A couple of kids protesting in a church on the other side of the planet taught me that if you want to play with fire, be prepared for the consequences.

A musician who’s part of a corporatised musical group playing officially-sanctioned anti-corporate lyrics taught me that hypocrisy knows no cultural bounds.

You see, I’m all about the power of the people.

But keep in mind that my goal is to move the wealth of many thousands of millionaires and billionaires out of reach of the people.

The “people,” of course, is a meaningless term that can be used positively or derogatorily: “We the people…” or “you people,” and its many forms used to provoke crowds in time for [re]election.

The people get used a lot, don’t they/we?

Keep people distracted while we prepare…

Well, I’m not supposed to tell you what’s being prepared, am I, if I am to maintain this storyline?

Let’s imagine a few possible futures:

1. It’s clear that changing the habits of billions of people to save themselves from themselves is not going to happen when so much profit is at stake, including just good enough profit to feed the mouths of billions of people.  If you had the opportunity, would you set up a location for your friends and family that is safe from invasion by non-heavily armed people and sufficient to provide you a livable subculture/ecosystem while the rest of the world was experiencing major/negative climate change?
2. You have great wealth at your disposal and you believe that the global economy is your friend so you spend your billions of dollars trying to improve local economies which, in turn, improve the global economy, increasing not only your chance for survival but the whole world’s, too.
3. You and your friends in private and public businesses have been testing the theory that living off-world is a sure way to hedge your bets about Earth’s climate change and any detrimental effects it may have on your way of life.  You encourage the use of public funds to affirm your theory while you amass the resources you need to build off-world colonies.
4. Your family has lived in relative poverty for generations.  You have competed against your peers and created a small empire — it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labour, cost no object in pursuing a life of luxury.
5. Your family has lived in the peace and comfort of middle-class living for generations — no reason for you to change the course of history.
6. Poverty means nothing in your subsistence lifestyle.  Words like “blog” and “computer” do not exist in your language full of nature-based terminology.

All of us are familiar with these scenarios, through personal experience, from someone we know or by popular culture references.

In telling the story of our species in relation to the humongous universe in which we barely understand we live, tying these subplots together is interesting some days and boring on other days.

However, it’s all I have to work with here.

Like going from static cartoon strips to creating animated daily cartoons in writing, if not drawing.

Protestors with machetes will most often lose to security guards with guns, who will always, always, always claim self-defense after discharging their weapons and killing protestors.

My question is this: if the commander in-chief claims credit for killing a notorious villain, does he also take credit for the most number of military suicides of any commander in-chief during his time in office?  If your military has some of the lowest morale on record, then I, in honouring my father’s legacy, have to ask myself why anyone with a military background would vote for you?  Following that train of thought, how many of us benefit from one of the largest peacetime (sorry, I mean “war on terror”) military deployments in history — should we also question re-electing the commander in-chief?  In this case, the Law of Unintended Consequences meets the Law of Diminishing Returns.  What am I missing here?  What am I not telling the reader?  I am not my father so why is there not a viable third candidate for me to elect?

Ahh…the balance of power.  ‘Tis a game that entertains, n’est pas?  Sarkozy and Berlusconi quickly become footnotes in history.  Merkel, like Kohl, is not far behind.  Anyone remember Mikhail Gorbachev or Deng Xiaoping?  Did Greece used to be a country?

It will be no different on the Moon or Mars.  More pioneers, more forgotten history as we scramble to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves from the elements while armchair bystanders question our motives and protest our version of progress that clashes with theirs.

Remember the Golden Rule: S/he with the most power protecting a stash of gold makes the rules.