Thirty-seven years ago I was on the streets of Bucharest chanting along with thousands of “revolutionaries”, taking pictures, losing friends… A week from now I am supposed to be with my kids in Minneapolis. In what now escalates to be a hot zone. On the streets.
Just like 37 years ago - when I did not listen - I am being advised not to go. Unlike 37 years ago, I am older, wiser, weaker, more cynical of what I see around me. 37 years ago I was fuelled by an almost fanatical desire to ensure - as if I actually had any power - that my own daughter, born with the “revolution”, will live a free life, free from the insanity of the corrupt communist regime I grew up under.
The “revolution” had succeeded and many stories were told about the illusion of what had happened. My daughter eventually never knew the old way. In a sense, we, the revolutionaries of those times, had succeeded - even if true freedom never really came. Because you see, freedom is not “rights”. Freedom is wisdom. What good are rights if you do not know what to do with them?
Ironically, today we are in the “upside down” if you know what I am referring to. Today, and here, we did have rights and we sort of knew what to do with them. But we, as a society, also lacked the civic wisdom of knowing what to do with them. We took them for granted. We dismissed them in others, but we exploited them for ourselves. We embraced civic laziness, political arrogance, and moral greed. Upside down.
Now, the times are a changin’....
Each period of historical turmoil had and has an ideological undercurrent that eventually emerges with the power of a tsunami. Nowadays, the emerging ideology is one of unhinged greed and senseless power, wrapped in prejudice and near hate for others and driven by a singular - laser focused - creed that the world must once again be redesigned in the form and shape of its new creators, the technocratic elite empowered by the top financial echelon via military means.
But a week from now, I should be with my kids in the hot zone. And I feel wiser. Over the last few decades I have learnt my place. I have understood power. I have accepted to a higher degree - but not entirely - what human nature really is like. And I just played along, day after day, not truly in my element but not entirely in the world’s element either.
One thing I have really honed down over the course of my life is the absolute necessity of being honest with myself. While I still maintain sweet little lies here and there, as a personal arsenal of self-deception for the sake of some degree of mental comfort, I do see right through them, so these little lies act more like a painkiller rather than a principle. Painkiller indeed, because one cannot but feel the hurt that rises from the clash of what it is and what could have been.
But in the end, the very, very end, Life’s Sunset comes for us all at some point. What is there to do, other than to bask in its sunlight?
Unless, that is, if and when someone brings down the rain…
The world is a changin’...and with it we should too. As a parent, I must ensure the safety of my kids and the stability of their development as human beings. As a human being, I must give them the tools and the intellectual capacity to dream up a new, better world, but to also be adapted to the absurd world of ours. It is a hard, very hard and difficult task - if I am perfectly honest with myself. How tempting the sweet little lies can be…especially the one that I matter.
Over the last few months I could not help myself but to express my disgust, fear, surprise, and sometimes anger at what is happening in the world today. At the same time, free of sweet little lies, I can clearly see life going on as if nothing is actually happening. We all still go about our daily lives while thousands others perish in a day. We all still have our drink and play our games, or go to the gym, or carelessly shuffle through our days while others slowly tighten the ideological barbwire around the necks of our children and their children.
Somehow, in our complacent compliance, we believe that we can ride the tsunami of our times, unaffected much, in chosen ignorance of where and when it will crash. For many, history is just a string of data points, never really experienced in our minds and bodies. We can stare disaster in the face, not through an act of courage and defiance, but like deer caught in the headlights of flash news, willingly and unwillingly unaware of its destructive power.
Once again, the world learnt nothing. Once again, we missed the chance to rise to our own spiritual ideals and principles. Once again, we shall pass the torch of our errors onto our children and future generations. And for those who struggle and suffer, help is NOT coming. Not unless we have something to instantly gain from “helping”.
A new evil is rising in the world and it is relentless, resourceful, and extremely radical in its strategic pursuit of absolute power and control. It cannot be combated by traditional means and we cannot “take it back”. Albert Einstein sublimely phrased it for all of us to ponder on - "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them".
In the end, now or 100 years from now if we give our children and their children a chance, humanity will still need to accept its true power and profound responsibility of building its own future rather than letting it be designed by an infinitely small yet virally damaging individuals believing themselves to be special and better than the rest. They are not. We all are headed for a grave, sooner or later. Even the "elite".
Right this very moment as you read this, powerful forces are tirelessly taking apart the structures of our collective illusion. When they will manage to entirely erase our collective memory, humanity’s backup, they will have managed to fully dismantle not only our freedom, but also our dreams of a free and progressive world. If this succeeds, humans will no longer remember what we once dreamt to become and a new dream in the image of the elite will replace the map of humanity’s destiny. Should that happen, we will not suffer, but our future generations will be entirely and utterly lost - disconnected from their potential and burning themselves into the ground in a devastating collapse of imagination and vision.
No one can fix this alone, but it has to be fixed before it is too late. This is the cold, hard truth.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ Buckminster Fuller.
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