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Mothers' breast milk should be pure and powerful... instead it is loaded with dioxin and many other toxic contaminants. Forests -- literally, the lungs of our planet -- should be large and thick... instead North America has less than 4% left, and we are quickly slicing through everyone else's trees, too. Oceans, topsoil, air, 100+ endangered species a day, as well as our overall sense of well-being and contentment are all vulnerable to and/or vanishing under the deadening weight of chronic materialism. Please consider the words below, authored in 1955 by marketing consultant Victor Lebow, and carried out daily by most in dominant culture...  ...that internalized mandate has disconnected us from our own cores, each other and the ecosystems that make Life possible. We should be righting mad about this. Writing mad. Mad enough to heat up the cool, pathologically desensitized. Mad enough to arouse the limp and disinterested. Be alarmed. It is an appropriate response.
Empathic writers have long sent letters to editors, senators and representatives to voice their concerns. That's good, but this revolt demands more of us. Seeds of sanity -- freedom from mental derangement -- must be embedded more deeply and more broadly than letter-writing campaigns. Our culture is in long need of a new and viable saturation. One that absolutely replaces Lebow's call to consumerism as a way of life. Many of the doctors in the Nazi death camps tried to help the imprisoned Jews by giving them, from time to time, an aspirin to lick. Can you see the littleness of that gesture, however well intended? Socialized craziness requires of us radical revolt and resistance. Aspirin-licking ain't gonna relieve this planetary migraine. We *have* to come together and shut the Sick Show down. United in sanity. Bonded in our knowing of Life. Committed to act, and to cause acts. The redeeming kind. The saving, correcting, game-changing kind. We are homo sapien, not homo consumericus. Start with your Burn, your holy indignation, and craft from there: songs, movies, books, articles, public service announcements, plays, TV shows, business plans, small farms, urban homesteads, community gardens, workplace outings, birthday celebrations. Allow sanity -- sound, healthy thought -- to pervade all of your outputs and creations. Embrace the burden that gnaws at you. It entrusted itself to you. Your particular area of care is just that. YOUR area of care. Own it. Then assert your creative influence into that space. Strike this match made in heaven, and express it on earth. Letting your ink flow into the parts your heart sees as arid or 'off' will, ironically, strengthen you. As writer. As citizen. As lovely, lively human. Cultural conventions that cause cancerous, disastrous consequences have been parading as normalcy. When, exactly, do we wake up from the prolonged stupor of the industrial mania that is sucking all forms, signs and whispers of life at hyperspeed? Will we mindlessly shop 'til everything drops? Remember how delicious it was to play outside. To make discoveries in *the natural world.* To watch the flight-pattern of a bumblebee or red-breasted robin. To get splashed by fresh water from a lake, or salt water from an ocean. To eat berries and pears straight from a tree. To get breathless from a mountain hike. To get romanced by the silver light of a full moon, or energized by the golden light of the sun. To get quiet and still from the closeness of a deer. To get drunk from the scent of honeysuckle. To feel your skin extend to the green land around you. To remember when you preferred a monarch butterfly to a manic mall. Start there. From the place of your deepest care. And write as if your life depended on the blossoming of your words, because it does. Leverage the wonderful technology we have at-hand. Use it -- via the Twitter and Facebook buttons below -- to share this post with others. Start planting your seeds of sanity all over the place. Now. Please. Thank you.
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