial Complex’s ongoing carnage in AfPak-Iraq,

Like pedophile priests, War Inc. and Big Business inflict catastrophic cruelty.

And just as many Catholics embraced a strange, retro reverence that their children’s best interests were lovingly encircled in the beatific arms of caring men, married to ethics, we, ordinaries, have believed, for years, that our wellbeing is honored by those we elect to represent us.

Many of us have awakened to the truth of our plutocracy, but we feel helpless to repair the damage of institutionalized corruption.

Certainly, we can examine the obvious—that our actions in the voting booths do not move the world in a positive direction for anyone but the wealthy and powerful. Government leadership acts on behalf of government leadership and large corporations whose donations ensure the continuation of the status quo. In other words, they, the powerful, win, and we, the powerless, lose.

In the words of Barack Obama, “Let’s be clear.” And clear it is.

The predators are winning. Predator priests. Predator politicians. Predator petroleum companies. They are hacking our environment. Our homes. Our bodies. Our psyches. Our livelihoods. And they are not thieves in the night. They act with blatant disregard, deliberately tripping our alarms because they know we have no one to call. They have disabled our security.

Wall Street biggies exchange emails, bragging about their toxic creativity. They laugh as they stick it to the poor schmucks whose lives are ruined.

Pedophile priests hide their raging appetites for young flesh behind white robes and the poetry of sacred scripture. They, like our military, operate “joysticks” to violate the bodies of their prey. Lump into the depraved mix politicians who cast their votes to fund endless war abroad and at home.

These are the guardians of human wrongs.

Meanwhile, we go about our little lives, some of us sorting our plastic, glass, and cans into recycle bins and standing on corners, holding signs that say, “Peace Now,” hoping to make a difference, expressing concern for our world and, perhaps, setting an example for our children and grandchildren.

But we are slammed, repeatedly, against the rocks. By those with power. By those who choose violence and tell us that this choice will protect American values.

We’ve been brainwashed to believe in the rule of law, yet our legal system protects large corporations and their personhood.

And, now, a commission? To investigate the most tragic environmental catastrophe EVER? A disaster with no end in sight, this man-made war against nature that’s as cataclysmic as the war we’re waging against human beings in the Middle East.

We are pathological, oil-devouring rogues, exploding weapons of unimaginable consequences on men and women who live on land whose resources we covet. We have traded our souls to US empire, exploiting our own young with promises to “make you strong” and platitudes like “love of country” and “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

We are witnesses to the horrors of greed.

How do we exit the craggy, craven path that’s given birth to the petroleum hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico, the disaster of our imperialist foreign policy, and the pervasive complacency that defines our lives?

Not with a commission, wasting time as the centrifugal force of habit holds us to our immoral moorings.