12 step plan for the United States

[ritaxis]

 

Proposed 12-step plan for the United States and its Power Addiction. Before beginning, we must understand that the addiction to power is an illness, not merely a bad habit or a set of maladaptive behaviors. Seen this way, illegal invasions, secret overseas prisons, bullying treaties which work against the interests of our allies, runaway arms trading, and all the other dangerous acts which our country does every day are understandable as symptoms and signs of that illness.

 

1. We admitted we were powerless over relationships: that our lives had become unmanageable. We look at the state of our own people -- with adult health and neonatal mortality near the bottom of the developed world, with a quarter of our children going to bed hungry at night, with the institutionalization of a permanent unemployed and underemployed class, with ever-widening gaps between the rich and the poor, and we know that we are not making good use of our gifts as the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. We look at the quality of our relationships with other countries -- how the love and admiration other nations once held for us is increasingly replaced by horror, fear, resentment and pity: how increasingly our diplomats depend on bluster and intimidation and get less and less cooperation from other countries: how our interventions sow only discord, tragedy, and chaos, rather than the democracy and prosperity we promise -- and we understand that our hegemony has become a juggernaut already gone over a cliff. at the base of which are rocks and mire, neither of which we will avoid of our own power.

2. We have come to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. What power greater than ourselves exists in the world today? None. However, even the uncontested might of the only superpower on earth is not as great as the power of the entire international community should it be capable of uniting for a single purpose. Only the international community as represented by the UN has a chance of becoming that power.

3. We will make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the international community. By doing this, we elevate the UN to the higher power necessary for our liberation from our illness.

4. We will make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We will open our records, make public our secret documents, pay attention to our statistics, be honest about the condition of our country internally and its behavior internationally. We will embrace the truth and not flinch.

5. We will admit to the international community, to ourselves, and to the Native Americans the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. We will be entirely ready to have the international community remove all these defects of character.

7. We will humbly ask the international community to remove our shortcomings.

8. We will make a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. In spite of the desperate straits of many of our citizens, we are still the most wealthy country of all, and we are completely able to do this.

9. We will make direct amends to such people wherever possible. We will invest in the community of Bhopal, providing medical care to the survivors and cleanup for the land, and clean industry for the future. We will invest in the rain forest of the Amazon, providing the funds and knowledge for the indigenous to replant and nurture the forest. We will dismantle the seed patent system and re-engineer golden rice to breed true. We will rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf of Mexico at cost and without the participation of Halliburton. And so on.

10. We will continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admit it.

11. We will seek through open and honest communication and discussion as equals to improve our conscious contact with the international community, asking only for knowledge of their will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a political awakening as the result of these steps, we will try to carry this message to power addicts all over the world, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.