This Is A Strange Sort Of Ark

This Is A Strange Sort of Ark (collage credit: Amaya)

We are all living together on this planet and everyday we face the Light and the Dark. We can transcend that duality and cocreate a better world. It's been a few months since I've posted on here, tho I've been writing offline and really feeling the desire to return to the blog. So, I will definitely be doing more poetry share as well, but as some of you may remember this is also a spiritual/social commentary blog. So, I want to take this opportunity to share some brief ideas that continue to come up on a daily basis as violence continues to erupt around the world and tragedy continues to occur...

When you breed a nation of people into a fierce individualism and consumerism on overdrive, you teach it's citizens to place more value on things and on achieving personal satisfaction than on the lives of other human beings. 

Thing fetish has risen above the value of life, so we destroy each other, we destroy the planet, we destroy our own bodies and we simply don't pay any attention to how our thing fetish is what's killing others. The broken record being played by our institutions, that non-American lives are collateral damage, is a slippery slope to the mind being able to place anyone in that category. It's a dichotomy to assume that Americans should jump into outrage because 26 people were killed in a Texas church while pretending that the 55 innocent people killed overseas by US air strikes in Afganistan on the same day are meaningless deaths to be accepted. Millions of people everyday decide that getting their crap for cheap on Amazon is absolutely acceptable, regardless of the true costs of their purchases. 

The question is not should Americans enact better gun control laws but rather do we value human life. Is the basic welfare of humanity at large more important than meeting the desire of an individual? Are things more important than lives?  We need to ask ourselves whether we can choose to recognize ALL human beings as fellow and equal human beings with as much right to life, liberty, and happiness as anyone else on this planet. Self has been pitted against Other for so long, we now actually dehumanize others that we have never met or interacted with and this creates disparities in so many ways. Some people, over all this time, have managed to expand their cognitive horizon and decide that their community falls into "me and mine" and these folks seem to get all the more outraged when this stuff happens "in our own backyard" but do very little to support their fellow human beings who have become daily victims of American tyranny. We are drunk on nationalism mixed with capitalism, and such fierce individuality that it has largely desensitized the vast majority of us. 

You could read about hundreds dying somewhere overseas without blinking an eye. If you're not buying fair trade or local, you're likely contributing to the slow and painful oppression and killing of scores and scores of people everyday. Indoctrinated by society or not, there's not an adult among us that doesn't have blood on our hands. The fact that we accept this continued indoctrination daily, largely without saying a word, means the killing will continue- long, slow, and silently or outrageous, violently, and in your face. Two sides of the same coin. Scream in the face of the gun control lobby and government all you want, but if you aren't getting over your own thing fetish and living a responsible life, then you are not just wasting your breath, but letting your mind trick you into thinking you're actually helping and fighting the good fight. Stop fooling yourself! 

It's healthy to have outrage when disasters happen, but it's not healthy or productive to say only certain death and suffering is important. The global consumerist society uses many ways to divide us, and keep us placated. While we're busy comparing oppression scorecards and sharing scintillating social commentary memes, wealthy individuals who have amassed power are consolidating and controlling so much of our world, while pumping into us a message of having no agency that has become so effective, it's almost unbearable to accept it and see it. Willful ignorance only takes you so far. It's not hard to see how all these dots connect. When you know these things to be true and you continue to turn a blind eye, you are actively cocreating this violence, this other-ing, this thing fetish. Hiding being a sense that you deserve all the things that other people have The need for change is at the root of how we see ourselves, others, our world, and how all those systems interact. 

We are All One. We are all here, now-living and dying together. We can achieve peace but it requires honesty, love, and a willingness to accept that we were wrong. Whether we were wrong because we were indoctrinated by society, our parents, or who/whatever, or by perpetuating those dangerous idealogies with our daily choices, it does not matter. The acknowledgment of what is at the root of the pain that causes all this separation and harm is needed. Making the choice to accept Others as Self is the first step. To see we are one equal global community and dedicating our hearts and minds to that reality is what will guide us to a future where balanced and peaceful ideals are the focus. 

I have long devoted my own life to eliminating hatred and greed. It is unlikely that this is a task that will ever occur in my entire lifetime, but that does not make it fruitless. Planting seeds of Love and Peace and doing my best to make a fertile ground for them to thrive in, I hope will make future generations wake up from this capitalist consumer coma.

"Can't really act surprised when the harvest has no worth, the curse that lurks around the corner is the product of our work" - L. B.