Earth Day - March 20, 2010 - Integrity Will Set You Free!

By Melinda Pillsbury-Foster 

At the stroke of a moment, the 40th Annual UN Peace Bell Ceremony will take place. This is the Real Earth Day, Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 1:32 p.m. EDT (Equinox). The mission and vision statement for the real Earth Day was not some sappy after school program, with tee-shirt, but a challenge to live our principles with lives framed with integrity. Peace, Justice, and Care of the Earth.

Those who planned it and participated were life long proponents for clean water, clean air and transparency. The issue was not political in 1970, both Republicans and Democrats were involved.

If you thought Earth Day was in April you swallowed a corporate lie perpetrated that 1970 with the blatant use of the same name by a group of corporate hires. Read the story here. All of us need to be more discerning. Lies are destroying everything we built. Read The Wrong Kind of Green, in The Nation, just yesterday.

Some few have known and tried to warn us. We did not listen until our own ox was gored.

Today is the direct result of that lie and all the lies, the manipulation, and the lack of conscience by a relatively few. Today you see the outcome of unbridled appetite and greed, a lack of conscience and integrity, by those same few. Most of us, the overwhelming majority, do the right thing most of the time.

Together we, the many, can change direction. Integrity and discernment is all we need. Uncounted people today are drawing on their own integrity as they fight for you, even when you do not know it.

Today an elderly man is sitting in solitary confinement in the Los Angeles Jail because his integrity makes it impossible for him to say the words which would immediately release him. In his mind is justice for all of us. He will die for his integrity, for you.

Prominent anti-trust attorney Richard I. Fine was sentenced to “coercive confinement” in the L.A. Central Men’s Jail for an indefinite period of time to silence him. He has now been sixty days in solitary confinement and has been in jail for over a year. Fine was handcuffed and shackled, lead away to jail from the court house, on March 4, 2009. Judge David P. Yaffe gave the order. The court wants him silenced on their ongoing schemes to use the court system for their own profit. They have been attempting to coerce Fine into submission, but failed. Richard Fine is determined to reform the justice system.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17O0T9uRNe5VX9dAQyWR5lC7i47TTZQ7fpy3Wz2qCwMM/edit?hl=en&hl=en&pli=1#gid=0

Don't expect the media to cover Fine's heroic challenge of corruption. Taking over the media, converting it into an extension of corporate PR, was an early strategy, now reaching its fruition. Journalists should have been the first to see this and take a stand. Their own standards mandate it. https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

They failed to exercise integrity.

If we want change we need to do it ourselves and begin by understanding the entirety of the problem we face.

Our world is melting around our ears, caused by this same lack of integrity, installed as the operational formula in our institutions. Integrity is the tool which helps us survive and prosper – if it is used. Integrity includes a refusal to accept lies as truth and so profit from lies. Integrity is an insistence on knowing, not accepting assurances without all the facts.

The awakening of our common humanity challenged generations past to see what was possible and never settle for less. Yet even as we have stretched, innovated and labored, reaching for the vision which is America, we have harbored a devil within. Today the full realization of psychopaths as individuals without conscience, incapable of integrity, is sinking in.

We reject gluttony, sexual deviancy, self-indulgence. These attributes along with the lies and manipulation which simulates emotion, characterize psychopaths. Yet who have we trusted to lead us?

Turn your eyes to those occupying positions of trust in government and corporations. These are occupied by all too many who will do anything to get what they want. Psychopaths are drawn to the nexus of power, they can be charismatic and will tell you whatever you want to hear to achieve their ends. They simulate emotions along with mouthing words of honor to deceive as a matter of routine.

Today experts believe many of our institutions are psychopathic in operation. Dr. Robert Hare, psychologist and world renowned expert in psychopathy, originated testing for psychopathy, common in criminals. Testing is now routinely used for applicants in various service professions such as firefighters, operators of nuclear power plants, police officers and teachers.

While lecturing to a convention of cops in Newfoundland, Hare posed another application for testing, as reported in Fast Company Magazine by Alan Deutschman , “Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?” The screen suddenly transitioned from faces of sex offenders and Mafia Hit Men to, “top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron.” Hare continued, “Why wouldn't we want to screen them?

Dr. Robert Hare coined the word, “corporate psychopathic,” and has since written the book, “Snakes In Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work,” Paul Babiak, Ph.D. and Robert D. Hare, Ph.D.

Look at government. Is what you see any different? No.

Psychopaths have no emotions. Their brains lack these functions neurologically, according to research by Kent A. Kiehl, PhD at the Mind Institute whose work with criminals has been highly revealing. They see you as prey, not as people. Who but psychopaths would send your children off to war on claims they knew as lies?

