heart of darkness

I just finished reading an article for Advanced Theroies of Development. My exam is on wednesday and I haven't had an exam since last tuesday morning. So i've been relaxing and slowly catching up on my readings for the class. The article I just read was on ecological imperialism and was quite interesting. Actually it was a chapter of a book by John Bellamy Foster entitled The Vulnerable Planet. It was pretty interesting, but more than that it was pretty darn depressing.

By the end of the chapter, my eyes were welling up and I had a disturbed frown on my face. One of the first things that got me was its discussion of the dirty industrialization that was occurring in the Soviet bloc and Asia that led to some pretty serious health problems for the people.

"So much contamination by chemical wastes had been dumped into the drinking water supply that mothers in the Aral region cannot breast-feed their babies without running the risk of poisoning them" (p100, The Vulnerable Planet by JB Foster).

A mother cannot take part in the wonderful bonding experience of breast-feeding, something that is biologically supposed to be there to offer further nourishment and health protection, because of the political situation. Because the government wants to - needs to - try and develop a comparative advantage against the other economies (cause let's be serious, no one else's developed on naturally as a result of market forces). Because of imperialism, because of capitalism, because of colonialism.

The second thing that really hit me was the bold faced admission of the US's goal in Vietnam: to create refugees, which would give the US physical control over the peasantry via "defoliation" (the euphamism for ecological warfare/ecocide). Does anyone else see the systemic racism in this? The absolute hatred of people? Where will the lust for power end?

I seriously want to vomit right now. The greed, people. The dirty, grimy, smelly, scummy greed. The lust for more, the passionate desire making our chests beat faster for money. For power. For validation.

And I can see myself in all of this. I can see my own selfishness. My own lust for validation, for status. I will forget everything and everyone around me to study because I want to be considered smart. I want to be considered important. But I have people around me to remind me that there's more to life than school. That there is eternity to think about.

Where are the people in the lives of all these other powerful men who make these decisions that end the lives of so many. Who's whispering in their ears saying "there's more to life than all of this?"

Because ultimately, they might get what they search for in their lifetime at the expense of everyone else around them. But they will die. Game over. Who's going to tell them that?