Protest

I was raised in the Faceless Fifties. Our fathers were beaten minions of Fascism, despite being lauded as victors over it. American Fascism, acknowledged fearfully by Dwight Eisenhower as the Military-Industrial Complex, turned the uniformed millions of the 1940s into a gray-suited army of productive conformity in the 1950s. As children of that era, we were beaten and belittled by brainwashed parents who felt that submission was a healthy thing. Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" is an ode to stifling creativity and individual freedom in favor of corporate enslavement.

Submission to unjust authority is not a healthy act. It is not healthy for human beings. It is unhealthy for the planet, as is evidenced by the mess our environment is in and the lack of crucial action by our political leaders.

The current protest against corporate domination is the flight of the truly free human spirit away from mindless submission to materialism's dogma. The great lies of unbridled capitalism are being challenged. The greed of the ever-resurrecting aristocracy is being exposed once again. Those who would send the poor off to be blown to pieces in unjust war, waged for profit, are being exposed for who they are. The bankers, the oil magnates, the money manipulators... they are being shown up for their selfishness and deluded sense of self-importance.

Peaceful protest exposes those who wear uniforms and wield sticks as servants of those who oppress. Violence, their inevitable weapon to maintain control, marks them as fearful defenders of injustice, of the status quo. They trade their natural yearning for peace and harmony for a government pension. They too are victims of the system they defend.

My humanism began with an acceptance of my basic humanity. Once I truly accepted my mortal life for what it is, I became incapable of aggression and domination. No uniform or title could erase my consciousness of my equality with the poorest and most tortured in society. I believe this is the initial passage to humanism. The practice of humanism is promoting and using that consciousness in moment-by-moment life. The first protest of the humanist is the protest against all the internal conditioning which promotes aggression, selfishness and hatred.