I’m in the process of reordering my priorities.
I’ve always been a student of a cornucopia of philosophical truths, all (of course) with LOVE as their basis. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed, since the last former president and COVID, is that I had become extremely frustrated by the way I saw our society was heading, with rampant corruption, racism, white supremacy, male supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia and utter selfishness in nearly every headline. I’ve been witnessing the underbelly — the dark side — of the human psyche and focusing my ire on it, when what I need to be doing is putting more light and love into the world.
We all have a dark side, and when we see someone expressing what’s worst about the human psyche, our impulse is to squish it as fast as we can, send it back underground, back into the shadows, so we don’t have to look at it or deal with it anymore.
But when we do that, we give permission to our own dark side to come out and take command. And that’s where we go sideways, I think. (Some people call it “fighting fire with fire,” which works with actual large land mass conflagrations on occasion, but human psyches are very different.)
I’ve been reading Deborah King‘s series of books and other stuff of hers online, and I think she has identified the lynchpin of the problem. We mustn’t succumb to becoming just as depraved as we consider others in the ways we react/respond to the darkness we see in them. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it so succinctly, “Darkness cannot overcome darkness. Only light can do that.” Only love can do that.
Somewhere, buried deep (in some) (in all but psychopaths and sociopaths), most of the people we decry for their attitudes are loving, misinformed (or proactively disinformed) victims of ham-handed upbringings. They’re fear-based and paranoid. They truly think that equality for others will upset the applecart they’re riding on. They have a scarcity mentality. They think, “There is only so much equality/provision to go around and we need to hoard it, to protect our upper hand in accessing and possessing it.” That’s the white male supremacist attitude in a single sentence. To them, it’s an “us versus them” matter. They get to keep winning and the rest of us need to keep losing because that works for them.
BUT NOBODY LOSES WHEN WE’RE ALL EQUAL! Oh, their egos will take a beating, for sure, but beating the ego is one of the best things that can happen to a human being. Humility is a blessing, not a burden! Count the ways!
It’s all a mass delusion brought about by parents, preachers, teachers and other folks who influence us while we’re growing up. We’re in a crony capitalist-based society that restricts access to health care and denies higher education, home ownership, and other necessities of life to all but the most affluent among us. Capitalism puts insurance companies in charge of denying health care to people who need it and scientists and R&D folks in charge of studying only the products and remedies most likely to earn their stakeholders insane profits.
And Capitalism is just one of the human-devised ways in which some of us screw the rest of us.
It needs to stop.
And the only way we can stop it is to love each other (and ourselves) like there’s no tomorrow, because there will BE no tomorrow for humans and many other creatures until we stop separating ourselves from each other and realize we’re all ONE. What we do to each other, we do do ourselves and to lots of others we don’t even acknowledge we’re impacting (the planet, other living beings, etc.).
There needs to be a tipping point in our human consciousnesses when there will be more of us loving than loathing, more of us caring than separating, more of us communicating than counterpointing. I think we’re on the cusp of figuring it all out, which is why the darkness that’s within is rising up and becoming so vocal; it knows its days are numbered, and it’s screaming, screeching and resisting with all its might.
But love beats might. Light overcomes darkness. There is always a dawn. Darkness is never forever.
