Aspects Of The Same Issue

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed?
Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations
and corrupt politicians —
be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane
to piss in our own cistern,
but we allow others to do so
and we reward them for it.
We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
How do we submit?
By not being radical enough.
Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Molly Tuttle/John Mailander: Gentle on My Mind

If we apply our minds directly
and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world.
But we will also see through
the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.

--Wendell Berry
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays