Chaos is driving us apart, our collective humanity must bring us back together
The hardest piece of news to come out of Nice for me, was the story of an
eyewitness describing a baby’s body with its head crushed by the truck. What
sort of a monster does this? How can this baby’s parents (if they survived) endure
this pain?
And for all parents all over the world – regardless of country, race or
religion – facing similar horrors, none should ever be put in a position to
endure this agony. It’s just too awful for words.
And who won in Nice? The Far
Right, led by Le Pen, that’s who. And the Far Right is rising everywhere.
That should concern all of us greatly. Of course ISIS (Daesh) claimed it, but
this claim isn’t stacking up, even if the French President is jumping on the
radicalization bandwagon now. He must. His government is at risk. Please read
this great piece featured in the New Yorker this weekend – What We
Know About the Attacker in Nice.
No doubt we can’t seem to cope with lone wolfs or nutters. You can’t do
anything about them. You can’t predict them. It’s adding a whole new dimension
to our current time of crisis.
There is no question in my mind that our world is in chaos and the
politics of division and hatred are tearing us apart. We’re all enduring Trump,
but did any of us see Brexit coming? Australia elected Pauline
Hanson (a pathetic racist), and there are many other unstable political
situations around the world demonstrating one thing. Fear is winning.
And then the bombs go off. In Istanbul, in Iraq, or the terrible,
graphic massacre in Bangladesh. We mourned the victims of the Orlando shooting
by a person who appears to be a confused homophobe, and couldn’t believe it
when a monster set off bombs in Saudi Arabia at its most holy place, during its
most holy time! Cops kill black men in America and then cops get killed by a
black man in return. Turkey is just overcoming a military coup where too many
civilians died.
An eye for an eye
makes the whole world blind.
Horrible people are committing horrible crimes, and they are winning.
Fear is winning. It’s awful. Hope feels a long way away and I have always
believed in the best of people, always.
The vast majority of people are essentially good – no matter where they
are from, what religion they follow, or who they love – but there are monsters amongst
us. A small handful of bastards who want to drive the world into chaos and
drive us apart. And they are winning.
We all talk about the threat of ISIS or Daesh and more often than not,
they are just claiming involvement. And we lap it up. We believe the media –
especially if a Muslim was involved. Only Muslim’s commit terrorism, didn’t you
know? Bollocks!
And yet fear is a lucrative business. Money, oil, drugs, weapons…. There
are many people getting very wealthy while we all cower in fear behind what,
safe walls. Really? There haven’t been safe walls since weapons capable of
travelling thousands of miles were invented, let alone nuclear weapons.
But it’s not just weapons for foreign wars
“Since
9/11, the Department of Homeland Security alone has doled out somewhere between $30 billion and $40
billion in direct grants to state and local law enforcement, as well as other
first responders.”
Look at the police
uniforms. Is this really necessary? Are we accepting a police state as normal?
And who is benefitting here? The weapons manufacturers? You betcha they are!
I believe we’re teetering very close to war and in war, it is always the
little man who dies. The voting public who listen to the media and are influenced
by ignorant thinking are always the ones destined for the front line (or their
children or grandchildren if they are too old). This demographic is always the
cannon fodder of war. They will passionately support war and they will die. It’s
how it goes.
We often look back at history and wonder how the hell did it happen? How
did the Nazi’s get an entire country behind it’s horrific extermination of the
Jews? How did the Rwandan genocide happen, where one-day,
people woke up and hacked their neighbours to death?
It was a slow and insidious process that’s how. It happens step-by-step.
Fear-by-fear. That’s how it succeeds. Slowly, the consciousness of the people
is filled with this frightening “otherness” and then everything explodes.
Can we not see that we are heading in the same direction? Could you see
yourself hacking to death the lovely Muslim family living down your road right
now? Don’t think you’re capable of it? We have thousands of years of history to
show that we are all capable of it.
We just need to be a fed a reason and there is none more powerful than
the idea of ensuring the safety and survival of one’s family.
Afterwards, we’ll cower in shame and guilt that it happened in our
country. We’ll lick our wounds, pull our country back together, and eventually,
heal as nations. A new “Anne Frank” book will be published and consumed for
generations, all trying to learn the lesson. But do we ever really heal from atrocity?
Do we ever really learn the lesson? Unfortunately, I don’t think so.
I am definitely concerned we are teetering towards WWIII. The first two
wars started somewhere far away too, and before we knew it, the whole world was
engulfed – in separateness and the full ugliness of humanity turned against
each other.
We turned a blind
eye in the build-up then, are we turning a blind eye now?
Let’s look at the refugee’s crisis. Babies are drowning, freezing, being
sold into slavery and these future slaves will know nothing else, because their
parents are long-dead and cruel people are seizing on this opportunity to snatch
innocent lives away. I believe we need to feel more outraged as a human species
about this. We have to stop the ‘closed doors’ thinking. It is this thinking
that keeps feeding the enormous problem we are facing.