While psychopaths continue to grab for power and money others struggle to do good.

In Nigeria a man, Francis Bosah, is looking for help with a problem which is confronting people around the world. This morning I received an email from Francis asking for my help. What he needs is tiny. Read the email and what is needed here.

In the wake of WWII chemical companies, now losing profits because overt war had ended, converted their factories from weapons of war to pesticides. Today the level of pesticides is poisoning the Earth as the residue of the war for profit shows up in toxic levels in autopsies from all parts of the world. People are dying, the unborn are not safe and neither are our elderly.

Francis wants to stop this in his country by replacing the use of pesticides with natural, non-impacting solutions. If he were starting this campaign alone it would be impossible. But Francis found an ally who had already produced alternatives to every pesticide now in use.

Steve Tvedten, a former exterminator, lost his uncle and baby son to the toxic effects of pesticides, nearly dying himself. Giving away his company, he committed himself to providing alternatives. His book, is available for free online. Read it for yourself and use it as have tens of thousands now living healthier lives.

Americans believe in the power of the individual. In these three men you see power exercised with integrity.

The vision which is still America conflicts with the business plan for engorging corporations with our stolen lives. Psychopaths are drawn to power. The point of conflict is integrity. Normal people have limits, things they will not do for power. From the member partners of the Federal Reserve, to Big Oil, and on to, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it on leaving the White House, the Industrial Military Complex, they are eating out our substance. See it now.

We did not see this clearly before. They always knew what they were doing.

Each Spring the real Earth Day brings with it the opportunity to remember the opposition will do anything to win. Lying and murder mean nothing to the kind of people who displaced the integrity of the real Earth Day. The death of your baby girl from an injection? Your uncle abandoned and starving on the street because of the nightmares which haunt him from Iraq? These are just corporate write offs.

It is all about money and power for them.

This Earth Day commit yourself to understanding what is confronting us. Stop settling for assurances. Notice what is happening around you. Listen as they mouth the rhetoric which once moved you and remember it when the reality emerges. Learn to see the greed lighting their eyes. Instead of following, live your integrity. Judge for yourself – and at the moment when the Earth turns towards renewal in the Northern Hemisphere, remember, we are human because we feel, we love, care, and hunger for the vision which moved generations to become Americans. The vision is still true.

Earth Day No. 38 - The Summer of Love, Two

 by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

The real Earth Day, the one that takes place on the Spring Equinox, carefully planned by a small group of true and stalwart environmentalists in 1969, continues. On Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 1:48 a. m. EDT (Equinox) a figure will step up to the Peace Bell at the United Nations and a sweet chime will ring out into the night, lingering for all gathered to hear. At the same moment across the world other bells will ring, a symphony of sounds that speak a long and patient dedication to “Peace, Justice, and Care of the Earth.”

The real Earth Day has been kept for 38 years without fail. The faux event, Oil Day, is surrounded by far more noise but more people every day are coming to understand the true meaning of that day in April. If that day had a motto it would be, “Profit, Power, and Exploitation of Earth.”

There was a time when caring about clean air and water united all of us. In 1967 when the Summer of Love bloomed in Berkeley, California, all Americans believed that they stood on the cusp of a time when we would naturally assure that the rivers to flow clean, all shared a common vision for unpolluted air, and war was obviously a problem to be ended. It was a future fervently hoped for by nearly all of us.

It did not happen. The appearance of controversy was carefully manufactured by the same people who now collude to assert ownership of the air we breathe and the water we drink; given the starkness of our future today the words that divide us fade in significance.

Liberal – Conservative – Republican – Democrat – Man – Woman – Black – White. They are just words.

All Americans need to examine how we arrived at this juncture in time. Each of us needs to take immediate action to get off the grids. It is the grids, installed by that ugly concatenation of government and corporations, that caused the problems and divided us. The people of greed need our lives and money to survive; you can stop them by climbing off the grids.

Take this simple yes – no test to find out just how entrenched you are in the grids.

    • Do you pay a mortgage every month?

    • Do you pay an electric bill every month?

    • Do you pay to put gas in your automobile?

    • Do you have car payments to make every month?

    • Do you pay every month for cable television?

    • Do you pay for your Internet access?

    • Do you pay for your phone service?

    • Do you pay taxes, not fees for essential services?

    • Do you pay every month for the water you drink? Use to wash?

    • Have you ever paid a traffic ticket?

    • Do you pay for tags on your car?

    • Do you believe politicians are telling you the truth?

    • Do you believe that the media is unbiased and reports honestly and completely?

