Preamble: We, the ragged remnants of Pleistocene blood and sunshine, hold these truths to be self-evident: that all consciousness is created equal, that it is endowed by creation with certain inalienable rights, that among these are air, water, eros, wildness, and art. The human race in general and Americans in particular are mired in malaise and fear because we have shat upon the love and wildness that sings and aches in our hearts. We offer the following in loving outrage:

Article I: That our various governments are never going to cease starting and waging wars should be completely obvious to everyone by now. The reason they won’t cease making war is that they don’t want to. War is the raison d’etre of their existence as well as the source of their wealth, despite their shrill and numerous token efforts to pretend otherwise. Given a reasonable urgency of will to do so, our governments have the means to put an end to this bloody lunacy. In a civilian individual, the lack of such will in the face of countless thousands of innocent deaths would be universally regarded as criminally insane. The captains of our various ships of state are vicious sociopaths.

The end of war is our responsibility as individuals, families, and communities. We must take the political mass murderer’s weapons away from them. Their weapons are our poor, brave, swindled, coerced sons and daughters. We must offer honor and healing love to our veterans whose blood and bravery have been illicitly used to pay for the greed and cowardice of politicians, but it’s time to cut this nationalism bullshit and give our hearts to our watersheds, our families, and our neighbors. It’s time to say no, to refuse to serve, refuse to enlist, to desert, to shelter and honor our deserting heroes.

Article II: Our various governments have not taken meaningful steps to reduce human dependency on fossil fuels, despite the many catastrophes that dependency has spawned, for a reason that, despite the terrifying complexities of its machinations, can be stated very simply: they don’t want to.

The real, functional political issue has little to do with a finite and shrinking supply of oil, global warming, or the dangers of nuclear energy. The real issue is whether the generation and consumption of energy will be small and local with an emphasis on family and community self-sufficiency, or large and monopolistic with an emphasis on family and community dependency. Massive, dishonest, and often violent manipulations of the cost and availability of energy, coupled with the multifaceted terrorism of war and looming environmental catastrophe serve to maintain the demoralized apathy of dependency that keeps the masses viewing their political leaders as abused children look at their parents: with a weird mixture of awe, love, and fear so intense that it blocks them from realizing the pathetic miscreants ought to be caged and medicated.

Article III: Unloved work is the great, unacknowledged problem of the Industrial Age. The entrapment of most people (even the relatively affluent) in lives of labor they do not and cannot love is an essential component in the pervasive atmosphere of apathy and defeatism which nurtures the passivity requisite to maintain our collective willingness to tolerate false and needless wars, environmental degradation, and the steady erosion of basic civil rights. What, in a village or on a small farm, would have once been called a “work ethic” has devolved into an ethic of drudgery. This process has been reflected and supported by a parallel devolution of education into vocational training.

Article IV: There are too damned many people. Pollution is, among other things, a symptom of overpopulation. Political leaders have not taken meaningful steps to limit population growth because they do not want to. A steady supply of the young and poor flowing forth from a large, frightened, apathetic working class is necessary fodder for cannons, meaningless and/or dangerous work, votes easily purchased with shallow, cynical lies, and the constantly expanding markets that fuel the constantly expanding fortunes of the rich. There is no reason disconnected from the greed of the rich and powerful that the world should have a human population larger than three billion.

Article V: No one has ever cornered the market on salvation or enlightenment. Neither dogma, nor scripture are necessary prerequisites for a profound, life-enhancing spirituality. Incantations, rituals, and ceremonies can alter only the consciousness of the practitioner, not tangible realities, laws of probability, causal relationships, or, on a moral level, responsibility for one’s actions. Magic doesn’t work. To err is natural. To forgive is human. There is no forgiveness in nature.

Faith exists as a dynamic equilibrium between belief and doubt. As such, faith cannot serve as a vehicle of fanaticism. Fanaticism is based on a static state of certainty. In spiritual matters, certainty is always false and often dangerous. People do not kill others as an act of faith; they kill as an act of certainty.

While in the intimate, communal environment of a tribe or small, unified community spirituality tends to impose healthy restraints on leadership’s inherent susceptibility to egotism and greed, when the scale of a society expands beyond the realm of direct interaction among virtually all members, the restraints of spirituality must be replaced with a constitution. When religion allies itself with political power and wealth, it inevitably becomes an instrument of oppression.

Article VI: There is no inherent mystical or moral value in the shapes of flesh anyone is hormonally and/or aesthetically drawn to consensually play with. When a politician tells you your marriage is threatened by the gay couple who live down the street, the underlying message is that the politician believes you are delusional and unintelligent. If you feel troubled, threatened, or frightened by the details of anyone else’s sexual desires, the appropriate combination of counseling and medication may help in resolving your problem.

