It is the year 2010. The greatest superpower on earth (US) is increasingly under the supervision of a fundamentalist right wing christian administration. It's a veritable "fast food nation". Education is on the downswing. Military spending on the uprise. Wars being orchestrated in the mideast over political power and fossil fuels. Terrorists wage their own war against the US, which reacts accordingly, buying into their plan, with a "fight fire w/fire" mentality (which acts as a corrosive to their very spiritual foundations, a strategy the terrorists are perfectly aware of, and succeeding at implementing, perhaps a thousand percent more than they had ever dared to imagine was possible).
In this arena, a group of forward -thinking revolutionaries and citizens of the US, begin implementing their plan for revolt: Eradicating the ingestion of refined sugar from their diets entirely. This is their "First Crucial Step" in their attempt to salvage their own previous rights to govern their own country, as originally intended: a government of the people for the people. To even begin DREAMING of doing this, they understand intuitively that ridding their bodies of the slowly -accumulated presence of stultifying refined sugar(s) must perforce be the first step.
They intend to accomplish something of the utmost simplicity (and importance): The clarity of their own rationality and energy. They have studied former revolutions, and realized that this time, an armed militia or similar violent uprising is bound to failure, if not for being outweighed by sheer numbers and/or force, at the very least for the very pragmatic reason of contributing to the already ceaseless implementation of the "cycle of violence" (the very scourge at the heart of what they ultimately hope to rise above).
They recognize that what is going on - on a mass scale in their own country - is nothing short of total control by an elite cadre of usurpers who have gradually cemented themselves into the superstructure, having been inocuously aided by the gradual increase of "opiates for the masses", of which the primary culprit is refined sugar itself, indiscriminately laced into the majority of foodstuffs the increasingly corporate -sponsored nationwide distribution network encourages.
They suspect that this "nigh - total control" by an administration bent on overt profiteering and media control - not to mention self-announced wars on "drugs" and "terror", is largely successful in an almost accidental manner. I.e, they recognize the inherent "slow movement" towards this "ideal" (or inversion of the conventional ideal) as being something that only began almost subliminally; that is, on such a minor scale at first, as to largely go unnoticed. They realize that once this "movement" began to proceed into secondary and tertiary stages of progression - shifting into higher gear, so to speak - that it began to gain a sort of collective momentum, and that at a crucial point - would continue down the vectors of that course mostly by its own generated force of numbers, and having carved itself that path of least resistance, paved a way for itself ending in a closed -loop of inevitable tragedy for most concerned.
They understand that absolutely NOTHING can be done about it w/short -term results. This Beast must be properly deflated by reversing the impetus which generated it. And the only way towards that goal, is to WAKE UP to this insidious reality that crept up on them all while they were busy working, raising families, and otherwise participating in their own society as best they could. Seeing the bigger picture as being something now beyond the control of any individuals, they vow to spearhead a movement by maintaining a kernel of the populace dedicated to the process of fully WAKING UP to the impending realities of globalization and mass distribution of prioritizing profits over health, and a veritable tangled cluster of seemingly inextricable variables all feeding off each other to create the downward slide of tyrannical possessiveness which has been allowed to go on unchecked enough that it has been granted a life of its own.
They have dubbed themselves THE EARLY BIRDS and have begun to assemble meetings one night a week to further study their aims and goals, and the chances (and nature) of their potential success.
During one of THE EARLY BIRDS latest meetings, it occured to some of them that an additional variable may be at stake in this process. They have compared notes, made correlations, and become increasingly concerned about the nature of this conundrum their country has gotten itself into. They each suspect that the problem is one of multiple dimensions, or variables, all working together in concert to effect an unprecedented dilemma in the history of the human race.
One theory The Early Birds are working on, is the idea that the US fosters an inherent sense of CHILDISHNESS in the fully operational and functional - even literate - adult. They have perceived a gradual dissolution of literacy in the populace, in each subsequent generation, as the now-inverted ideals of a once - earnestly Christian nation trump old-standing creeds (such as "Love your neighbor", "Turn your cheeks to the enemy", and "Thou shalt not kill"). This hypocrisy is noted by the Early Birds and earmarked for further study.
They have also duly noted the success with which the current administration's "Newspeak" media -manipulation tactics (along w/the various modalities of "opiates for the masses") work together to keep the populace largely entertained, dulled, or in one manner or another completely subservient to the caprices of the establishment.
Having had quite enough of this obsequiousness, The Early Birds vow to get to the heart of the matter, strictly out of humanitarian concerns. They figure if their own "elected" state officials cannot place the needs of humanity over their own selfish concerns for power and wealth, then by jove The Early Birds will start a movement of their own based on ensuring the accomplishment of this simple objective.