    • Do you think that elections accurately reflect the votes cast?

    • Do you know where the food in your refrigerator was grown?

    • Was your food grown within just a few miles of your home?

    • Do you know, for sure, that Monsanto had nothing to do with producing the food you eat?

    • Do you take dietary supplements in hopes of being healthier?

    • When you become ill, do you go to a physician?

    • Do you take prescription drugs?

    • Do you have investments in the stock market that you depend on for income?

    • Are you dependent on a pension that is invested in the stock market?

    • Do you have a credit card with an unpaid balance?

Count up your “YES” answers. If you answered 1 - 4 questions in the affirmative, you are on a grid, but you are close to being free; good for you. With 5--11, you are Grid Challenged; time to exit. If you scored 12--18, you are Grid Entrenched: you need serious help to extract yourself. Anywhere above 18, you are totally Grid Locked.

Doubtless, you think living this way is normal. Add up the amounts you pay every month just to survive: you will see that mere survival is consuming the bulk of your earnings. You probably have moments when you wonder if there is an exit. There is.

There are two things you need to know right now:

Your situation is not ‘normal.’ Throughout human history, most people have not had to pay money just to continue to live.

And you can change your situation, for yourself and for your children. At the same time, you can build a life that is filled with the things that bring solid community, real happiness, and the leisure to enjoy them. You can get off the Grids and be free to enjoy your life, to find those things you never had time for and which, on your current path, will never be yours.

Most of us work ceaselessly to have the time to do what we love. If you reduce the cost of just surviving, your life is effectively longer because you are spending it in ways that make you happy.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness...”

Happiness is getting off the Grids. Happiness is greeting your neighbors with delight and knowing you matter to them, that you are respected. Happiness is knowing you and your family are safe. Happiness is caring for others and feeling your own life extended through strengthened relationships. Happiness is having the time to make each moment worth remembering.

This can be your future.

You can wake up in a home that you know will be there for your great-grandchildren. It keeps you cool in the summer, warm in the winter, without effort or cost: it is designed right. This technology is available today. You get up and go out to your garden to pick berries for breakfast. They are natural anti-oxidants, the kind of food your ancestors took for granted, that kept your great-grandparents healthy. Much of your food you grow yourself or get from local sources. You can see it growing, so you know it is being done right. The food is delicious, it makes your mouth water and satisfies you: you do not hunger for sweets.

Once, you worked in an office building. Now, you own your own business, which you run out of your own home. You could have chosen any of a dozen things to do, but you picked the one that you find most satisfying. You earn less in money, and much more in satisfaction. Your kids are doing the same; the whole world is their school now. They mastered physics by the time they were 14 or so, and now they are taking time to decide what they want to do. No one you know is worried about money.

All the money is local. Your local ‘bank’ is something you can visit online, but you don’t have to give it much thought. You know who runs it, the woman who used to be your son’s 4th grade teacher. She handles that part time, when she is not teaching weaving. The Board meets occasionally, and you were on it for a while before you cycled off. It is simple, transparent, and therefore impossible to steal.

There is little theft now. Honesty is reinforced by practices, all common law, that make stealing unprofitable. There are no big concentrations of money, no easy way to use power to steal. Those who thought otherwise have found out that it would not work and that trying was not a good idea.

There are not many elections: your community handles matters in your local town meetings. There are no standing armies: the rest of the world has followed the example of the Second American Revolution. Everyone you know can explain the principles contained in the Constitution.

You are healthy; you stopped taking supplements years ago, after the Change. You have discovered the ways of healing that the Grids had worked to keep from you. Physicians earn less, but they now feel better about their craft because they are now assisting people to actually become healthy.

For you, the moment of change might have been when you discovered that the cancer that was killing your wife, could be cured. Or it may have been when they turned off your electricity. Or when your 19-year-old daughter came home from Iraq, the victim of rape that was ignored. She hanged herself from the tree where you had built her tree house back when she was 7. We all had that moment, one when we saw what was really happening.

None of us looked back.

Today, you love your life; you love waking up every morning because life today is exactly what nourishes your spirit and brings joy.

You are looking forward to being a grandfather. Your automobile uses no gasoline, and you know it is guaranteed to last a lifetime. That is what you expect from the world, quality in all things. The furniture in your home will last for generations. The former attorney down the street built that furniture in the shop you helped him set up. We all changed, and it was a good thing.

Welcome to the real America – Celebrate Earth Day and remember what matters.

It only sounds impossible. The means exist; individuals have solved all the problems and individuals are coming together to share. You will find those answers for yourself at the Summer of Love Two this coming Solstice in Berkeley, California.