This Sunday - During Another Long Choice We’d Rather Not Face Directly

I don’t know how anybody else feels.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m HIGHLY empathetic - and very intuitive. Now adays there’s a well-worn term for this. It’s called being emotionally intelligent.

But we can never know the interior world of another person, no matter how long we’ve been here or how good we think we are. But we do have connections, we CAN see each other in some practical yet mystical way, and we have been together here for a few million years and learned a few things since then.

But we have finally become people who do not want to face where we come from, and what we’ve done, in a universally connected world and no way out.

We truly are interwoven. And we have become wholly unbecoming of our own nature, for we have abandoned our limits even though biology is a miracle of the universe in and of itself.

#WeAreNowAlien

We are forgetting ourselves.

To some it may seem that since the sun still shines, flowers till bloom, and we are able to be happy…that we would probably do our best to focus only on what we can create in our personal lives, in the only readily tangible and accessible cauldron of our emotionally directed relationships. That this is what binds us to our lives’ given trajectory and provides the dictation of what our purpose is.

And if we can thrive there, or at least make something good or meaningful out of that somehow, than that is enough. For now, in this or that moment.

Well…

This is altogether true. I don’t want to insinuate that loving one another on an individual, familial, or local community basis is naive in any way; or that it shouldn’t be the most important aspect for any one of us. It’s all we have really, when it comes down to it.

However, we live on a planet where there are exponentially more of us, and in a very very real conundrum.

And by conundrum I do NOT mean that it is some sort of intellectual puzzle to figure out on a Sunday afternoon before tea, as if I drink afternoon tea. I’m American of course, so I drink coffee and beer and work myself to exhaustion so I can afford to fix my ulcer just shy of being turned over to the collections company.

No, what I am saying is that we still live in a world with murderous momentum. With persecution that enslaved and beat down generational bonds; pummeled the organic order of the universe into immense suffering and codified it into our everyday lives so perniciously that many of us fail to recognize it even exists. It is literally out of sight and out of mind so definitively that the physical transportation networks we have taken for granted and rely on as readily and desperately as the air we breathe, that seems and feels as if a divine and irreducible force mysteriously generated beyond our individual ascertainable and humble grasp, this is not done for our very daily sustenance only were it not constructed just as intentionally to maintain this exact bloody comfort of separational blindness (https://dirt.asla.org/2023/10/02/confronting-the-racist-legacy-of-urban-highways/; https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/racism-by-design-the-building-of-interstate-81).

Moving ahead isn’t honorable if it means continuing to run over all those who made it possible to begin the journey, or who are forcibly removed from the story altogether to keep it going.

We must be honest with ourselves.

That means recognizing where we have been part of the suffering, or at least benefitted from it, even if we did not cause anything or take part in it directly or consciously in our own lives.

This brings me to our current predicament…

It may feel as if things are changing for the better. And in some ways, they are.

We no longer have slave plantations. We are more aware than we used to be of what injustice means as a society. We have better technology which allows us to be more connected and access to products of previous generational wealth able to be distributed to more and more people. For example, we have the equivalent of a supercomputer combined with access to multiple services and products which only the highly wealthy could have had access to only several decades ago in many of our pants’ pockets. But many still don’t, and so many are still struggling to get by to survive daily.

But even more disturbingly, we still have to deal with the fact of who has power - and what power means.

Power is the means to direct and control resources on a broad scale, or to dictate societal processes or means. To put it more simply, those who have power are allowed to control what happens to us.

We cannot divorce ourselves that what we have come to know as the circus of, the laughably surreal clown show, the travesty of what we are witnessing in modern “politics”, has a very real interest in us. We cannot escape it, no matter how removed and abstracted it may seem.

We are not just individuals, though the universe only reflects itself in our uniquely manifested experiential life journeys.

WE can only make sense of, and have any reasonably compassionate control - in the intensely existential lense of protecting our existence and any humane aspect of continuing it - over the destiny of our human civilization if we elevate ourselves into the mechanisms of where power rests in crucial moments.

Charasmatic and benign figures cannot do it by themselves. We learned that with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and John Brown.

Presidents will not do it. They are in a system which by its necessity propogates itself, no matter the effect.

It must be done by the forceful pressure of those of us who know what the stakes are, and take the means to ensure that what needs to be done MUST be done. That what is best for the harmony of all people that have dignity of the soul and mind make itself a reality.

This means we must all take part, somehow. We must have uncomfortable conversations, we must question things we always thought would exist or be possible. And we must KNOW that our inalienable convictions must never change.

Don’t become distracted or confused. You already know what these are.

These are to take care of our neighbor as if they are as precious as ourselves, and ensure a better world for our children.

To do this we must understand that our fathers and forefathers built walls between us and our darker brothers, and then starved and beat them into accepting shorter lives and acting like they enjoyed it.

This is the definition of sadism.

They convinced our mothers and sisters that they didn’t need to be connected or even able, to make choices about their own bodies OR their own state of mind, not to speak of their livelihood or means to achieve it. Then they revoked the privilege of arriving at what being a woman might mean, and the universal decision of what and how to create new life commits to your own being.

