In the old geopolitical paradigm, Montes explains, «limited energy is competitively captured and consumed by restricted number of organisms, to detriment of the rest; energy is mostly used inefficiently, improperly recycled, and released into environment as polluting waste; energy stocks decline and environment irremediably suffers; living organisms
increasingly suffer in a world of diminishing resources.»
Indeed one reason why even the most virulent attacks on God give rise to no upheaval
in the Muslim
world, something that only insults to the Prophet and his Book are capable of doing, is because the former has
suffered a kind of «death» while the latter has
increasingly been divested of his metaphysical attributes.
What can we do as educational and cultural workers, at this crucial moment
in history, when corporate revenue expands as the job market shrinks, when there is such a callous disregard for human
suffering and human life, when the indomitable human spirit gasps for air
in an atmosphere of intellectual paralysis, social amnesia, and political quiescence, when the translucent hues of hope seem ever more ethereal, when thinking about the future seems anachronistic, when the concept of utopia has become irretrievably Disneyfied, when our social roles as citizens have become
increasingly corporatized and instrumentalized
in a
world which hides necessity
in the name of consumer desire, when media analyses of military invasions is just another infomercial for the US military industrial complex with its huge global arms industry, and when teachers and students alike wallow
in absurdity, waiting for the junkyard of consumer life to vomit up yet another panacea for despair?