Thanksgiving Day Civics Class

When I was in high school, I had to take a class in Civics. It was a requirement for graduation, and it was the most boring, god-awful class of my entire life. At that age and stage of life, I could not have cared less about the need for 3 separate branches of government or the stunning practicality of the rules governing who managed what or the timing built in to our governance structure…representatives for two years, senators for six years, presidents for four years, this branch having say over those issues, that branch having say over these issues, with communication and compromise built-in all over the place.

Watching what is happening in our country this past year has, for the first time in my life, brought home the incredible meaning of the words “rule of law” and the amount of power that can be available to a population when everyone subscribes to an agreed-upon form of governance.  I’ve learned more in the last year about how our governance structure works and why it is so magnificent than I learned in all the previous years combined.

In spite of the magnificence of our system, we have a lot of drama going on. Some people cry and beat their breast over Trump, but Trump is not where we should be putting our attention. Others demand that Hillary be brought to justice for her many crimes, but focusing on Hillary may be more of a desire for vengeance than justice. Still others insist that those involved in pedophilia, sex trafficking, child sacrifice, be arrested, brought to trial and shame, then imprisoned, hung, or shot – and maybe they will be – but sordid activities like these are only distractions. The biggest issue unfolding in front of our eyes is the demand being placed on a 250-year-old system that has inspired the entire world and whether or not that system is worth keeping.

Is it?

We have been so mindlessly secure for such a long time that we’ve forgotten how awful it can be to try to get water if it’s not coming out of the kitchen faucet. We don't know what it's like to go out and scrounge for food when soldiers bent on winning a war will shoot anything that moves. We have forgotten what it is like to have to sit up all night watching over our house, our vehicle, or our chickens because marauding individuals with no interest in the rule of law are roaming about freely. We have forgotten what it is like to have no police to run to when someone does something that is not fair or against the law. We no longer have the capacity to heal ourselves if the local hospital has been bombed or is closed because doctors and nurses are unwilling to risk driving there anymore. We have long forgotten what it is like to grow up illiterate because there are no schools, we have little sense of responsibility for feeding ourselves, and nothing but helplessness when it comes to maintaining our health. We are victims drowning in circumstances beyond our control. How did we arrive at this victimhood?

The move from self-sufficiency to victimhood is a shift in consciousness. It is not a shift one would want to brag about, nor does such a shift happen all at once. Often it starts with lure of an ‘easier way,’ because we all know that life is hard work. Then we add the idea of getting ahead. Then there comes the moment when we have to decide something... but someone or some organization or institution offers to decide for us and says, “We will do this if you will just do that.” It looks like such an easy choice. So we take it, never realizing that another tiny sliver of our power and authority has been siphoned away.

An example: “Here! Come to our city and work in our business and we’ll pay you some money. We’ll even make sure some local farmer hauls food into the city so you can be fed without a hassle. Just give the farmer some of your money for the food and everything will work just fine!” So you take a job and never notice that it requires you to do what someone else wants, not what you want. There goes your satisfaction and joy. You fall for the money and fail to notice that your connection to nature is slowly fading, your survival skills are dwindling, and you are aging three times faster than your parents did. You fall for the idea of progress and keeping up with the Joneses, never noticing that cooperation has slipped away, replaced by competition, which becomes an unquestioned way of life. You raise your children, and they think this is the way it has always been. You work longer, harder, tell yourself it’s worth it. Soon, the money carrot and all the other artificial systems put in place to get more money from you have sucked your soul dry.

Now you’re facing death. You tell yourself 'everyone dies…so what!'  Then you die. You’re gone from family, friends, and home, still conscious, but without a physical body, looking back on your life and trying to forgive yourself for having wasted the entire life trying to get ahead instead of developing the consciousness needed to become a man or woman of power. This reality system looks so big, so all-there-is when you’re in it, but once you’re out of it, it is so small that you feel like a parochial idiot for never having expanded your consciousness.

What might you have done if you expanded that consciousness? You might have been able to remember other lives when you lived through chaos brought by Mother Nature, foreign soldiers, or the lack of a stable system of governance that held everyone day after day. You might have used those memories to make better choices. You might have recalled being one of those soldiers who pillaged, raped, and murdered with abandon until one day one of your victims refused to run, refused to look away, refused to react with fear and consciously met you and your intent in a way that shook you to your soul. You might have stepped up in your family or community and said, without shame or blame, “Let’s talk about what we can do…” to work together, to figure something out, to bring someone back into the group, to respond in a way that makes sense AND makes a future. Once you're dead, you suddenly see and feel the thousand and one things you could have done differently.

Everywhere I turn I hear people talking about “ascension” as if they know what they’re talking about and as if they’re almost there! I beg to differ. For years our entire population has been spoon-fed with hundreds of suggestions to ignore action and focus on mucking around in the psychology of why things happen. Once we became acclimated to the idea of forsaking action in favor of trying to figure out the reasons for some situation, The Powers That Be began to feed us perspectives and faux-psychology that would appear to explain the situation in such a way that no action was required. Soon, all we could do was speculate and argue about motives and personality. Meanwhile, whatever action was going on was allowed to proceed uninterrupted and unheeded.

That’s where we are today. We are ashamed of our anger and ‘unresolved’ issues. Thus, we fail to realize that the raw emotional power of anger is meant to be married to our passion in order to make change happen in this world. We are so busy trying to pretend we don’t have any anger that we walk around with a simpering smile on our face, call it ‘spirituality,’ and think fine thoughts…but never take action. We are so embarrassed by our childhoods – with their supposed lack of support or nurture – that we cannot recognize that our lesson was to learn to support and nurture ourselves, not in a selfish or thoughtless way, but in a way that forces us to know thyself.

We are so hampered by decades of fake psychology and being told what to think, what to see, and how to rationalize it, we can no longer see what’s going on at all. We prefer pretty platitudes and smooth-talking political salesmen who make a million promises and NEVER do what they promise. How do we handle the frustration of this con job? We take it out on one another.

When a government lies to its people, people know it deep in their core and take permission from those lies to lie to themselves and one another. When a government denies that it is responsible for something that it clearly is responsible for, the message people take from it is that it’s okay to deny responsibility. The problem is that when we deny responsibility, we give up power. What is power? It is the ability to decide and do. We must take responsibility if we want power and the freedom to act on our own behalf.

We may be evolving beyond our particular system of democracy, but we will never outgrow the need for the principles it is teaching us…freedom, honor, fairness, order, community, and personal responsibility. The next stage of human development is to incorporate those principles into the deepest heart of our being, understand the power of the collective, develop our personal power, and move forward into personal responsibility. Only then will we be able to step into the galactic community. Are we ready for that?

People say we are making America great again. That's good. But I think we are preparing to move into a completely new world, one that we have never allowed ourselves to imagine, mostly because we didn’t think it was possible. It is possible, and it’s time we started preparing. Think about it…and Happy Thanksgiving!