Voting with flowers?
Raw food enthusiast David Wolfe has a pretty good philosophy on politics I think. You don't vote at elections, but you vote with your money. Many people like George Carlin and Bill Maher would also say the world isn't run by politicians, but by money. It's run by donations and campaign contributions from oil companies, food companies, and pharmaceutical companies, friendly things like that. So if we can conclude that voting is pretty much a powerless activity because elections are rigged and American people don't really care about what's going on and what they can do anyway... what CAN we do to put our wishes and desires for a better world out there? What kind of a way do WE want to live anyway? Well, you put your message out through what you buy and what you make of your life.
For example, if you buy organic food, you say that you want a cleaner and more nourished planet Earth. If you buy and plant trees, edible and useful plants and flowers... you express your desire for man to achieve harmony with the natural world. If you buy nice porsche cars all the time, your saying that the world should be filled with finely designed hunks of metals driving all over a paved planet. A paved planet, that's a pretty powerful concept when you stop to actually think about it, and a pretty grim one to me.I'd be willing to bet that almost everyone who buys nice cars never once realize it. Ghandi said it best, you life is your message to the world.
See, this is why I think vegetarianism is so great. It shows you that as a consumer, you have the power to influence the world. You can change things, you can have your message and your opinions heard with your doller. It wakes you up to the reality that we all buy comes with consequences that we often don't see right up front. People don't see candy factories emitting pollution and producing so called food on massive amounts of electrical metal equipment. People don't see how high fructose corn syrup is made and how the way it's made just LOOKS completley poisonous and carcinogenic like crack when it's boiled down. They don't see Genetically Modified corn labratories, and they don't see red dye #40 is and how it is derived from cockroaches. They don't see the MSG that's put into their products to subtly addict us to them. I would be willing to bet though, that if they saw all of that actually happen, and they heard the people of those companies talking about how to make their product appealing to turn a profit... laffy taffy would go out of business the very next day. The same way with ciggerates, or maybe people would be too addicted to quit?
And you know what, people do feel the stress and the afterburn of that stuff eventually, whether they realize it or not. People are dying, people are crying, people are depressed and anxious and confused, people are at war with each other, people are killing each other... and they haven't even begun considering the most important saying in the world as David Wolfe likes to says. You are what you eat and inner pollution creates outer pollution. Unhappy people are not trying to make other people happy. The problem in the world is not terrorism, it's not drugs, it's not the economy or war, it's constipation.
But people don't see the clearcuts that go on in ancient forests to make Kleenex tissues. People don't see the cruelty that goes into making veal. People don't realize that other people have lost almost all of their sense of values, and only us can start to cultivate that sense again. Nobody else can do it for us...
"Jingshen is the Mandarin word for spirit and vivacity. It is an important word for those who would lead, because above all things, spirit and vivacity set effective organizations apart from those that will decline and die." James L. Hayes
