Reality as we’d come to know it is quickly dissolving around us, and there’s no turning back. The pace of change is so rapid now that it exceeds our capacity to absorb what is happening to us on all levels, individually and in the collective. A tiny virus of global reach is replicating itself with a vengeance while the world freezes in disbelief, stunned by the physical, social, economic, political and environmental upheavals it unleashes on the planet.
We are living a collective crisis of meaning as once distant waves of our aggregate past are coming to shore in the present moment, confronting us with the legacy of greed, conquest and domination we’ve inflicted on each other for millennia. And we can no longer bury the specter of those ghosts coming back to haunt us, as we did with our own human history, written by those conquerors who lived to tell the vainglorious tale.
The scale of our suffering is becoming apparent to us now as we mourn loved ones lost to pandemics & wars, as hordes of species fade into extinction, as forests burn, as wars we export to foreign soils disrupt the social fabric there, sending millions out onto roads of exile and migration knocking, eventually, on our barricaded doors, as our own children attempt to awaken us out of our addicted lethargy.
In the public sphere, everywhere on the news, we witness in horror the erosion of the values we thought we’d agreed on. There are so many variants to the worship of despair, the litanies of alienation that we feel helpless, disconnected, numbed to the scope of the changes that need to occur.
The digital age has long replaced the mechanical world, artificial intelligence is becoming an emotional norm, and nothing compares to the brave new corporate world of surveillance capitalism and data mining we’re now ensnared in. Who could have known that we’d move so quickly from being consumers to becoming commodities?
“Ladies & Gentlemen, place your bets on the futures market!” (trauma manufacturing really is so VERY lucrative…) In the absence of meaning, there’s always the short-term promise of achievement through the addiction du jour, take your pick, which gives so generously up front, then sends you the bill for the very fear you sought to avoid in the first place.
With every heartbeat on the news we witness another shooting, in our churches and schools, in concerts halls and shopping centers. We have become frozen in place by our addiction to violence. The chorus on the news rises daily to a crescendo of disbelief, hand wringing to the core meltdown of politics as usual, flooding our nervous systems with helplessness, as we watch incredulously from the sidelines the reality TV of revolving presidential dynasties.
America has become the land of the free-for-all, mostly benefiting the tiny few who’ve harnessed the sweat and tears of the poor and tapped out the veins of a middle class chasing an impossible consumer dream, to subsidize the swell of corporate margins that run the planet into deficit.
Our social conscience has been eroded by decades of war abroad, the toll on society apparent when soldiers returned home to inadequate responses to the physical & psychological wounds they both inflicted and endured, as families strained at home when parents were serving abroad, to maintain a precarious livelihood aggravated by the economic meltdown of corporations none too big to fail us.
School systems serving children of veterans nationwide reported spikes in substance use and domestic violence at home. Homelessness and suicide rates in our veterans skyrocketed, while funding for services was simultaneously reduced to largely pharmacological interventions.
Military hardware, once used overseas, was recycled to bolster domestic policing efforts in our inner cities, race baiting, manufacturing fear, salting the toxic wounds, marginalizing, incarcerating and demonizing the most vulnerable in our society.
We could go on… But let’s stop it here
We are living in a chaos of our own making
And it is time to (re)connect the dots…