Opinions of Thursday, 10 September 2020

Columnist: Stacy M. Amewoyi

The lie we live - Part 1

Stacy Amewoyi Stacy Amewoyi

At this moment you could be anywhere, doing anything. Instead, you sit alone before a screen, reading working or learning. So, what is stopping us from doing what we want, or being where we want to be?

Each day we wake up in the same room and follow the same path to live the same day as yesterday. One time each day was as a new adventure, along the way something changes.

Before our days, we not time-bound, we were timeless, now our days are scheduled. But is this what it means to be grown-up or to be free? But are we free?

Food, water and land, the very element we need to survive are owned by corporations. There’s no food for us on trees, no freshwater in streams, no land to build a home.

If you try and take what the earth provides, you will be locked away. You will be termed as uncivilized or uncultured. So, we obey their rules. We discover the world through a textbook.

For years we sit around a large table in groups and taught. We then get tested and graded like a subject in the lab. We are raised not to make a difference in this world; raised to be no different.

We are to smile enough to do our job, but not to question why we do it, so we work and work, left with no time to live the life we work for until a day comes that we are too old to do our job. It is at the cemetery we are left to die, and our children take our place in the game.

Together we are nothing more than fuel. The fuel that powers the elite. The elite who hide behind illegal corporations. This is their world and the most valuable resources known in the ground.

It is us; we build their cities, we ride their machines, we fight their wars; after all, money isn’t what drives them, it’s the power. Money is simply the tool they use to control us.

Worthless pieces of papers we depend on to feed us, move us and routine us. They give us money and in return, we give them the world.

With our trees, they clean their air, and on our factories, they poison it. Whether it is water they drink, its toxic wasted stinks. Where animals run free, our factories and farms where they are born, are slaughtered endlessly for our satisfaction.

Over a billion people are starving, despite us having enough food for everybody. Seventy per cent of the grain we grow is fed to animals we eat for dinner. Why help the starving you can’t profit often?

We are like a plier scraping the earth, tearing apart the very environment that lasts us to live. We see everything as something to be sold, as an object to be owned. But what happens when we have polluted the last river, poisoned the last breath of air, have no oil to fuel the tracks that brings us the food?

Where when we realize money cannot be eaten, that it has no value. What do we do next? We are destroying the planet, destroying our life on it. Every year, thousands of species go extinct and time is running out before we are next.

If you are living in America, there is a 41% chance you will pick cancer, heart disease will kill one out of three Americans. We take prescription drugs to deal with these problems but medical care is the third leading cause of death, behind cancer and heart disease.

We’re told everything could be solved but throwing money at scientist to begin to discover our pills to make our problems go away but the drug companies in cancer societies rely on suffering to make profits.

We think we are running from the cure but really, we are running from the cause. Our body is a product to what we consume and the food we eat is purely designed for profits.

We feel ourself with toxic chemicals, the bodies of animals infested with drugs and diseases. But we don’t see this, the small groups or corporations that own the media don’t want us to. Surrounding us with the fantasy, we are told this reality.

It’s funny to think, humans once thought the earth was the centre of the universe. But then again, now we see ourselves as the centre of the planet. We point to our technology and say we are the smartest.

But do our computers, cars and factories illustrate how intelligent we are? Or do they show how lazy we have become, we put this civilized mask on but when you strip that away, what are we?