Article VII: Time spent watching television represents a net loss of information. People would receive more information in an hour sitting quietly by a creek than from their daily several hours of television.  A person who claims to be deeply religious, but whose political opinions are conspicuously lacking in compassion is usually someone who has been electronically diseducated by an unbalanced excess of the shallow, fragmented, sensorially impoverished swill of commercial television.

Article VIII: The programmatic destruction of wilderness and wild lands is not merely a matter of the carelessness of corporate greed (although it is indeed that)—it is an instrument of oppression. It is no coincidence that a nation which ostensibly values personal freedom above all other social and political concerns came into being amidst a great wilderness. The wild hunter-gatherer life that is humanity’s most ancient heritage is the origin of the living possibility of personal freedom. When the last of our wild land is either gone or its wildness is so irremediably compromised as to be nonfunctional, we will have lost the hunter-gatherer option of our primal nature. If that dark day comes, our society, no matter how affluent it may be, will become a prison. Our dwellings will cease to be places of comforting shelter and become cages. Our food will cease to be a vehicle of celebration and exist as mere fuel. Our leaders, who speak with righteous fervor about spreading freedom abroad, are digging up freedom’s foundation here at home and selling it to multinational corporations at bargain basement prices. They will not set aside a reasonable portion of our nation’s wildness for our spiritual and psychological sustenance for the very simple reason that they do not want to. It is not in their best interest to nurture wildness in the hearts of their constituents. They would rather rule a nation of sheep than a nation of coyotes—it’s easier and much more profitable.

Article IX: The Bill of Rights is dissolving because our political processes are dominated by an elite class of hacks and hustlers who do not need it. Our variously corrupt and devious political leaders are supported by a class of peasants so utterly reduced to mindless subservience by a relentless flood of consumerist propaganda cleverly disguised as light entertainment and demoralized by unrequited desires that they eagerly vote against their own best interests. They proudly send their young away to die violently in third world shit holes to defend the economic interest of the corporations who bury their lives in drudgery and poison their land.

Article X: Caring for the sick, wounded, elderly, and very young and feeding the hungry are fundamental, collective responsibilities of a civilized society. Failure to address those responsibilities is worse than mere neglect, oversight, or incompetence; it is savagery. Our leaders have chosen not to meet these responsibilities because they don’t want to. The tragic powerlessness of the victims provides a valuable contribution to the aura of apathy and defeatism necessary to maintain the desired level of subservience in the general population. Those same victims also serve as convenient scapegoats for middle-class dissatisfactions, especially as the middle class is eroded by the increasingly brazen depredations of the corporate ruling class.

Article XI: Corporate agribusiness is a cancerous growth on the soul of agriculture. That it produces cancer from the soil of America should be surprising only in its poetic horror. As an outgrowth of corporate industry’s desperate clinging to the nitrate munitions profits of world war, its current entanglement in America’s lust for foreign oil is not surprising. Those who preach and bray so loudly about the sanctity of life should consider the monstrously arrogant sacrilege of patenting a genetically modified life form and punishing farmers for saving their seeds. The terrible irony of getting fat while growing steadily poorer is a very dark and cynical joke indeed. Traces of sick laughter in the background are visible in the evil, sleazy grins of our politicians.

Article XII: The corporate meat industry is a moral blight on humanity. The killing of creatures living within the natural expression of their evolutionary heritage for food is natural and, when done with reverence and compassion, can be as clean an expression of primal divinity as planting a seed, making love, or giving birth. Vegetarianism only avoids the blood that can be removed from the hands with soap and water. The real moral issue in eating meat isn’t killing for food—it is forcing one’s fellow creatures to live in squalor and misery for profit. Calculated depravity cannot be excused by efficiency or convenience.

Article XIII: The venality of our leaders does not excuse the exchange of our complicity for high fructose corn syrup and motorized toys. Our failure to see our glittery simulation of affluence as a terrible impoverishment is the fuel that feeds the current epidemic of political dysfunction. You don’t have to let your body swell into a swinish reflection of a politician’s soul. You can feel the land beneath your feet. You can watch the creeks flow. You can eat fresh, flavorful tomatoes with sensuous abandon in August and September. You can eat venison with sharp, poignant appreciation in January. You can love the soil, the sunrise, the wind, the snow, the laughter of children, and the musings of the old when they are untroubled by pain and fear. Carry those in your heart when you make love. Carry them in your heart when you make art. Carry them when you vote.