Zahir Ebrahim, Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Dateline Friday, March 20, 2009, California.
I can relate to both Mr. David Lindorff's penchant for hitch-hiking, and to the Security man Michael Edward Loftus who commented on Lindorff's article at AFP with a wise note of caution.
I too love to live in the idyllic days of the '60s and '70s. In third grade, living in Pakistan, I would take the rickshaw to school alone. Since my dad's job was in the opposite direction and he got a ride from his office-transport, that was the only way I could get to school which was at least 10 miles away. We didn't own a car – that was a middle class luxury few could afford in Pakistan at the time. And it wasn't a hired rickshaw on a pick-and-drop duty either, but was flagged from the street corner. It wasn't a big deal at all to travel alone. I would wander/play in the streets without supervision like all the other neighborhood kids. In the '70s, I would hitchhike to get around as a high schooler. In the '80s, I hitchhiked all over the UK – it wasn't a police state then – stayed in Youth Hostels, and had a phenomenal time. I knew many friends at college in the United States who had hitchhiked all over Europe with amazing stories of new found friends and interesting journeys.
Then, I watched my own kids grow up, but with us watching them like a hawk, even worrying about them walking home alone from school. And as they picked up martial arts which they diligently practiced for almost ten years in its many different forms and styles, the first lesson the instructors in all styles taught – and kept emphasizing throughout their black-belt journey to which I was a daily witness, or at least 4-5 times a week for years – was how to protect oneself in today's dangerous world by commonsensically avoiding situational hazards as the first-principle of rational self-defence. Hitch-hiking today surely classifies as that situational hazard.
When I was growing up, the world was surely simpler. Today, only a savant would live anachronistically and throw caution to the wind. It is fine to be nostalgic, but incomprehensible to think that hitchhiking is a safe bet as a means to getting back to the idyllic times.
Having said that, it seems to me that humanity needs some effective way of re-coming together to fight the hectoring hegemons who have laid siege to mankind. Our only hope, in collectively standing up to their devilish machinations, requires that we also begin to re-trust the stranger – for after all, we are likely to share the same fate under the bankster oligarchs' plan for 'one-world' government. It was their plan from the very beginning to break society apart, to cleavage the family unit asunder, to make the state the master-guardian for totalitarian control of all aspects of life even in the free-wheeling Western societies, and to snatch compassion, sympathy, empathy, and morality, away from the plebeian peoples so that we can be reduced to cattle, relegated to merely a unit of commerce and industry, and slaughtered at will when we outlived our usefulness or became too abundant in numbers to warrant subjecting us to the same population reduction regimes as the wildlife in preserves.
In fact, as I study more and dig deeper into modernity, the break-up of society as a deliberate agenda of the oligarchic ruling elite is plainly manifest with copious evidence which may be gleaned in my writings on my website http://humanbeingsfirst.org. And it has also become abundantly clear that since it has been a manufactured agenda all the way, and was not a natural development that we have become so violence prone, it can also be overcome. The United States' and the West's social fabric is in disarray largely due to these social-engineering machinations of the nihilist oligarchs to acquire full-spectrum control over us – as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Aldous Huxley have both predicted in their copious writings, one to effectuate, the other to warn. Their moral relativism is seeded in the ''ubermensch' philosophy, and their secular humanism in the selective human rights of the chosen ones.
Well, the natural inclinations of most peoples, which, as Mr. David Lindorff thoughtfully suggests in his reflections on hitch-hiking, are mostly humane and benign, and can be re-harnessed by encouraging its percolation to the social-surface, and once again making such empathy an essential component of the social fabric by fostering mutual interdependence.
So, while I wouldn't necessarily jump into hitch-hiking right off the bat to jump-start such an empathetic social intercourse, nor recommend it to my own kids despite their awesome self-defence skills (I can't win against them in wrestling on the couch anymore) – for, once again, a transition epoch is necessary to re-establish that age of trust and interdependency – a more holistic approach for rebuilding the community spirit, the family spirit, and the "farmer's market" spirit becomes the rational imperative. The latter spirit may in fact become a necessity anyway as barter and local currency become the only way to survive in the hard oppressive times ahead.
That survival may be made easier going back to the idyllic days when the milkman delivered the hand-capped milk bottle to your door and the postman stopped to say hello and received a gracious cup of tea, than the "Mad Max" route which Hollywood would like us to imagine, or the "brave new world" which the hectoring hegemon have prepared for us.
I don't have to adopt their nihilist narratives nor their 'ubermensch' planning as my future. In order to succeed in that self-empowering endeavor, I also cannot continue living the existing paradigm of fear and inhumanity which is being forcibly driven into our lives, and which in turn, is necessitating all the caution and paranoia of the fellow man who is deliberately being reduced to inhumanity as he is goaded into spectating with apathy, or cheering the barbaric destruction of others, while he is himself being primed into violence through the destruction of his own socio-psychic sanity.
So, both gentlemen are correct, one for his lofty aspiration which I appreciate, the other for his temporal caution which I firmly endorse as well. Please don't go and blindly hitch-hike today.
But in order to get there, eventually, do begin by inviting your local neighbors about whom you have no clue who they are, to a nice picnic in your local park and start explaining to them the reality when Alice is wide awake. Make that a regular bimonthly event. Throw the television out which is only dumbing down our kids into 'United We Stand' by “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, and stop supporting Hollywood which only sells the seeds of our discontent for the global agenda of a tiny cabal.
With these basic and simple steps that each of us can immediately take in our own lives, we shall soon be Bringing Back the Thumb! For my children's sake, and yours. And I'll also be stopping to pick up a hitch-hiker, just as they once did for me.
Thank you.
The author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley (patents here), and retired early to pursue other responsible interests. His maiden 2003 book was rejected by six publishers and can be read on the web at http://PrisonersoftheCave.org. He may be reached at http://Humanbeingsfirst.org. Verbatim reproduction license at http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org#Copyright.
The milkman at the door – A Response to Dave Lindorff's Hitch-Hiker's Guide to a Better Society: Bring Back the Thumb! March 20, 2009