As we approach a potentially historically disastrous turning point for the USA,\u00a0 I’ve wondered, ‘Where are the adults in the room?’\u00a0 The Fifty-Eight people: POTUS, VPOTUS, Attorney General (AG), Fifty Senators, and Five Supreme Court Justices,\u00a0 can and have demonstrated glaring failures in the entire system.\u00a0 The will of the people, both on the streets and by a majority count, is not being executed.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 Fifty-Eight people cannot do it alone.\u00a0 There is a minority of people supporting them, individual judges, and police forces to a relatively narrow and shrinking demographic of people being fed fear and lies by a media operation who profits from the anger.\u00a0 Where are the adults in the room who remind people that love is the answer?<\/p>\n
Love is the answer, full stop.\u00a0\u00a0 We can grab religious texts from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, et al., and what are they going to say?\u00a0 Love is the answer.\u00a0\u00a0 People are dying in the streets right now here at home and across the globe trying to stop various forms of authoritarians, be they political, religious, or social, \u00a0from radicalizing more people to continue the cycles of hate and pain.\u00a0 The fight isn’t always in grand scale gestures like standing in front of a wall of police forces with firearms pointed at you.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes the struggle is smaller, every day, nuanced battles like when a woman gets interrupted by a man trying to explain how another woman was interrupted by a different man.\u00a0 Those jaw-clenching moments routinely happen because women aren’t valued as equals in society.\u00a0\u00a0 Love is the answer.<\/p>\n
Here in America, somewhere along the way, we were ingrained with this false notion that we can out-work our problems.\u00a0 We can run away from everything by working harder.\u00a0 The depression-era phrase ‘pick oneself up by the bootstraps,’ which is supposed to demonstrate a physical impossibility, got co-opted into some rallying cry for self-determination. \u00a0Similarly,\u00a0 Trickle-Down Economics was a rebranding from Horse-and-Sparrow Economics. The idea has always been you keep feeding the horse more, and maybe you, as the sparrow, are fortunate enough to eat from the horse’s droppings.\u00a0\u00a0 What if the horse gets bigger and eats more but leaves fewer droppings?\u00a0 It’s been a failed economic practice for generations.\u00a0 It has resulted in catastrophic greed, untold environmental damage, and incalculable human suffering.\u00a0 \u00a0Hard work and greed at the expense of relationships is the plot of many famous stories.\u00a0 Again, love is the answer.<\/p>\n
A little over Two Thousand years ago, one of many religious rebellions happened in human history.\u00a0 The consequences of it are still felt every second of every day.\u00a0\u00a0 In the west, the calendar is modeled around it.\u00a0\u00a0 For many people, there’s a disconnect with our relatives who existed in what that calendar would call negative numbers.\u00a0 How does one have a ‘negative’ history?\u00a0 We don’t inherit the planet; we borrow it from our children.\u00a0 Our ancestors, a long time ago, who were caretakers of the Earth for us,\u00a0 led a comparatively simple ‘hunter-gatherer’ lifestyle.\u00a0 We have insufficient knowledge of who they were as writing hadn’t formally been invented yet, but we’re still here, so they persevered.\u00a0 However, about Twelve Thousand years ago, it all changed.<\/p>\n
Around Twelve Thousand years ago,\u00a0 we became much more proficient in agriculture.\u00a0 We didn’t just invent it overnight, but we got good enough at it wherein people started to give up their more nomadic lifestyle for a communal one.\u00a0 We can speculate why,\u00a0 but in my heart – love is the answer.\u00a0\u00a0 We are people called people living on a planet called dirt.\u00a0 For generations, various roaming groups of people would come together to dance by the fire and exchange what they had, knowledge or objects, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Now, Twelve Thousand years ago,\u00a0 people were creating a place of permanence to gather.\u00a0 People could exchange ideas, items, seeds, and more, in a home for everyone.\u00a0 It was a source of food security and more.\u00a0 We are inherently social creatures; we want to love and be loved.<\/p>\n
The Age of Agriculture set forth an explosion of human population that set modern history into motion.\u00a0 We baked bread, brewed beer, invented writing, created civilization et al.\u00a0 People for Twelve Thousand years, when not oppressed by religions, racism, sexism, etc., have been pursuing their passions. \u00a0For Twelve Thousand years, people have been (re)discovering love is the answer.\u00a0 Whether it be in the tranquility of a tea ceremony, or the infinity of the stars, we find love is the answer.<\/p>\n
Twelve Thousand years removed by the people who created a permanent fire for people to dance around and sing the songs of their people,\u00a0 we still sing and dance by the fire.\u00a0\u00a0 We still point to the clouds and stars to create shapes and tell stories.\u00a0 We still celebrate the seasons and have cultural rites of passages.\u00a0 Twelve Thousand years branched out the family tree from those early agricultural pioneers, thinkers, engineers, bakers, etc., we still find joy in doing all the same things.\u00a0 The challenges of today, in some ways, resemble the challenges of their day just on a different scale. \u00a0They were trying to create a place to call home, which was more on a village level.\u00a0\u00a0 We’re trying to make a place to call home, which is now on a global level.\u00a0 The motive is still the same; love is the answer.<\/p>\n
It is disheartening to see the pain in the world right now.\u00a0\u00a0 Volumes of history books can (hopefully will) be written about the suffering in the world.\u00a0 There’s no way I could do justice to the systemic issues people are fighting against:\u00a0 systemic poverty,\u00a0 systemic racism,\u00a0 sexism and glass ceilings,\u00a0 religious oppression,\u00a0 anti-intellectualism, \u00a0the resurgence of fascism,\u00a0 wealth inequality,\u00a0 climate change,\u00a0 and regrettably more.\u00a0 There is a common thread linking them all, however, and that is an absence of love.\u00a0 Whether it was taught by their parents, their church, or some other source,\u00a0 children are not born hateful.\u00a0 \u00a0Children are indoctrinated into hate and pain and then have to unlearn them as they get older, to discover love is the answer themselves.<\/p>\n
The scars of abuse are visible across gender lines, economic lines, and generational lines.\u00a0 It’s not necessarily intentional; some people don’t know what love is, and perhaps never have.\u00a0 Others once knew but forgot or buried it underneath anguish.\u00a0 We, individually, cannot tackle the world.\u00a0 I have tried for far too long.\u00a0 However, big things are made of little things.\u00a0\u00a0 Individually, we can break the bonds of hatred.\u00a0 We can learn to love ourselves and those around us.\u00a0\u00a0 We can learn to love those who do not look like us, and those we’ll never meet.\u00a0 We can learn to love those from whom we borrow the planet.\u00a0 We can learn to love those who also look up at the clouds and stars, who also dance by fire and sing songs.\u00a0 We can learn to love those who celebrate the seasons and chase their dreams.\u00a0 It’s not too late to be the adult in the room and say ‘Enough!’\u00a0 Whether it be with a clenched jaw, a tear-streaked cheek, an extended hand, or a smile,\u00a0 we can be the ones to teach those who need the lesson or reminder, love is the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As we approach a potentially historically disastrous turning point for the USA,\u00a0 I’ve wondered, ‘Where are the adults in the room?’\u00a0 The Fifty-Eight people: POTUS, VPOTUS, Attorney General (AG), Fifty Senators, and Five Supreme Court Justices,\u00a0 can and have demonstrated glaring failures in the entire system.\u00a0 The will of the people, both on the streets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[338],"tags":[291],"class_list":["post-27877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-considered-thoughts","tag-291"],"yoast_head":"\n