Houston;We Have A Problem

Out Of Touch With US
Or
Houston, We Have A Problem

Observation can be a powerful tool or a means to delude oneself. Like many aspects of life, duality reigns supreme and often leaves us in a place without sound conclusions. It has been called ‘The McNeil-Lehrer Syndrome’ after the PBS news broadcast that would attempt to give a fair and impartial analysis of an event usually ending in no conclusion at all.

The mind likes conclusive evidence especially when dealing with the more mundane but essential aspects of life. Homeownership, investments, work and family being just a few but frequently at the top of the list. Absent firm thinking, the mind tends to insert a belief to shore up an empty space in order to seek closure on a subject and allow itself to move on. Uncertainty is a terminal event for most individuals and even worse for a collective.

As we slide towards what is undoubtedly a serious decline in our 'living standards', the feeling of hopelessness are painfully evident expressing itself in the many suicides we are seeing in the civilian and military sectors. It appears we are unable to find the solace required to move on right now. It appears that the only insert we have for understanding what has happened to our society is simply too painful to accept. It appears we are floundering in every way because we do not like what we see, what we have seen and what we are bound to see a lot more of being on our current trajectory.

We know from our best efforts to unravel our existence, that we are all connected in ways beyond our ordinary perception. We understand a little about the forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the ubiquitous forces of the subatomic world. We have harnessed many aspects of these for our daily lives in the form of cell phones, televisions. automotive and pharmaceutical production, to name only a few. But it seems fairly certain that we have only addressed the larger aspects of these dynamics and - having ignored the underlying reality of our connectedness - we are suffering for ignoring or even denying the importance of the deeper ways in which we are truly connected

What I am suggesting here is not that we need to crack the unified field theory or to fully quantify consciousness. That would be nice but there seems to be a pretty good chance that we do not really have the luxury of time to do so. And time is fundamental to understanding both of those concepts. But that is a more esoteric discussion.

The more urgent call is to admit that we indeed are all connected and that we start to conduct ourselves accordingly. We seriously must adopt a standard of treatment for ourselves beyond what is being provided by the arcane and outmoded concepts we presently live by, like ‘the rule of law’ or ‘monetary development’. Underlying these are far more important principles that are the foundation for our existence and for our very survival. As important as gravity itself is the notion that if we live lives devoid of the recognition of fundamental truths, immutable and constant truths, that we will indeed fail as a civilization - as we are now witnessing.

Our shortcomings are being manifested as people failing, not as systems collapsing or as business models being found out to be false or inadequate. It would be a specious argument to say the level of foreclosures is due to the excesses of those who have taken on too much for themselves as the loans were made available in ways never before seen. Predatory lending has been mentioned but we tend to steer away from that truth so as to protect the notion that we can preserve a system already intact with little or no effort. Simply by denying its existence, we hope to overcome. Or at least allow it to pass as a bad episode and to simply move along to the next sunny day with no real consideration for the what has really happened or, worse, how it affects the lives of millions of our brothers, sisters, mothers and children. Moving on with no honest assessment is making us dysfunctional as a society, as a group, as a country, perhaps even as a species.

Consider the exact same dynamic in the manner in which we conduct military operations today. Fabricated stories lead us to conflict creating further hatred and resulting in even more conflict and despair. A high-octane ride to nowhere. And when the facts arise to illustrate just how mistaken a path we have embarked upon, we look away, just as in our own domestic housing crisis. We look, we see, we stare and then we look away.

It doesn’t really matter whether you view the needs of humanity as those of some quantum force field of interconnectedness, some ether invisible but undeniable, as a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim. What is important is that you acknowledge that it is there. And that you yourself to need to benefit from this acknowledgement that we are all, indeed, not only connected but actually dependent upon one another for our very survival.

The notion that the differences in appearance of one culture to another, the phonetics of their speech, the color of their bodies or the spiritual beliefs they hold allow any one of us to view the other as separate from ourselves is such a serious shortcoming that unless we defeat that simple prejudice we cannot possible think we are to survive let alone flourish. And not because racism or religious intolerance is wrong - which it is - but far more than that it brings about such a distorted picture of our world that we wind up like the blind cave worm that lacks eyesight except having never developed an alternative sensory perception to at least see in that darkness we bring upon ourselves. In this way, we are less than that worm.

We are falling behind the evolutionary curve that nature has set for us here in our world. And we are being punished for squandering that right. We are suffering the shortcomings not only of leadership and greed - the paranoid actions of ignorant angry and punitive few - but also of the inexhaustible parade of humanity that keeps on repeating the same practices over and over with no regard to our actions in a larger context. We act as though we are only passersby taking what we can with no regard to the role we ourselves play in the process, never really considering that our most pure role is that of fellowship, of being stewards to this life, indeed to one another. The importance is not merely religious but actual. Use up the planet and we have nothing left.

Pervert the legal system and we have no application for our laws. Bleed the Treasury dry by way of political jargon transferring away the peoples wealth and we have the financial difficulties we are now witnessing. Allow our leadership to act as a glorified surfer, riding a wave of obvious duplicity only to retire after their particular wave energy ends and we are trapped in an endless cycle of wave-riders.

Surely military suicides are at an all time record high not because of the inability of the soldier to stand on their resolve but because the resolve on which they stand is false. Over time that all comes to the top and the result is a devastating toxic precipitant. Truth is an integral part of our existence as a specie. Truth is the foundation upon which we can rest our work, our efforts and the secure blanket that is actually our freedom. If violence worked, we here in the US would have long since found peace in it.

Truth appears, at first, to be as invisible a force as gravity or quantum mechanics. But as time goes by, we see the failures of our society manifested by the absence of truth. Without it we are doomed to repeat our shortcomings only to stare at our traumas, to allow an endless repetition of an endless procession of non-truths to dominate us as a people; as a nation, a civilization.

Is why the Founding Fathers first line was ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’?