Why can’t we see that?
Because let’s face it, while dealing with one of the worst refugee
crisis in living memory right now, wait until the environmental refugees start
pouring across borders. And it’s coming. Record temperatures in the Middle
East and New York
City predicted to be un-liveable by 2080. Bangladesh is basically doomed,
and what are we doing to prepare for the mass of humanity that seeks shelter
then?
We are trying to get the most at
risk countries prepared, but we need to prepare for environmental refugees
too. Not later, when they’re drowning in the oceans or freezing to death while
crossing Europe during winter.
It’s coming. Winter
really is coming.
We continue to turn our backs on fellow humans in need, because that’s
not our fault. Well I’m sorry, when we vote in the politicians who decide to go
to war and then afterwards, face the fall-out of that decision, don’t you think
it is our fault? I do. Isn’t that democracy?
We are at a point in time where we need to say ENOUGH!! The world is
more connected, more immediate, more global AND more compassionate than it has
ever been. Everything is changing at a phenomenal pace too - read this
article about the speed of change – don’t underestimate its impact please! - and
we must brace ourselves. The Industrial
Revolution took 80 years, the Digital
Revolution will take 20 years, if that.
These changes mean jobs lost, industries destroyed, political
instability, educational revolution, rising inequality, and more. But it’s not
happening over three generations. It’s one generation. That’s why this time is
so hard. It’s brutal because we can’t adapt fast enough.
But we’re approaching it the wrong way. Dividing isn’t going to help us.
“Us” and “them” doesn’t exist. We’re all one
people today. So we need to open our hearts and minds, and help everyone through this time.
So I suppose we
have to ask ourselves this
Is what we are facing the natural evolution of our planet and our
species? Is heading towards more chaos and war what we need to move forward? I
mean we’ve certainly always moved forward after
wars right? Slowly but surely we get there yes?
Or is it time to recognise the puppet masters – the tiny percentage some
call the ruling elite, the illuminati or the New World Order (aka the
politicians, religious leaders, media barons and business leaders) – who are
manipulating and controlling us all, by keeping our eyes focused at the lowest
level, where we hate our different
neighbour, believe what we’re told, elect pathetic politicians and forget to
pay attention to what is really happening here. Power, greed, and trillions of
dollars being made? We are capable of seeing past all of this bullshit to the
bigger picture at play aren’t we? We don’t benefit by the situation we currently
face. They do. Can you see that?
The human species has never gone through such tumultuous change in such
a short time and it’s excruciatingly difficult. I believe it leaves us with two
choices:
- We step into the chaos and allow millions of our fellow human beings to be wiped out through war or rejection
- Or we say enough, it’s time to rise up together and make this one hell of a magnificent world we all enjoy. It’s time to elevate humanity into the next dimension of human evolution. A kinder world. A more loving world
But we must stop
the fear
Here’s a little fear story. I was working for a company based in the
World Trade Centre back in 2001 – I was based in Boston then. On that fateful
day now known as 9/11, a work colleague stayed in the towers after the planes
hit the building. She was under her desk, cowering in fear. But another
colleague, a brave woman, went back and coaxed her out, forced her to take
action. The two ladies made it out the back door as the tower collapsed. She
lived. She wouldn’t have survived if she continued to cower. Fear gets you
nowhere. It completely freezes you.
So can we achieve point two? Yes, but we’ve got to listen to the people
in fear. We’ve got to hear them and then we’ve got to gently coax them out from
under that desk. I reckon there’s enough of us who can do that. I really do.
But we must do it with compassion, love and understanding. Brexit showed us
that.
Do you think it’s possible? Can we make loving and caring for our fellow
humans, as well as our glorious planet, the central driving force of all we do
as a species?
I bloody hope so. For my boys, and all the promising futures of children
born today.
I mourn the civilians killed in Turkey and the families ripped apart in
Nice this weekend. I have mourned every innocent death before that, from every
country in the world. But I’ve had enough of fearful thinking and rhetoric the
most. What about you?
Yours, without the bollocks
Andrea
Photos courtesy of Shutterstock: Broken world, refugee boat by Nicolas Economou, Police in riot gear and grieving world.
Thanks for reading this and thanks to my husband, Steve Johnson,
for patiently editing it and helping me get it more focused. It’s a massive topic and I
hope I’ve done it justice. Please feel free to share if it aligns with your
thinking, but if you think I’m wrong, I’m really happy to hear from you – in a
respectful way. I don’t think I have all the answers and am only trying to
share a point of view - one that helps to get us headed in the right direction
as a collective species, all sharing the same planet. I don’t want to send my
boys off to war one day. Do you?
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