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On the road again:
Greetings from Green Valley, Arizona
Today's Story
Well, a few weeks have passed since my last blog.
I’ve been taking care of situations on the home front while the world continues to stir up a witches’ brew of “toil and trouble.”
In July, I reported that Cyndy had been in the hospital with severe acute pancreatitis. Many of you responded with good wishes for her health and wellbeing. Thank you.
Since that blog, she has been back to the hospital twice due to complications. But, she is home again and getting better.
So, for today, I want to revisit three previous blogs that I posted in late May and June.
In those, I quoted philosophical opinions about viewing our country’s current chaos from “The Fiftieth Floor” where it’s easier to see solutions and, then, participating in the “Spontaneous Evolution” that will advance out of that chaos when society reaches the “Tipping Point” and cries out, “There must be a better way.”
There is a better way. It is available to us.
Here is what some of the people I look up to have to say about new perspectives, waking up, and dramatic change.
Our intent by viewing situations from The Fiftieth Floor is to encourage and uplift others during this strange and dangerous time. This concept is the place to launch.
The unsustainable system has hit the wall. We could not keep moving forward with the cultural status quo or the idea of “Make America Great Again.”
All the symptoms, from questionable pandemic, global climate change, economic collapse, and religious and racial violence, are ALL symptoms of one crisis—we are in the 6th Mass Extinction, as revealed by science over 12 years ago.
The current world chaos is an expression of either an “End of Time” or a “Beginning of a New Time”—all dependent on how the chaos evolves. The resolution may be evident by election time.
This is a tipping point. The current confluences of crises may activate a critical mass of the heretofore uncritical masses to join the awakening coherent mass of imaginal cells, as the falling caterpillar debris piles up.
It’s important that we shift the energy from “uprising” (which keeps us in the same “you vs. me” field) to “upwising” where we wake up to the illusion of separation and wise up to the power of love and connection, moving from the fear-based “emergency” to the love-based “emerge and see.”
Note: imaginal cells are tissue-specific progenitors that biologically compel a caterpillar to metamorphose into a butterfly.
As we pull money out of programs that actually help people, poverty remains unchecked and disorder—including crime—spreads, thus justifying ever-increasing police budgets and, eventually, ever more militarized police.
Impoverished communities, communities of color, must now be kept under control with occupying armies. This is currently the status quo—which is suddenly facing global outrage and is coming apart even as its defenders try desperately to hold it together.
Quoting author Noah Berlatsky in the online news magazine “Foreign Policy,” Koehler continues: “The military also directly benefits from, and relies on, domestic disinvestment and poverty. The armed services focus recruitment efforts on lower middle-class and poor households.”
Instead, Koehler says, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee of California has put forth a congressional resolution that would cut $350 billion from the military—almost half the Pentagon’s bloated annual budget.
The savings would be used to help struggling families—including more than 16,000 military families on food stamps—pay bills.
Reinvest in people? Are we really ready for that level of common sense?
Topple a few statues, remove some iconic names from American institutions, and the ghosts of the past start to escape from history, filling the present moment. It’s called awareness. Too much awareness can feel like chaos.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people would prefer to stick with the old historical narrative, the one that’s so tried and true: This is the land of the free, the home of the brave, the birthplace of democracy. God bless America! (And forget about slavery, Native American genocide, racism, packed prisons, nukes, endless war, etc.)
The question of the moment is whether this narrative is gone for good. Are we merely in the process of making some superficial adjustments or has the national soul truly torn itself open?
Will we stop short—once again—of creating a society of compassionate equality? Will we eventually (as soon as possible) retreat to another narrative of American exceptionalism and ... uh, white power? Or are we in the process of real change?
I confess to being an optimist. The ghosts of the past that are returning to the present moment could be the harbingers of unimaginable change. Even the changes that seem trivial—rebranding Aunt Jemima pancake mix, for instance—have roots that go deep into the national identity and its sources of power.
What matters about the present moment is that change seems to be coming from multiple directions, both outside and within the corridors of political and economic power, as our ignorance shatters and we wake up.
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Thank you for caring. Thank you for reading my stories.
God blesses everyone ... no exceptions.
Robert (Bob) Weir
