Thank you. It's wonderful to be here today at Wartburg, which I have
long admired as one of America's great liberal arts colleges.

I would like to underline that word "liberal" in the context of liberal
arts. It does not, of course, refer to big government, or to
left-of-center politics. No, as I'm sure you know, it refers to the art
of thinking freely--training the mind to think for itself, free of the
lies and fantasies and prejudices that wrap around us from an early age.
In this time, the very idea of human life on the planet is at stake.

War and violence have taken new and decidedly more dangerous turns.

So you are doing well to be freeing your minds right now. That is a
difficult task, as there are so many forces around you, telling you what
and how to think, and selling you incredible lies. The War on Terrorism
is a good example. It is a term used to keep you from thinking freely
and from actually solving the world's problems relating to poverty and
freedom. If you solved those problems you would severely damage the
profits of the elite. The very idea that you can have war on terror is
as silly as the idea that you can have war on anger.

War itself is insane anger.

As the world's resources become stressed by global warming and
overpopulation, do we really think we can kill all the angry people? Can
we calm them down by dropping bombs on their villages and spraying their
families with machine gun bullets? Isn't that rather like dropping
gasoline and crumpled newspaper on forest fires instead of water? Do you
think anyone really thinks it will work? They don't even want it to
work.

War is too profitable.

It is profitable for those who finance the careers of our politicians.
Islamo-fascism, as a label, is yet another fraud used to keep you from
thinking freely. Some people in the world are so desperate and angry
that they will blow themselves up just to hurt us, that is true. But it
has to do with the conditions of their lives, not with religion.

Religion is always the excuse for murder, but rarely the motive. If I
tell you that God wants us all to clean up the dining rooms tonight, to
scrub every seat and scrape-off every blob of gum, you will thank me for
my opinion and you will back out of the room en masse. If, however, I
tell you that God wants us all to storm the administration building
tonight and change our grades to straight A's, then how many of you will
answer God's call?

In war, religion is a cover and an organizing convenience. That's all it
has ever been, going back to the Crusades, which were all about treasure
and rape. The "War on Terrorism," has very little to do with anyone's
religious beliefs. Terrorism, historically, is a term used to describe
what governments do to rule through fear--to overrule the rule of law.
The term originated after the French Revolution as a tool for
suppressing dissent. If we are to truly prosecute a War on Terrorism, it
would inclue preventing governments from using fear to shred the
democratic rule of law.

If you want to stop insane anger in the world, you have to get at world
poverty and the injustices that people suffer as nations ruthlessly
jockey for resources.

"We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Anytime you hear tough language like that, you will do well to assume it
means the opposite.

If we actually don't negotiate with terrorists, you would have heard the
President make a speech proclaiming that: "Nothing our enemies do will
persuade us in the least to give up on our principles. We will hold fast
to our Bill of Rights and to the cherished Geneva Convention. All
suspects will be afforded a lawyer and a trial and humane treatment, no
matter what. We will not run like cowards away from the Constitution and
the human values that our people have fought and died to protect and
improve. We will not give any of that up to the terrorists in exchange
for some hope of extra safety. We will not negotiate."

THAT would be refusing to negotiate with terrorists. But that is not
what this government has done. In terms of giving up on things of value,
this government has knelt down and emptied its pockets after the first
punch. It was profitable for some people for this to happen.

Not only has our so-called government given away our basic human
rights--turned them over to the terrorists in exchange for worthless
hopes of safety--but they have subjected you and me to endless little
indignities unbecoming American citizens. Why do they harass you at the
airports, refusing to let you stop your car for a moment at the curb to
pick-up your friends? Do they think that, by harassing you in this way,
that they are in any way preventing a truck from driving up and
exploding? They of course know better.

It is not about that. it is about keeping you fearful, and reminding us
that We the People no longer have the power. Speak up at the airport and
you will be whisked away. What a wonderful place an airport is to teach
us all about the new country we are living in. So you take off your
shoes because one madman had an exploding shoe some years ago. I'm not
sure which is worse: one possible tragedy like that, or the smell of a
hundred million feet thereafter.

The point of this airport ceremony is to physically humiliate you into
subservience to the new state. Get used to it, because it is just
getting started--if you will let it. Any politician you hear talking
seriously about the War on Terror or about Islamo-Fascism is lying to
you and trying to prevent you from thinking freely. Call them on it.
Tell them you think those terms are really just a lot of BS meant to
deflect attention from the real issues of world poverty, the
unsustainable exploitation of resources and other issues that we, in
fact, could address seriously with a fraction of what we spend on
counterproductive warfare--though we understand it is highly profitable
for some.

If you are a psych major or have taken some psych courses, you
understand that we often transfer to others the things we fear most
within ourselves. When some leaders label others with words like
terrorist, let them look first to what they are themselves doing in the
world. Are they upholding the human rights encoded in the U.S.
Constitution, and in the Geneva Convention, and in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights? If they are not, then they have forfeited
their right to label other people in any disparaging way..

Do they understand that 90% of the people who die in war are civilians,
and that any pre-emptive, meaning non-provoked war, is by definition an
act of terrorism?

In the term "Islamo-fascist, let's look a little closer. The term
"fascist" was popularized by Mussolini to describe how corporate
interests could be combined with an authoritarian government. If some
American leader has assumed dictatorial powers by claiming the ability
to disregard laws, and if he has given no-bid contracts with billions of
dollars to friendly corporations that he has an actual family interest
in, then he may indeed want to transfer the word Fascist as far away
from himself as possible, but we see through this with our free minds.
The historical shoe fits.

