Bill Moyers: We Have to Face the Unpleasant As Well As the Affirmative Side of the Human Story

We are living in perilous times. The whole of the Republican Party is off the charts in the depths of deceit, greed, denial of human caused climate change and the urgency that we act, projections of blame onto immigrants and refugees and the LBGTQ+ community and on and on, criminality that it endorses and colludes with, and the daily toxic and polarizing lies that it tells the American People. Each and every time that any republican talks about the over spending of democrats and the need to cut spending, it is talking about taking away the already deeply compromised and limited social safety net that millions depend upon. 

That said, we have not come to this place where the whole of life on Earth is threatened due to one political party that is now taking a deep dive into fascism. Corporate owned democratic politicians who in this neoliberal era have long put the needs of their corporate donors over we the people and the planet also shoulder enormous responsibility for the peril, the suffering and deaths, and the ravages that catastrophic climate change have wrought on humans and wild beings in our country and worldwide. And more...

It is the whole of what bell hooks calls "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" that must be seen for what it is and completely dismantled within our economic, media, political, and religious systems. And it needs to be dismantled within us, individually and collectively. This is the great work of our time. And what I believe must be done if we are to save ourselves and preserve any chance of a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren and all of the children of all of the species on Earth.

Deepest gratitude for Bill Moyers and for all of the wisdom-keepers, truth-tellers, visionaries of our times and times past who illuminate the shadow side of what must be faced, understood, healed, and transformed within humankind if we are to have a future that protects rather than destroys life. One of my bumper stickers sums it up — OUR DESCENDANTS ARE COUNTING ON US. — Molly

America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

They (the corporations) are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They're counting on you to stand at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls "The Patriot's Dream."

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.

— Bill Moyers