It is a matter of fact that those who get into positions of power must be forced to use it wisely, but the majority of the time those that get it are either temperamentally or experientially geared to destroy the best needs of our continued prosperity.

And now we are on the highest precipice of history, of our place as a species on earth - we the current living people in our current forms - to DECIDE____

Consciously, if we are to continue living or if we are going to destroy ourselves and much of what we have come to know as the environment around us.

I don’t doubt that we all have subconscious desires of power which we export to our political leaders and we would never admit out loud in public. I know that slavery, murder, rape, incest, gangsterism, genocide…these are all part of the human experience and will continue in some way moving forward - and THAT is what liberals fail to understand -

But

We can’t become accustomed to it, and vote for these calamitous realities into the highest bueurocratic vestiges of power as a matter of permanent policy.

What many fail to understand is that this may be our last chance. If we choose - before this year is out - the familiar evil we relate to as something we can access to destroy the machine as it exists today, with all its problems and relative evils, we will become complicit in what comes next;

and unable to reckon with or change it without suffering the reign of our own unconscious terrorism becoming reality along with it.

Then the grotesque bastion of enraptured persecution will manifest itself in ways we never thought possible, or though to be remnants of the past in black and white photos or ancient texts with many “thous” and “sires” and “locust plagues” and stonings of women so unfamiliar it will seem as if the word Biblical created a spoked terror so kaleidoscopic our bodies and shakras will have become the Second Coming themselves, except without the Rapture.

But there is a way forward. There is more than one option.

And it takes those who are at least relatively aware and ready. And it will look a little different for every individual.

I can’t pretend to say exactly what it will look like. That would be presumptuously maniacal, and bordering on stupidly myopic.

It has to take a form of resistance while building something new at the same time. Some may get hurt, or may not make it, but we - who do not know each other yet or will come to know each other, as James Baldwin said,

“Will build a new Jerusalem.” I believe he was quoting a universal sentiment, of course.

By this I am not referring to strictly Jewish theology, because their theology has become universally known, and now we are linked by dogma - good and bad.

I am referring to the new heaven on earth, which is always our journey to becoming human beings, which we are all rediscovering and rebuilding in the lives we are living NOW on this earth. We must use our comforts, our leisure, our technology - more than every generation in human history - to find a way to be in communion with the universe - and to keep ourselves in the cosmic conversation.

God didn’t guarantee we would be here forever.

But he did give us the divine gift of making choices, and as of right now the Earth hasn’t forsaken us. Not yet.

But it seems as if we are still allowing ourselves to go through another period of starkly terrifying suffering.

But do we have to? Are we addicted to the glory of human limits in tearing ourselves to pieces to see how much we can die and still come back from it?

What if we don’t come back from it this time?

Noone has a license on what it means to suffer. And those who have suffered most can still abuse others. In fact, they are usually the ones who are most likely to continue the abuse.

We can hold sympathy for that tragic condition while also breaking off the tragedy from becoming something grader. We need to isolate power from driving a wedge into our skulls.

We are too special for that. We were meant for something better.

I know it.

I have a niece, and she is better than all of it.

I see it in her eyes, and in her sisters’.

I can’t allow myself to live in a world where their lives, their expressions, and yes - their lived experience - are the direct result of what we failed to do and say because we didn’t know any better. Because we were to busy with self-improvement, or because we thought “this couldn’t happen here”.

There’s a new movie out called The Zone of Interest. It’s about a German family during World War II and only shows what happens in their family life, with many real and deep moments good and bad - not judgmentally but as genuine people - right next to a concentration camp.

The director said in the Oscar acceptance speech what it means to dehumanize entire people regardless of background or race, “Thank you so much. I’m going to read, I’m afraid…

Thank you to the academy for this honor, and to our partners…for their trust and guidance. All our choices we make to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say ‘look what they did then’ but ‘look at WHAT WE DO NOW’ (emphasis mine).

Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.

Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people…

(Applause…)

Whether the victims of October the 7th [2023] in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, ALL the victims of this dehumanization …

How do we resist?

(Scattered applause and cheering throughout the Academy audience…)

(Proper name), the girl who glows in the film as she did in life, chose to -

I dedicate this to her memory of resistance. Thank you.”

We have a long road ahead of us - and much of it may be broken, bloody, and baren, - but which path is that which may provide salvation depends on the choices all of us make now. The only clear direction should be for all of us…

That we must do it together.

How can we be together again, in loving harmony? Especially when those that have the most ready means to change things in the morning are trying to kill us.

That is the question we must answer. And the stakes.

None of us know how long any one of us have. Maybe that’s the blessing, really.

To act as if we’ll keep going, because what will happen actually is a mystery to us - no matter how much we fool ourselves.

I’d like to continue loving myself, my partner, and my family. And knowing that tomorrow will be better, whenever and how long it takes to come.

Today was wonderful. I’ve never felt fuller. That can be true.

I hope to meet you tomorrow too. And we can both smile at the beauty we both created together.