The fact of our condition is that we have two governments. We have a
faceless government that has secret prisons, its own rules, a suspension
of all our rights, and its own armies and budgets. It laughs at us when
we think we can tell it what to do. It has been around for some time
-certainly since the early 60s when we started losing the leaders who
actually represented our values. We do have another government. It is
the one where we have debates, campaigns, elections (more or less), and
where the winners play at a Congress. This government has fallen in
power as the other has risen.

I have lived long enough to see the dimming of lights in the Capitol
building.

These people no longer much represent you and me. The mainstream news
keeps us from seeing the truth of this. We are expected to be happy with
our wonderful cars and your wonderful music players and our fancy phones
that can message back and forth. But we have been left without anything
of our own to say that is not a rewrite of a commercial. If you are not
hearing the truth from the mainstream media, it is because there is a
game here, and one of the main rules of the game is that you have to
pretend we are still a government of, by and for its people. If you
cannot live in that fantasy, you will be ostracized as a nut case, a
fanatic, a fringe element.

That is part of the control mechanism that you have to understand if you
would be free to think for yourself.

If, to create an absurd example, the family of George Bush were
investors together in oil partnerships with the Bin Laden family, or if
George Bush Senior were a part of a company like the Carlyle Group that
has profited greatly from the Iraq War, would those stories be all over
CNN and in the front pages of newspapers, or would those stories violate
the fantasy and therefore be ignored? Well, those stories happen to be
true, so judge for yourself if we have a problem with the news media.

How, indeed, do we bring order into the chaos of our lives once we
reject the lies around us? What is the thing that is not a lie? Where is
a fixed star by which we can navigate our lives through the ever-warming
waters ahead?

Somewhere, perhaps less than a mile from here, there is someone who
didn't come to this lecture. This person took time out of his or her day
to go tutor a kid or help an older person--maybe to help someone learn a
needed language. There is the star. That person out there has more to
tell you than I do, for Love is the only truth that can save us from
lies and from anger and sad living.

The real division of politics in the world is between truth and love on
one hand, which call for the happy development of every human's highest
potential, and the politics of fear and hate on the other hand, which
are known by exploitation and oppression. You know which kind of
politics is at the helm today. Maybe an election or two can make some
improvements.

But, even so, we still have this little problem with the other
government, the one that thinks it is really in charge of our lives and
our world--the one the world knows very well.

When the storm destroyed New Orleans, the wealthy neighborhoods suddenly
had armed Blackwater guards at their gates. These machine-gun toting men
were from other nations and had no familiarity with our Bill of Rights.
They would have followed any order. In that storm, we saw the future, if
we will allow it. Race is more important in organizing political
differences than economic class. So now we see a rise in racial conflict
in America, even in places where we wouldn't have imagined it a few
years ago. The uneasy peace between the races in America made possible
by the post World War II boom is now moving into difficult times. It is
aggravated by the immigration issue.

Can you see these issues freely?

You read the newspapers and the internet news sites, and you watch the
Daily Show, so you know just about everything. Or do you?

The U.S. Farm program, voted for by our elected representatives,
subsidizes the corn industry so heavily that American corporations sell
corn in Mexico for half of what Mexico's family farmers can sell it for.
So half the farms in Mexico have gone out of business. Farm families
have migrated to Mexico's big cities, where there is so much poverty
that all one can do is plan to sneak into America for decent wages. They
die on our desert borders. If it were easy to come and go, how could we
oppress them so easily? We have come to rely upon this oppression for
the smooth operation of our communities. But you will not hear about
this story on the TV news, will you? It is outside the accepted fantasy.

The lies that surround us drive emotions and they drive unkindness and
cruelty, which are the signposts of misinformation and misunderstanding.
People who are not free of mind are not kindly of mind. Kindness is
freedom's truest indicator. If you cannot stop to help someone who
clearly needs your help, you are not a free man or woman. Your chains
may have the glamorous attachments of Blackberries and credit cards, but
you are not free if your time is not your own to follow your heart. If
you are looking for a strategy to improve relations between the races,
between straight and gay people, between religions, you must understand
that such peace is most achievable when there is sufficient truth and
prosperity to go around, and when there is the kindness that is the
product of those two.

To preserve prosperity in the world, agriculture and nature must be
saved.

The coal plants must be shut down--all of them--within the next few
years.

Gasoline-powered automobiles must be phased-out in the next ten years.

International trade must be largely curtailed in favor of local
production.

These are the issues of a politics of love, and they cannot go forward
without some free thinking and some knocking-down of immense lies now in
place. Free thinking, prosperity and kindness, so intertwined, make
cooperative living easier to achieve, and push intolerance away. We have
a lot of work to do, but, can you see it? Do you have a glimpse of it?
Can you stand the idea of Google-ing a little more Noam Chomsky and a
little less USA Today? That would be a good beginning.

Churchill was correct when he said the empires of the future are the
empires of the mind. The big battle for the future is being fought right
now in your mind. Your freedoms are closing-in around you. Our present
circumstances seem to necessitate a new and democratic international
compact between those of you who are willing to do what is necessary to
be free people living sustainably, and to withdraw our support from
systems outside the compact.

The compact can be first between individuals, and then communities. It
can later include regions and nations. How will this be brought forth?
Will it be enough? I don't know, but it's all we can do. Certainly the
Internet, for as long as we can keep it, can get us started. But don't
rely on it entirely, for it is no longer ours to trust. You have the
power to save your freedoms and your natural world.

Truth and Love, Courage and Energy, and a good organizing plan for
cooperative action are your great powers. Don't look for leaders to do
it for you, unless you are standing before a mirror. I'm 97, soon 98, so
saying 'good luck' is about all I have left. I have filled my life with
adventures and good causes. They have not been enough for the world, and
they have not even been enough for me.

But I shudder to think of how bare my life would have been had I not
answered the call to action that you must now be feeling somewhere in
your hearts, as you have it felt before.

Thank you all very much. And good luck.