Artifacts of culture including music, TV, movies, books, etc offer us, if interested, a peek behind the curtain, a chance to see the little man who is pulling the strings of our social world. Most don't take the opportunity afforded them to see into the world as opposed to seeing out of the world in which we are embedded. Why? One reason is the failure of our education system. Actually, failure is merely a perspective. It is actually quite a success if you judge success by the passing on of convention from one generation to the next. We, like the generation before us are asleep and are only awakened during brief moments when the drugs were out, the money runs dry or we are forced to spend time in solitude with our own thoughts and not those generated by Holy-Wall Street-Wood. Why wake up from the reality that our culture has created when we can turn off, tune out and drop into the latest consumer craze?

In the 60's, some woke up, most who did fell back a sleep, but fortunately, a few not swayed by our narco-culture, remained awake. Their insights into our institutions that drive us to war, to numb out, to want to control others by defining their reality and managing their thinking and behaviors, to consume without conscious thought, to hate, to steal, to pretend to care, remain with us, if we can find them. They are there, some times hidden, other times right there in broad daylight. You can find them in music, in books, on TV, in some movies, in some alternative institutions that have been created over the years. The values, although not necessarily always consistent, or integrated, offer us much more than the values that our conventional culture brings fourth in an orgy of greed, creed and misdeed. States schools, elite rules, industrial agriculture, slash and burn medicine, drugs for everything and nothing, occupations, misallocations, managed trade, getting laid, nickel and dimed, misogynistic rhymes. McFat, Sugar highs, freedom fries, death of right and wrong, the criminalization of bongs, no more privacy, the end of shame, the war on pain (doctors) and the best the President can do in the middle of a national emergency is tell us to go shopping. What type of culture have we co-created that the highest value is shopping?

Fortunately, for every sick institution, there is an alternative one. Many Americans are starting to wake up, although in many cases slowly. They are finding the alternatives to our sick and soulless institutions. Slash and burn medicine has integrative/health based medicine, state schools have competition from alternative education institutions such as Waldorf, Montessori, home schooling, deschooling, etc, industrial agriculture has organic, sustainable cooperative and family farming, managed multinational corporate trade regimes have small business, consumer groups, entrepreneurs, cooperatives, and post-monetary exchanges, and drugs have natural medicines, healthy lifestyles, love and friendship.

Today is Independence Day; I look toward the future with hope when we once again declare independence from another King and his empire. A king with no clothes, no spirit and a dying world order. A king whose institutions which once served the purpose of freeing us from old and outdated institutions from previous times now have replaced those same institutions and become the new barriers to freedom, autonomy, health, learning, loving and living.

Michael D. Ostrolenk
mostrolenk@comcast.net