It’s Harder to Keep Silent Than I Thought!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I plan on being silent about the election results until I regain consciousness.  One friend noted that I seemed to be able to type while unconscious.  Caught again!

In the absence of my own thoughts (for now) I am sharing the comments of a long-time friend who is pretty much on the same wave length as I am.  Here is what Lloyd Agte has to say.

Looks like I'll have to fill the gap, then.  I hope a vow of silence is not accompanied by a spell of deafness and blindness!  To wit:

We are hitched to a dying empire.  We have not won a war since World War II.  All others have been truce, withdrawal, or defeat, or stalemate.  We will no longer be in the driver's seat as we were after WWII.  The myth of each generation getting richer and richer by doing less and less (grunt work that is) has come to an end.  The goal of the rich seems to be to acquire more wealth so that offspring don't have to worry about work and so that they can flaunt their "superior" class to an ever impoverishing nation.   They need bread lines, people dying in the street of starvation, food riots, to really feel their superior position.  As the wealth and power drifts into the hands of corporations, who have no responsibility to anyone but themselves, and the wealth percolates upwards in a class warfare that the super rich are winning, and there is less and less money in the hands of the middle and lower classes  that create the demand for goods, our economy will continue to falter and we will continue to try to maintain our lifestyle by borrowing money from the Chinese who will soon have the most powerful economy in the world.

That was a powerful illusion of wealth that the middle-class, and upper class as far as that is concerned, and it even trickled down to the poor, indulged in with the housing boom and bubble.  With nothing down and no credit and lies on a credit report, everyone thought they were getting richer, when it was just a house of cards.  Now they want it back again.  They LOVED that feeling that they were getting richer every day just because they had made the "wise" decision to buy a house.  Everything inflated: price of lumber, housing material, permits, labor, petroleum, stocks, real estate, and on and on.  It was a heady addiction and any drug is hard to give up.  Obama's sober money priming machine slowly does its work, but like a spoiled teenager, American voters want it NOW.  "Wave a wand and make me feel rich again," they shout. And the Republicans are there with their wands and their shills mixing among the crowd to pick the pockets of the middle-class and poor of what little remains.

So expect in each two year cycle a repudiation of those in power by the electorate who want to be restored to at least their illusion of masters of the world, and a constant escalation of material goods is their only means of keeping score.

Lloyd

Getting Beyond “I don’t WANT to.”

A number of weeks ago a friend sent me a saying she liked and thought I might.  It was:

I don’t WANT to,

I don’t HAVE to,

You can’t MAKE me . . .

I’M RETIRED!!!

Maybe it was because it resonated with my frame of mind at the time, but I DID like it.  In fact, I immediately made it into a small poster, printed it and posted it on the wall in front of my computer where I saw it every time I was at the keyboard.

One of the reasons it resonated with me at the time was the fact of the growing discord in our societal “conversations.”  It seemed to me no one was listening to anyone else.  We each were shouting our opinions as though we were the only voice that counted. These were not only the voices of individuals, family members and friends, but also of the media and the politicians. The fact is that they had long since ceased to be “conversations” and were, for the most part, simply diatribes of complaint and finger-pointing.  I definitely didn’t WANT to continue being part of that frustration, but I was!

Then, this morning I received one of those innocuous email forwards.  At first I thought, “Here’s another one!”  The email referred the reader to a blog page, “Confessions of A Confetti Head.”  The first paragraph got me.

Where does REAL personal change come from? You know, the kind that puts you into a tailspin with profound “AHAs.” The kind that after you come back to Earth, you say, “WOW! That was AMAZING!” and from that moment on, you are different. You are different in ways that you may have struggled with for years, or even your entire life.

As I read on I discovered that the author had many degrees, had become certified in many human potential techniques, and yet still felt a distinct schism in her psyche.  With all she knew about living and how well qualified she felt to live life fully, she also “struggled with a dual experience of myself as dynamic and capable on one hand and invisible, unworthy, and less than on the other hand.”   I could also identify with those feelings of a strange inadequacy to really make a difference, to be heard above the din of angry confrontation and lack of civility. Who wants to listen to me?  (Also, who do I want to listen to?)

Personally, I have found myself echoing and believing the “I don’t want to” attitude about life.   What’s the use, I thought.  It is not a pleasant place to be when that is the way one thinks and feels about life.  In that place you feel like a voice crying in the wilderness, hoping the deaf will hear and the blind will see.  They don’t and they won’t as long as we cannot respect and accept our differences.  If this country stands for anything, it is the rights of each of us to be whom we are, and to recognize that right in every other American.  Remember, we ALL came from somewhere else (except for the Native Americans).

Somehow, I thought to myself, I have to get beyond these feelings of not wanting to participate in a world gone crazy.  I cannot hide away in a cave (as much as I would like to at times) and pretend there is nothing to be done, no way to make things better.  I do know I cannot change anyone else.  Great gravy!  It’s almost impossible to change myself.  What in the world makes me think I should even want to try to change anyone else?

I cannot help but remember an experience I had years ago that provided a profound example of what can happen when one decides to change his/her attitude.  I had felt deeply hurt by a situation that occurred.  I felt so angry that I defiantly told myself I didn’t even want to want forgive the other person.  Over a period of time working on that situation I came to a point where I realized I wanted to want to forgive the person.  Finally, I wanted to.  At last, after much work in prayer an objectively discussing the problem with those whose opinions I valued, I did forgive!  In that moment I was totally free from the negative power of the original event.

I wish I could say that overcoming that situation took me beyond ever feeling hurt again or angry and unforgiving.  It didn’t.  Life is not a matter of overcoming one situation and forever being free of challenges.  The most we can expect from meeting a challenge is to understand the process fully enough to use that knowledge to meet subsequent challenges. 

There is only one way, really, to get beyond “I don’t WANT to”.  You have to WANT to.  That is where real personal and societal change will come from.  It is my hope that our society will get beyond the anger and frustration that so many feel.  I suspect that once the midterm elections are over and the politicians have little more to gain from milking the adversity to their advantage that things will settle down for a month or so.  Of course, then the REAL election effort begins and we can return to accusing one party or the other of misleading us, being dishonest, baiting the divisive tendencies in those subject to such efforts and generally further destabilizing our sense of connectedness.  You see where this is going, right?