We the People

How did we miss so many signs? How did we blindly sit, refusing to believe what was happening to us? It is easiest to remain ignorant, of course, to deny the reality of our disastrous world, to shake our heads and wash our hands and wait for someone else to do something.

The only problem is that for every moment that we languish in this stagnant state, there are the others, those who lay traps and weave their lies so thoroughly around us that they have ceased to merely be a part of our lives. We are a society that has been hand-fed materialism, a manufactured culture of greed, laziness and intolerance. We are slaves to our paychecks, to our ‘need’ to possess the biggest, shiniest, most expensive versions of everything. We need to own computers, laptops, cell phones, PDAs, high-definition TVs, stereos, iPods, Hummers, and bling.

The simple truth is that we the people have failed to maintain democracy. We do not demand to have our rights defended but instead trade them away one by one, along with whatever scraps of dignity we might deserve to claim. We are lazy and stupid; we do not seek to improve ourselves but our possessions, failing to remember that the only thing you can truly own in this world is your Self—mind, body and spirit.

We are the great failure of the modern era; we are the reason for so many of the problems stalking through our world today. And it is because we have chosen to follow the devious, greedy manipulators rather than to fight them. It is because we are too busy emulating those we should have overthrown in the earliest years of the twentieth century.

Perhaps in reading this you now despair of ever changing the world, of ever emerging from the wallow we have sunk ourselves into. But this is the time for change; this is the great opportunity that we have missed, that our parents and grandparents have missed.

No revolution begun in front of a television ever made it out of the living room. Leave behind the realm of the known and comfortable; we have let others dictate our standards and beliefs for far too long. Lift your voice and be heard, because if you can’t speak for yourself, then the choice will be made without you.

Never accept any state of being as irrefutable fact or impossible to change. No change was ever brought about by waiting and none will ever occur unless we believe in our own power to create it.