War and its fiendish, capitalistic bedfellows is a scourge on humanity and the planet. If you have been inculcated with fear and claim to just want to protect Americans, realize it doesn’t work because it is destroying the living planet.

We need genuine progressive thought and action because conventional thought is leading us down the primrose path of near-term extinction – which means, literally, the loss of habitat for all higher forms of life on the planet within a few decades and the concurrent slip into the longest night of never-existing-again as a species. Now who could want that?

While it’s pleasing to see Bernie Sanders populist support, his rhetoric along these lines leaves something to be desired. The Green Party is the only voice resembling reasoned awareness. Meanwhile, pay attention to the way Donald Trump will play the deep, latent tendency of poor Americans to vote for someone that promises not to spend on tax dollars on some poor ‘other’ like all those different-from-us immigrants and refugees. Tax policy favoring the rich will ride in a Trojan Horse of promises just so hollow.

Meanwhile, policy to protect us from that same despised other will continue to enjoy legs. News flash, the despised other is our repressed hatred of our own shadow. Time to deal with it.

It is so obvious the way they all play to these deep, fear-based qualities by mimicking the father-knows-best, expert tyrant that will keep us safe, protect the little of the good-ol-days that remains, and even, in Sanders case, restore the order of prosperity within our borders from some imagined past.

Things will never be the same because we live on a finite planet with real limits. Predicaments require response, but they do not offer solutions. It is time to respond to the depth and direness of the planet’s physical, emotional and spiritual condition.