Why do many think we may never stand face to face in mortal combat with an enemy that wants desperately to kill us & who will resort to any method to do so? This willingness to hide from & deny these realities is a basis for them to occur.
   Ask the self... Why was the conflagration of WWII so widespread? Consider the prior generation & the state of the nation during fascism's spread. Ignorance with its root word of 'ignore' is again a central issue, just as it is today. We had come through the extremely prosperous decade of the 1920's. No one thought the party would end. Remind anyone of the 1990's? Great portions of our population didn't think the party could end & then denied that it did when the stock market crashed on black Monday. People jumped out of windows in NYC. Remind anyone of Sept. 11th, 2001?
It's time to choose new behaviors. Do we want to have to fight an ongoing global war that very well could completely consume humanity? This means destruction of you & all the stuff you are letting distract you from taking preventative action... Obliviousness will not save us from the fate of being born. We can run but we cannot hide from the ever-present conscience.

   And so, why not now take up our honor & act. Be a hero. I believe that every good action - adventure hero myth was sent through humankind’s collective consciousness to inspire us to save good from evil. Life is bigger & grander that we can think. Join in it or at least, please get out of the way.
   The end of the oil era is already happening, just not so much as it should in this country. My petition is intended to help avert war & spark prosperity. Do we want the E.U. to continue to defeat us economically? This is a whole other war. The American dollar is in decline. Europeans & Chinese are beginning to buy this country out from under us as fundamentalist Islam takes pot shots. America is not & will not continue to be the superpower of the planet as we have been lead to believe if we continue to allow IGNORE-ance to roost in our mind’s eye.
Ignorance is not a judgment of stupidity. Ignorance is a process.. Ignorance, the process of ignoring… When one ignores to the point that it is self-defeating one becomes justifiably stupid.

   America ignored Hitler’s plague of fascism as he spread it across Europe. That was ignorant. We were then forced into death grips because our ignorance led to the stupidity of warfare. Warfare is stupid because it requires killing. Someone’s father/brother/sister/cousin/uncle/mother/aunt is killed & their counterparts are left alive (because you can’t kill everyone… Remember? Hitler tried that)… So the ones left alive seek vengeance which is why war is perpetual & only breeds more war. War has traditionally been about resources and/or ideology. This petition intends to do something about the resources part & to pull funding from an enemy who ideologically opposes us. We can beat them without ongoing slaughter, simultaneously wining back the respect of the nations, the health of the planet & making $’s in the process.
   Act for country, for planet, for yours & everyone's chlldren... & yeah, act for the reason that seems to be the prime motivator these days... Act for yourself & your wallet. Sign the petition... & maybe take another step and send the articles or April issue of Wired to your congress people &/or the Prez. I do this purely for the hope of a world I’ll be comfortable bringing children into. I will remain childless by choice until then. I refuse to bring innocents into economic &/or environmental slavery. A close examination reveals that they are one & the same (i.e., the resource base is the basis for all wealth, so it’s destruction means economic destruction).

   The month I write this marks the 60th anniversary of the battle of Okinawa. This was possibly the most atrocious example of men hatefully destroying each other in hand-to-hand combat. Do you think the veterans who served us there did not wonder how things came to be at that place as they saw their brothers in arms mutilated before their eyes? What a slap in the face of every veteran it must be for them to witness this culture of materialism. Was such sacrifice made so that we could live in decadence & complain when things don’t go exactly our way as the world around us again plunges toward greater conflict? If we have no respect for our planet, might we have some respect for our battle veterans & try to see that young men don’t have to kill one another just to have a chance at living a decent life? Begin the begin… Sign the petition for starters, then examine yourself & your world through your consumption behaviors. Reboot! This is a call to brains!

In ∞ Love,
Eric Joseph Haase
May 4, 2005