Thank heavens we’re in a pause or lockdown or whatever you wish to call it.
It’s taking me days to work through the inner explosion that happened upon my affliction having been named, what in the Growth Movement we would have termed “being called on my number.”
Others might shrug the comment off but, with me, it “fit.”
Cognitive dissonance had been building in me for some time, resistance to posting some of the material that passed as lightworker or light-filled or on the right side of God, whatever.
Some articles would be impartial for most of their length and then have a paragraph that demonstrated their bias in letters of stone.
I felt dismayed and a party to it all.
But I didn’t know what was going on. I was incredibly busy; I was enthusiastic about a change of planetary management; and I made assessments that totally left “us” – that is, lightworkers – out of the equation.
I was dumbfounded to find lightworkers swept up in the left/right meme and sickened to think we were now trying people in social media. As a person who used to decide credibility in refugee claims, I felt the dissonance building.
Michael stopped my forward motion by pointing out that I was getting involved in “political intrigue.” At that moment, I had a name for the source of my dissonance and the penny dropped. The room filled with light, so to say. (I’m exaggerating.)
Yes, totally without intending to or being aware of it, I was gradually being drawn into political intrigue.
I thought my training as an adjudicator was enough to have me avoid the pitfalls of reporting contemporary events. But my awareness went down and my awareness that my awareness had gone down also went down.
This time the polarization, the partisanship was happening among lightworkers in the person of memes and often (but not always) hashtags. I was being drawn into lightworker discussions of events which, if they were entered as evidence in my hearing room, I’d have thrown them out as biased, partial, and invested. I felt uncomfortable.
I recognized that what Michael called “political intrigue” I immediately translated into “the meme war.” I saw myself as being drawn into a meme war and it went against the grain with me.
I know that, since the outbreak of the pandemic, I’ve become increasingly partisan, politicized, polarized, partial. I was not going in a good direction.
I couldn’t see things as long as I was racing after the baseline of events every day. And for what? Increasing division, it seemed between left and right, between innocent and guilty, with the roles contested bitterly. (1)
All it took were the right words (“political intrigue”) to crack this nut open. Now I see things without my filter. I’d been so busy pursuing the baseline of events that I’d lost sight of what this was all about.
A fair trial. Based on credible evidence. Before judge and jury. Decision to be rendered fairly and impartially, after consideration of all the evidence. Those were the standards I was raised on. And that’s what I’m now reminding us of.
With the restoration of sight, clarity, and open-heartedness that resulted from dropping what I was doing, I now worry that we as a society are headed in an unhealthy direction as far as basic freedoms are concerned.
Never mind what the deep state planned to do with us before the Alliance stopped them, which was grisly. What we’re doing to ourselves by dividing ourselves into factions and more or less taking justice into our own hands through meme wars could nullify the efforts of lightworkers for some time into the future.
As an historian, I’ve so often seen revolutions themselves result in increased hardship and executions: Witness the French Revolution, Hitler’s rise in Germany, the Russian Revolution, and Stalin’s Russia.
When I see us mobbing someone on the Internet, I feel like crying. How divided have we become, Lord? How bad has it gotten?
Or willingly dividing ourselves into warring camps of “left” and “right,” as if those words mean anything to the people using them as ridicule, except if they bring a response.
Earlier I said the pandemic provided us with the opportunity to really come together as a world. It does and it has. But this tendency to fight each other on the Internet is going to neutralize the good that we’ve done, if we allow it to.
Not allowing it to means falling back on our basic values, basic principles, basic rights. These will be found to be universal. A smile, a bow, and a wave of the hand are examples of universally-understood gestures; the feelings behind them are also universal. So must our basic values be and so they are in reality.
We’re building a world that works for everyone, in Werner Erhard’s words. We will get there, one gradual step at a time. But it won’t materialize as fast or as deeply as we’d like if we allow ourselves to be divided and turn on each other.
We must unite.
Footnotes
(1) And this is election year. The more we approach that date, I predict, the greater will be the clamor and uproar.