One of the residual impacts of the years and years of having been downsized and laid off, having lost our benefits packages, watched our jobs go overseas, had mortgages foreclosed on, and everything else that the few did to dumb down, tame and subjugate the many is that we seem to exist in a kind of lethargy or torpor around many of the finer aspects of life.
Our sense of community was impacted by all the wars that were created in a world that was almost constantly at war in the last century.
Various agencies like the police, military, Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, TSA and others whittled away civil rights and human freedoms. Entertainment features movies and TV shows and violent video games that focus on crime, murder and suspicion.
Everything about our way of life seemed designed to put us to sleep, help us to conclude that nothing could be done about the social and economic order we lived in, and leave us accepting a bland, banal and hopeless existence.
And now here we are, emerging from such a world but still feeling some of the effects of decades and decades of watching our world go downhill in every area of social endeavor and community feeling.
What I’m noticing is that there are levels of change and that some levels are much harder to achieve than others and I think it reflects the level of dumbing down and pacifying that was accomplished by this menu of strategies designed to undermine the masses.
A Change of Mind
It’s relatively easy for us to experience a change of mind. I can write and make distinctions here and people seem to have a fairly easy time digesting and assimilating them.
A Change of Attitude
But go up the ladder of experience and things become more difficult.
It’s more difficult to inspire a change of attitude. All the competition, fear-mongering and anxiety-producing that this malevolent social order has done seems to have made people’s social attitudes somewhat harder to change than they were, say, in the 1950s and 1960s, or even the 1970s.
It was the recession of the early 1980s and all the bubbles and mergers and acquisitions of the mid-eighties on up that sapped all the initiative, hope and inspiration from people and made their social attitudes more dug-in and harder to change.
A Change of Heart
An actual change of heart seems about the hardest matter of all to inspire and engender in people. Granted that many of the largescale disasters such as the Japanese Tsunami or the Haitian earthquake do awaken us for a time and cause a limited change in our behavior such that we may contribute to funds or take action on behalf of the distressed, it still seems harder these days to actually inspire a change of heart among society at large.
A change of mind can come about through mere intellectual knowledge but a change of heart usually comes about only through experiential knowledge – a much deeper form of knowing.
And less and less of our public programming focuses on the higher qualities that would cause a change of heart.
A Change of Behavior
To get people to change their lines of behavior appears to be hardest of all. The attitude of caring less and less for one’s neighbor that so much negativity, disempowerment and impoverishment caused appears to make it very much harder to actually inspire people to change their behavior.
If you watch programs such as the reality police shows that are on TV these days, more and more people appear to be driving recklessly, evading arrest, beating each 0ther up – unless it’s just a sense that’s given off by showing more scenes of it on TV – than in former years.
I personally believe all of these programs were designed to raise fear and anxiety in us and, if that’s so, they seem to have had the desired effect.
We fight the phony war on terror many times each night on TV.
We’re suspicious of our neighbors and report each suitcase left for a few moments at an airport even though the vast preponderance of “terrorist” incidents that have happened throughout history have been instigated by our own governments.
We’re left suspicious, isolated, and despondent about any meaningful change and we lightworkers are heirs to this situation.
Here we are wanting to convince the population at large that a momentous shift in consciousness is occurring. But awakening the masses to that fact is like rolling a boulder uphill. We as a society seem to be gripped by a lethargy and torpor that make social progress seem as slow as walking through tar.
Somehow we have to overcome that social heaviness and drowsiness and get this show on the road.
So many people we’ve met on our travels seem to be wrestling with the problem of how to get a jaded, despondent society back in motion and kickstart the immense process of social change that needs to occur before the bonds of unity and community can be reforged.
I can state the question but I don’t have the answer. As Kathleen and I travel across this country and see its people in a way we’d never have been able to from our settled life in Vancouver, we mull over every day how to get a nation and a world under sail on the pilgrimage back to the future, back to rebuilding Nova Earth, the Garden of Eden we left so long ago.