How The NeoCons Stole Freedom: The Story of Earth Day - First in a Series

What do the environmental movement, the United Nations, and the Republican Party have in common? Each was successfully taken over by the elements we now are beginning to know as NeoCons either in this generation or earlier.
Forget the Bilderbergers and the Illuminati. It isn't a conspiracy, it was just 'good' business.
When America celebrated Earth Day this last April 22 it was celebrating the day the environmental movement was taken over by elements we now identify as Neoconservatives – although the people so identified are not new and are certainly not conservative. More on that later.
The original Earth Day is not forgotten, however. It has been celebrated since 1971 in the Peace Garden at the United Nations at the moment of the Spring Equinox with the ringing of the Peace Bell. Those who remember the original goals of the environmental movement included peace for the human family as a whole have preserved the original local and global focus.
Ringing bells sound across the globe at the moment of the Equinox which is shared by all living things. The founders of the Earth Society, among these John McConnell, Margaret Mead, and Helen Garland, had looked for and identified a day of renewal that spoke to their goals for the then nascent environmental movement. They saw a world of people who valued living lightly on Earth, who saw small, local solutions as the ones that best connected people to each other and to the Earth. It was a moment that resonated perfectly with the work of such native San Francisco institutions as the Sierra Club when it was small and personal, assuming individual accountability, responsibility, and simply doing the right thing. It was therefore entirely appropriate that in 1970 Equinox San Francisco became the first official entity to recognize Earth Day.

If all of this is true then why do so few know? How did the commercialized version with its emphasis on the banal and its website so void of meaningful content manage to displace the very different values of the original celebration? Money and spin can accomplish nearly anything if all you care about is the short term profits.
The birth cry of the environmental movement was silently but effectively stifled by an earlier generation of the same interests who now occupy the White House and run our courts and Congress. Using money and misdirection as tools they stole the moral high ground and stopped the movement in its tracks. With it they stole our institutions and the soul of America.

The techniques are simple.

1. Steal credit for the work of others.

2. Use brand new or recycled and stolen organizations to create a respectable front.

3. Place relatives and people you can always control into[positions of power and prominence to eliminate our networks and establish theirs.

4. Find a REAL organization to authorize some fraction of your agenda.

5. Pontificate as you obfuscate. (Lie)

Sound familiar yet? And with any luck the perpetrator can get away with it cold and still be cashing checks generations later. These are the techniques used by the present April Earth Day Cabal thirty years ago and it is still working for them today.
That is what they did. A quick visit to their site reveals that it is all oriented to dumbed down platitudes with not a viable alternative in sight. Educating without content or focus on independent thinking is perilously close to what is going on in our schools today. A review of their big donors is even more revealing.
What was being stolen was the moral leadership of a movement that 35 years ago could have made real alternatives available. That was one outcome, but it is the lesser issue. How this was done and the values it injected into our culture is at least as important.
While stealing a movement that enabled those responsible to focus the
public on irrelevancies and platitudes the perpetrators were also demonstrating that how you treat others does not matter as long as you end up with the credit and money. We see every day how much talking about morals and ethics works. In fact, talking about it while doing the exact opposite has become permanently installed in the tool boxes of so many of us that we no longer even notice. 35 years ago the devaluation of values had just begun. Then Americans still believed they could believe.
Today we celebrate men like Karl Rove because he is expert in lying and
cheating. A culture that rewards getting your way with lies, manipulation and plain violence has signed its death warrant. Ignoring what happened with organizations like the Earth Society can be best understood using economic terms.
It is an economic principle that bad money, meaning money with less ability to hold value, drives out good money, for instance gold, that has objective, lasting value. By occupying the same niche as good money, bad money displaces it because the good money is too valuable to be spent. In the same way good ethics, behavior that invests the individuals in long term relationships founded in trust, is driven out by bad ethics, forcing individuals in look for other means of guaranteeing they will not be ripped off. The increase in commercial packaging to prevent shop lifting is just one sign of this decay.
Cooperative commerce is good money; War commerce is bad money. With
cooperative commerce we build out into the future like a bank account filled with trust and good will. In the second we loot the bank account leaving everyone to starve.
What you do is what is true. Words too often lie.
We should have noticed 35 years ago. Dennis Hayes stole the name, Earth Day. He has consistently demeaned and sneered at those whose idea he stole. He has represented a very different set of values and acted those values out through his actions by delivering sappy mottoes in place of viable alternatives for both the environment and for the world.
How did the NeoCons achieve their place of prominence? Using the same tools employed by Dennis Hayes. And we let it happen. But we can still change it. The solutions are still local. The means for change is still personal accountability. All decent people, right and left, share a common vision that can unite us to act. Now it is time to turn that vision into our common reality.
And celebrate Earth Day on the Equinox.