It is curious to note that these various phenomenological traits engendered and commissioned by the short-sightedness and greed of a power-hungry elite seem to have resulted in a sort of retardation of the ordinary mass-growth process of a clustered humanity. I.e, it occured to The Early Birds during one bright sunny meeting, that if humanity as a whole could be seen (more or less) to have yet to fully emerge from the post-pubescent stage, then it was easy to see that when broken down into seperate factions or enclaves, well it made sense that perhaps some of these groups or tribes of humanity may indeed have "grown up" and successfully entered a mature, functional adulthood; while on the other hand, some factions may yet to reach "puberty" as a whole; and still others may be currently engaged in a struggle to get through this oft -difficult stage.
The symptoms of their own culture in the US seem to indicate a particular dilemma in having become largely "stuck" in this post-pubescent phase, and due to a host of ever complicating variables, more or less encouraged and/or nurtured to remain there. It began to make sense to The Early Birds that their country's penchant for entertainment, be it through the medium of movies or video games (to name just 2 examples) may have grown so out of proportion, that it has managed to stultify the otherwise normal growth process of their country, into a nation of more or less needy, spoiled, immature, and not-yet-fully sentient beings.
There came the day when some of the more astute Early Birds questioned the veracity of being able to literally do anything about this seemingly out-of-control dilemma. One of them pointed out the fruitlessness of getting through to a populace so disenfranchised, that only a particular subset of that populace has even conditioned themselves to vote. It seemed as if the nature of the 2 -party system and its simple-minded options (usually of "a lesser of two evils") was stuck in such a stale -mate, that no amount of planning could "sway" the populace into a more reasonably educated voting contingency.
That is when one of the Early Birds came up with the following idea: Acknowledging that "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink", this eager young Early Bird suggested the notion of simply competing with major advertising (itself perceived as part & parcel of the emerging threat to the collective) by virtue of espousing nothing less than the elimination of refined sugar from the diet. He argued that only in that way could there possibly be allowed an opportunity for the masses to assimilate all the variables present in choosing to elect a state official. I.e, that if The Early Birds merely set the precedent of achieving a notably healthier, more vibrant, energetic, lucid and exciting state of being for themselves, then this, in effect, would serve as a form of automatic advertising extolling the virtues of a refined-sugar-free diet.
Perhaps this alone would serve to showcase the benefits of eliminating refined sugar from the diet. Soon others would begin to take the notion more seriously. They would begin to see that their incessant, collective imbibing of sodapops, mass-marketed bread, snacks, condiments such as ketchup, mayonnaise, salad dressings, and most drinks, not to mention ice creams, desserts, candies, muffins, pancakes, cookies and pies really was putting them in a vicious loop of false energy dependence, and directly into the consequences of that cycle's inevitable "crashing". Because by having worked on this incessantly as a collective for many generations, the "energy" and "crashing" have now subsumed themselves so deeply into our everyday lives that they are no longer even noticed as such: we have merely adapted ourselves into a society largely too apathetic and fatigued to bother with important minutae (such as voting correctly or expediently).
The Early Bird's idea being that eventually- when more and more people see for themselves how alert, happy, and carefree The Sugarless have become, they will at last make the decision for themselves to throw off the shackles of their oppression. Fast forward through this process, and eventually The Early Birds hope to literally cut into the voting contingency itself deeply enough that more and more voters get to enjoy the benefits of seeing clearly and WAKING UP to the hard reality they have been led by the short hairs for too many years to count, by a blind idiot force that has managed to get the best of the populace for awhile.
So it was that the latest Early Bird's meeting was adjourned. They vowed to show the remaining populace of their country just HOW to "think for yourelf", by setting an example themselves. (They decided to set a limit on their objective, so as to curtail any possibility of their own agenda somehow getting out of control and consequently adding to, rather than taking away from, the parasitic nature of the problem they were attempting to tackle.) They felt a dire need to express this plan on a strictly personal level, and to "advertise" the level of their success to the world simply by word of mouth, by writing their senators and neighbors, by setting up blogs, and generally bypassing any "legally sanctioned" avenues ripe for corruption and/or redirection back into the formerly growing paradigm.
They decided to cut ties with that older paradigm by beginning the process of rearranging their own priorities into a more reasonable order. Because they were perfectly aware that they had to start somewhere, they decided to honor the integrity of their own independent biological systems - their own bodies and minds -- by eliminating the host of improper substances daily subsumed into them by the products generated from this overt Beast of Greed given life by a surprisingly small initial group of politicians. They made a choice to be patient and have faith that eventually, their own (wiser) choices for maintaining their bodies' integrity (hence their minds') would begin to invariably "bleed" out and affect others who took note of their gradual improved status.
In this manner it was suggested that some day soon, oh, maybe within ten or twenty years even, the tide may become turned about enough so that the pool of voters itself would begin to be comprised of more truly enlightened citizens, non-addicted, and who could actually begin thinking for themselves. Then some day in the bright future, the percentage of lucid voters would finally reassert itself into the majority, and the people of this once -promising nation could look forward to wresting control from the nearsighted tyrants currently in possession of the yoke about its neck.
