We The People - Aren't Ready

Nobody's going to read this post it doesn't have a hot topic gotcha lead line. It's not sexy and yet I feel the need to make this observation. The people not only of this country but the entire world aren't ready. This has nothing to do with education, time or opportunity but it has a lot to do with humanity, evolution, civility, logic, practicality and common sense.

The people just aren't ready. They are by and large still greedy, lusting for power consumed with self interest and exploitation as if that will bring satisfaction. It won't, it doesn't, and it hasn't, but until we all understand that we are going to have to suffer the fools who are obsessed with it and those that haven't comprehended for themselves what and why we are here for, and how that will bring about the world we all pray for.

We still have a lot of evolving to do as individuals and societies - a helluva a lot of evolving. If anyone thinks this is mankind at the uppermost reaches of his being laugh at yourself because of your conceit. In gods image please...not yet we aren't...not by a long shot.

How many train wreaks do we have to witness individually or globally to understand that fulfillment does not come through ruthlessness.

The struggles around the world and in the halls of governance are focused on the immediate gain of those who ruthlessly play the game, have a loud voice and have taken a seat at the table. They need to wake up and take those chairs at that table and turn them around. Drilling down on each other while facing off with each other until there are only a few ruthless power brokers left is so completely counter productive and narrow sighted. It gains them and everyone else nothing but annihilation and elimination. Whats going on and real success will come when they turn their attention outward. The choice is a Hitler world or a Mother Theressa world.

By and large the people aren't even ready to talk to each other - meaningfully. There is plenty of talk but it isn't meaningful.

The people just aren't ready. They exalt ignorance as some sort of creed that smart people are evil, that philosophers are dreamers, that art is for fools or investing and that a gun is an equalizer and way out. Weapons a tool of destruction are a path to destruction.

Mankind isn't ready to understand that and it doesn't even have a plan a vision for utopia. Yet utopia is easy beyond easy. Once we take a paradigm shift to a we society instead of a me society and help each other and actually care about each other we'll throw off the shackles of grid lock politics and govern from a human pragmatic center.

We do not have to be weighed down by arrogance, selfishness and the cowboy romanticism of the "rugged individual" going it alone. Its a stupid ideology that pits neighbor against neighbor as we ravage our resources and each other. The world is no longer big enough to accommodate that conceit.

Can you imagine a world where our national interest weren't defined by power and control for profit. What if we made a real commitment to feed the poor, heal the sick and provide for the disenfranchised a world in which the HAVES actually help the have nots and SHARE their wealth?

Can you imagine impoverished nations actually opening their borders and letting us take the food and education directly to the people? Can you imagine a society, nation and world that commits its resources to helping those in need with not just the bare essentials but uplifting them culturally, providing them the tools to better manage their lives, and philosophically with sustainability and spreading a feeling of well being?

The bottom line is there is more than enough to go around. Once we start thinking about being our brothers keeper and making that who we are, and helping those that need a leg up we won't be so quick to tear down our forests to make a buck.

What good is a buck when a whole legion of people on the outside looking in are forced to take up violence to feed their children.

We the people just aren't ready. We aren't ready to cooperate, live together, understand each other or help one another. We're ready to steal from one another, to cheat one another to kill one another, to lie to one another, to beat one another, to torture one another, to make sick one another, to exploit one another, to hate one another. But the opposite of all that is what we need and We the people just aren't ready to collectively give up our self defeating ways.

It's considered naive, idealistic but I tell you it is the only way we are going to succeed as a planet and the only way to co-exist. Those that would excel at ruthlessness must be met and confronted and out numbered. But they won't be if its considered futile, unfashionable or unrealistic or profitable, or advantageous to saddle up to the ruthless. Yet history is littered with examples of the ruthless falling when confronted by the peaceful masses. It is the courage and ethics of the individual that are at play here and those ethics and courage of convictions should be what is celebrated but the people aren't ready.

We are still enamored with ruthless.

The resources we spend on making and creating war are astronomical. Once for a quick second we talked about a peace dividend. We need that to come back into the conversation. Violence is inherent in our culture animals hunt man kills. But the people aren't ready to overcome that because they are acting purely on self interest. As if its somehow not understood that every action has a reaction and that the choices that we make in our individual lives impact everything.

From what we throw out to what we recycle, to what we buy to how we live right down to what we say every individual action, thought and deed impacts the whole of humanity. But the people aren't ready to accept that fact.

The fact that their words have power their media has power, their thoughts have power and that we are all responsible for our global survival in what we do, say, and live and that each one of us is a shareholder, and that no action thought or deed exists in a vacuum. It all impacts the end result of survival or annihilation of our very species.

But the people aren't ready to see and understand we all have that great of an individual power and that we are on a finite planet that has plenty to go around if we all cooperate, share and help one another.

The people think or have been taught their actions don't matter, someone will clean up after their mess, and THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT. Well no one gets away with anything.

Self interest leads down a road where everyone squabbles over the last remaining resources.

At the end of the day its the road to ruin. Self interest does not have an invisible hand to guide it. But if we changed our priorities to helping one another in every way which was needed the benefits to our global well being, individual well being, discourse and health would be overwhelming. And we would have a market sector that brimmed with opportunity, and innovation bursting at the seams.

Our intellect projected outward instead of selfishly limited to "whats in it for me" would simply bring utopia.

There's employment opportunity in helping educate the poor, feed the hungry, cure the sick and protect and cultivate our environment. And the return on that investment would be threefold. Are we really that lazy that the only thing we can think to do with trees is to cut them down? Are we really that lazy and stupid to think that the only thing we can do with the ocean is fill it with garbage and over-fish it to death? Are we really that lazy to think the only thing we can do with a mountain is to blow it up? How is that governing, smart, practical or having even a hint of common sense?

Its the exact opposite and we are going in the wrong direction unless extinction and annihilation is our goal. People turn to crime as a last resort bravado and all no one wants to pick up a gun there's no glory or honor in it and you know it the minute you pick one up.

But there is a heck of a lot of honor in a barn raising.

We do not have to look far for examples but by and large the people just aren't ready. Enough of us haven't reached that necessary level to understand that money and power and control through money and enforcement can't fulfill that empty hole inside our collective and individual beings or give us the purpose we all crave.

The powers that be are wasting your time and my time with their stupid profit wars, consolidation and monopoly.

At the end of it all they'll wind up with a stinking, polluted, nuked out cesspool of a planet.

There is another way but the people aren't ready yet. They can't see the planet from their toes. If we all stood up and changed direction and started really caring about each other instead of only about ourselves well that's a world worth living on.


And a world worth returning to.
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Paul Burke - Author-Journey Home