Changes Beneath The Surface
It all seems very odd and incomprehensible, doesn’t it? Sometimes you have to think that the whole world is going mad. But it is only because you are staring at the surface, and the surface is not where things are happening. What is occurring is taking place beneath the surface, the action you do not see casting mad shadows across what you do.
What you are witnessing is a political transformation taking place. A metamorphosis, if you will. And like a metamorphosis, it has long been taking place within, while up until recently, the surface has appeared unchanged.
But as the change emerges, surface appearances become distorted and ugly. On the surface, it appears as though everything is coming apart. And it is, at least the surface of it, the skin that is being shed to reveal what has been growing within. Until you understand this, everything will appear terrifying. Even after you begin to realize what is taking place, you will need a good amount of faith in human nature and the inevitability of change not to be freaking out a little. Because what is happening cannot be placed in convenient little boxes in order that we might understand it. Something big is happening, the situation is very fluid, and our intellects are not the tools we think they are that can get us through every problem we encounter. Fluid situation indeed, we are surfing a large wave, and we must react as honestly and purely as we can. We have no time now for relying on the convenient explanations we’ve amassed in our youth.
Donald Trump was the first huge manifestation of the change roiling within. He is an ugly crack on the dead epidermis that we mistook for what is, but has only been covering what is becoming. Trump is no reflection of what it is that’s coming, merely a warning that something is indeed coming. But Trump is enough to terrify those who do not see change as necessary and positive. They wish only to patch up the shell, because they are terrified of what lies beyond their superficial understanding. They would allow what is being born to die rather than lose their simplistic notion of what life is. Every great religion has commented on those who prefer to worship shadows/idols/maya/etc. It is a worship of our shallow concept of reality that makes us forget about what is real and undefinable.
You need not fear. Trump is not the face of the transformation, he is but the death rattle of the existing order. And Democrats are not the answer to Trump and to outmoded ideas, they are the life support system that is keeping the existing order alive longer than it naturally should be allowed to live. Democrats are the existing order, Trump an echo from the past that seeks to be an answer to that existing order. Between the two you have the insufficient present and the past that needed to be replaced fighting it out over the future. Neither is the future. Both are preventing the future from being born. It’s like Grandpa arguing with his daughter about how they’re going to control her child.
The old order is dead, a new one emerging. Boomers, fearful of life and doubtful of what wisdom they were able to impart to their children, fear the change that results from their mere existence. Republicans wish to resurrect an imagined past, Democrats wish to maintain an unsustainable present. Both fear the future, perceive it as an abomination to be throttled in the womb. Both stand in the way of change, fearful of the natural way of things because they have spent their lives in an artificial environment divorced from nature and reality.
The only answer I can see is to nourish what is to come — as we nourish our children — with all that is healthy and loving and passionate within us. We tell our children stories we do not believe, do not like, and have no passion for, but we do it believing it to be our duty. We need instead to tell them what we do believe, love, and are passionate about, not because it is our duty but because it is our wisdom. To the future that is being born we must demonstrate all that is best and noblest of humanity, with faith that it might be nourished, learn, and grow from who we are.
Shape it with your values, because values are timeless. Shape it with your aspirations and ambitions, because from such optimism and determination is a better future born. Stop trying to shape it with your ideas, because they are the ideas of a dying paradigm.
Look upon it for what it is, not for what you want it to be. It will not look like what you want it to, but if you feed it with what is best in your soul, you will see little glimmers of what you most admire shining back from this future you have helped birth. And because you are not the only parent, you will see wonderful aspects of others grow bright in unexpected ways. You will see little bits of Uncle Joe and Aunt Rosa. It will have elements of free trade and decentralized planning. It will use words like “comrade”, and even your libertarian brother will see the beauty in that.
It will grow to be what we demonstrate. By living our values, we pass them on. What is life in us we will pass on, just as what is death in us we will also share. It will speak the language learned by us. From one it will learn about liberty, from another it will learn fraternity. From one, justice, from another, compassion.
In fact, we are not watching something being born, we are giving birth to something. Something terrifying, in so much as we are terrified of it and of ourselves and of life itself. Something unimaginably wondrous, in so much as we are able to see our own existence as wondrous and the world in which we exist as wondrous.
There are two paths, faith and fear, love or hate, peace or violence. You choose. You. No choice is forced. If you believe in your own freedom, use it. If you believe in your own freedom as an inherent right, I have no doubt as to which you will choose.