I have marveled at and struggled with words or explanation for what I think I am observing.
Hard times bring out either the best or the worst in humanity and with love and respect to us each and all I need to say that I am not impressed with us as a whole– as the months, now year plus has passed, the main thing I want to say is: I am scared for us.
What I am scared about is that it looks like we are at the beginning of another cycle of dark history repeating itself. As has happened for millennia, humans tend to get caught up in taking sides and condemning “other” (or adamantly ignoring reality) so that what else is happening is not being noticed or recognized and suddenly in comes the repetition of human on human crimes. It is always a surprise because of the collective amnesia we consent to. I hope and pray this may be preventable if we can gather our attention and refocus ourselves as a collective. We are capable of this and it is time.
For us to interrupt this historical pattern, we must remember and acknowledge:
- Our government/the powers that be including the media lie to us and manipulate our thinking as a practice; this is not rare, unusual, or conspiratorial, it is the norm. Take a look at the history books.
- The horrifying acts humans commit on each other come via propaganda and lies made out to be irrefutable truths.
- Science* has unequivocally proven 1000’s of realities which we now know were not ever true. (There was a time when most humans believed the world was flat, that cigarettes were health-giving, that owning slaves was righteous.) In all cases, it is quickly forgotten that humans who did not agree with the norm were silenced, marginalized and in some cases annihilated—again, look at the history books.
*Science is the current all powerful; it has been the church, kings, politicians. This changes with time but an all-powerful influence is consistently part of the historical movement.
Here, at the edge of another repetition of dark history, how is it that we are still more compelled by choosing sides and grinding into our personal beliefs than by creating change or interrupting obvious patterns?
I believe it’s our need to BELONG.
The IMPERATIVE that we have a place in our group makes us dumb.
Why?
Well because the imperative that we belong is a biological drive, not an idea or a “wish”—we will do anything to belong—this is how genocide, slavery, mass rape and murder of innocents happens. We consent; this is what our group is doing and we unquestioningly join as this is the rule of belonging—or we question but do anyway or we leave one group and join another thereby taking that side and having our core need to belong met elsewhere.
We MUST belong or we perish.
Whatever “side” we are on—COVID, politics, whiteness/racism are all just places to belong—by neurobiological mandate, what we “know” is going on faith, believing and offering ourselves unquestioningly to those beliefs more than we realize. Our bias towards our own group is hard to see but very much part of how we are gathering information and “educating” ourselves—and the tricky thing, tender thing, is we cannot see this…we are censoring the information we take in, we are censoring the information we share. We just are.
If you are an exception, congratulations, you are overriding millions of years of evolutionary imperative—this is possible and this is where we most go to prevent this next uprising from being a repeat of the past…the thing is, everyone reading this is not that rare exception—please contemplate this and courageously challenge yourself to shift your awareness, to challenge any and all absolutes. Train yourself to listen to those you consider to be “other” and if you can, belief by belief, maybe by maybe, expand your circle of belonging– at some point there will be no “other”.
