Demean, Diminish, Disgrace, Dishonor

Not to be confused with Reusing, Refurbishing, Repurposing, Recycling

Subverting simple will to faith with the worn-out fictions of intolerant religions

Casually exterminating the bluefin tuna, albatross, dolphin, cod and salmon as mere bycatch

Pumping the sales of cheap imports via artificial guilt created solely for phony merchant holidays

Posting warning signs but not cleaning up the poisoned waters of our lakes and rivers

Letting advertising and entertainment set a totally vapid national agenda

Shaking our heads without taking meaningful action as each new genocide unfolds

Forever fighting wasteful wars and urging our inexperienced youth on to a tragically-false glory

Watching fresh water dwindle and being horribly polluted while letting our population swell

Witnessing our casual gases ending snowfall and spreading hot deserts to our doors

Stockpiling chemical and bio-weapons in case our many nukes are not quite enough

Plowing under fertile farmland for cheap strip malls, offices and ‘convenience stores’

Going it fumblingly alone in ill-conceived, immoral wars with no plan for the peace

Finding false virtue in the long hours but never asking about the meaning in the work

Spending more on building prisons than on maintaining our children’s schools

Wiping out the bears and tigers for some horrid oriental impotence fantasy

Destroying the orangutan’s habitat to ship ancient hardwoods off to Japan forever

Finding our Bonobo brethren in the local meat markets, shot with AK-47s

Discovering lots of our dioxins and PCBs in the rich milk of mother seals

Squabbling over destroying the 2% of old-growth forest that has somehow escaped us

Allowing coal-fired mercury and diesel emissions to poison the infants in mother’s wombs

Wasting money and alienating societies with a ridiculous and failed war on drugs

Nurturing the tragedies of tobacco, alcohol and gambling to retain their tax revenues

Furthering ignorance by portraying creationism as a scientific theory & climate change as bunk

Spending so goddamn much public time on the very private issue of abortion

Letting teenaged grand-daughters of under-aged mothers raise more babies all alone

Cutting every social program but preserving generous tax cuts for the rich

Wiping out the last amazon aborigines through slash and burn by the poor from city slums

Erecting trophy homes while the poor subsist on castoffs and live under cardboard

Allowing faceless and amoral global corporations to dictate domestic and foreign policy for profit

Perpetually stalling socio-environmental progress with the same phony jobs and money mantra

Watching corporate chains put an end to small business by abusing Chinese workers

Outsourcing CEOs signing off on 14 hour peasant work days at poverty wages and calling it progress

Taking pride in corporate agriculture and ignoring its subsidized price fixing

Coating our fields with poisons, fertilizers and fossil water while abusing disposable illegal labor

Fighting emission and fuel regulations instead of engineering better vehicles

Cynically labeling energy efficiency and recycling as small virtues of dubious social value

Backing self-enriching dictators if they allow multinationals to drain off their resources

Clucking self-righteously at grinding poverty which we view as ordained by our own one true god

Allowing immigrants to Balkanize us by providing their old languages in our ads and government

Estranging ourselves from our European brethren and ancestors, to our own great loss

Enriching fracking petro-giants as supplies dwindle without seeking out alternatives

Being required to piously intoning “God Bless America” after every carefully scripted speech

Finding childish pleasure in ATVs, Jet Skis, Snowmobiles and loud truck mufflers

Scoffing with macho disdain at geeks who read, write, solve and contemplate

Actually feeling real anticipation over a media sports event or some reality tv show finale

Twisting tired and worn-out biblical fairy tales into a self-serving, literal truth

Worshiping a system that raises prices with scarcity and thus encourages extinctions & shortages

Selling the fantasy that a negative savings rate allows you to continue to live beyond your means

Regurgitating sound bytes instead of considering issues for ourselves

Preaching that the “jury is still out” on global warming as well as evolution

Feeding cattle grain they cannot digest while people starve and farmland disappears

Not even realizing the vast unsustainablity of our self-destructive lifestyle

India pridefully becoming the most populous nation even when most live like dirty urban rodents

Inflating profits, lying to investors, stealing fortunes and then having folksy memoirs created

Not speaking up at all as the country plunges blindly into a dark night of ignorance and poverty

Lacking any awareness of the worldwide die-off of say, the amphibians and songbirds

Convincing deadended peasants to crusade by pitting one imaginary spiteful god against another

Institutionalizing constant and expensive warfare instead of actually seeking to eliminate it

Glorifying the conquest, subjugation, extermination & destruction of the New World

Vilifying only the losers of every war for their hideous crimes against humanity

Exporting intellectual jobs while pricing higher education out of reach

Gutting pristine mountain habitat for the benefit of the recreation & tourist industries

Attaching narrow-minded evangelical moral strictures on aid to people of faraway cultures

Passing bans on drug re-importation at lower prices over phony, soundbite safety issues

Not creating a moon landing effort for clean energy independence but bailing out the venal bankers

Disabusing world accord via mouthing the transparently stupid lies of industry donors

Melting tropical glacial water reservoirs without the slightest care or regret

Extending the deserts and letting the good topsoil blow across the emptied seas

Labeling any who criticize our doctrines as unpatriotic cowards who undermine our efforts

Spending more on so-called ‘defense’ than the rest of the world combined

Falsely portraying a greedy bulldoze and unplanned sprawl ethic as healthy economic progress

Somehow honoring as patriotic those imported plastic flag decals that adorn our obese vehicles

Allowing amoral agribusiness giants to treat gentle domesticated lifeforms as factory raw materials

Praising free elections in districts illegally re-drawn to ensure your own perpetual control

CEOs defaulting on pension plans and thus earning fat bonuses from the temporary stock rise

Workers expecting more for doing less every year and learning nothing new on their own time

Guiltlessly sticking to bad decisions made in private talks with our personal saviors

Settling issues through simply remaining doggedly on the scripted message of our donors

Explaining mass extinctions and global warming as simple geologic-scale variations

Pushing to get the government out of the so-called ‘business of habitat preservation’

Trusting that billions of selfish, isolated decisions will somehow result in an optimal world

Gutting the land, poisoning the water and selling off resources just to get rich quickly

Violating personal liberties freely on the basis of terrorism and national security

Destroying a society and then telling its people that it’s now their problem to solve

Exporting all kinds of weapons and raw materials but no factory goods

Replacing a heritage of wide open spaces with coast-to-coast, cloned corporate strip malls

Remaining silent, getting by, being comfortable and not making waves

Forgoing savings, abandoning our parents and drugging our children

Calling endless angry repetition of fictional corporate sound bites a reasoned debate

Leaving a lesser world in the filthy wake of our short-sighted and greedy, so-called progress