How do you shift a mountain?

Opinion by PETER HEHIR

Stone by stone.

We have lived for eons; for tens of thousands of years, generation after generation, culture after culture, race after race, in a world whose population continues to boom.

Where resources have and continue to become even scarcer, where those who have, have more, and those who have less end up with nothing; where the natural world continues to shrink, where whole eco systems become extinct at an ever increasing rate and the survival of all species, including that of the most destructive species of all, humans beings, is for the very first time under really serious threat.

And what do we do about it?

Not a lot.

It isn’t like we hadn’t been made aware.

Didn’t the occupants of Pompeii have multiple warnings about the very real possibility of imminent destruction? What did they elect to do about it? The slaves continued to serve their masters. Why? Because they had no choice.

Why do we continue to serve ours? Because we have no choice?

Yep. Because we have no choice.

Or is it because we have been conditioned to believe that it is an immutable fact that we are powerless to act? That those with the power and the money must know what they are doing because they have the power and the money.

Otherwise they’d be just like the rest of us; the overwhelming majority, scratching for survival.

How do you shift a mountain? Simple. Stone by stone. If each of us elects to shift just a little, we can build a pyramid; we can even change the world. But we need guidance, a direction. Should we turn Left or should we turn Right?

If this is where your thought processes take you, then you’re asking the wrong question.

The political systems from the far left to the far right have taken the hoi polloi to the same destination. An elite and a subservient majority.

Look at all of the civilizations over the past 8,000 years and show me just one where economic wellbeing couldn’t be simplified down to the visual representation of a simple stroke, a vertical line. With the rich at the top and the poor at the bottom.

Where is the society with a horizontal line?

Well we actually had one here before 1788. Sure there were tribal conflicts, just as the nation states of Europe have had for thousands of years. But the language, customs, tribal boundaries and culture were respected and had been for perhaps 80,000 years or more.

And when you look at the map of aboriginal Australia there were just two small areas of land identified as disputed territory when noted anthropologist Norman Tindale showed that the great white empty space wasn’t a great white empty space at all.

The personal wealth/profit motive was an utterly foreign concept. If there was food it was shared. The natural world was respected. Sustainability was totally understood and practised. The needs of tomorrow were just as important as those of today.

Land and resource management were vital for survival. None of the aboriginals that Cook encountered had ever been to university, but they clearly understood this undeniable fact.

Whitey obviously didn’t and still hasn’t.

John Lennon’s Power to the People can be simply dismissed as just a cliché. The tertiary educated will tell you if you give power to the masses they wouldn’t know what to do with it and they will fuck it up totally.

Perhaps. But can it be any more inequitable than either of the two political systems that we have today? Could the world possibly be much more fucked than it is?

That’s why a political system needs to be politician proof. Personality proof. It also needs to be colour blind and with immovable core policies built on rock solid principles, not unlike those that philosophers Petra Kelly and Rudolph Bahro espoused over 40 years ago.

Otherwise we’re just electing pigs to the trough.

Pigs of a different colour.

October 1st marked the anniversary of the death of German Greens politician and activist Petra Kelly.