What This is Doing

WHAT THIS IS DOING
November 2001

They've awakened the Blood Beast in us haven't they? The aspect of Kali that shows no mercy, that takes no "prisoners". The one who holds the sword of "Yes/No".

There have been complaints that, at the Presidential level, thinking is only "black or white". The complainants also say we ought to "...........think about this for awhile."

Since the seventies Olympics, I count thirty plus years that we have been "thinking about it." Seems to me, thinking time has run out. More than six thousands of our extended family have been murdered in one truly outrageous act; the time to think about things is over. We, in fact, have waited too long.

Even Hollywood has gotten the message that we have waited too long about a lot of things..among them, discovering what is really important on a human level.

I'm sure the intelligent among the people who star in movies have known this, a guy like Tom Hanks for instance, but the focus on profit uber alles, even sensibility, sensitivity and basic human dignity, has kept the wheel turning in this very crazy direction for a long time.the direction of the use of gratuitous violence and humor linked with cold blooded murder which then equals Big Box Office.

And it hasn't been just Hollywood, shows like "Saturday Night Live" and "Mad TV" have also used this theme, the idea that nothing is sacred. It seems to me that the result has been that we have whole generations of people who believe in that nothing, and who are caught up in a kind of madness of individual excess to the detriment of society as a community to which we are all supposed to have a responsibility.

We keep calling all of this "freedom of expression" and we want to protect it at all costs. But the cost of freedom without responsibility, is very, very high both on the individual and the collective levels. Without some moral convictions, some ethical cornerstone, some purpose; a society which embraces the concept of freedom without boundaries immerses itself in a narcissistic trance. All it becomes interested in, all it worships, is a shallow, self indulgent version of life. We don't raise our kids this way, why have we allowed our society to be, in a sense, "raised" by the entertainment industry this way? An industry which, by the way, is seen as presenting an accurate portrayal of life in America the world over.

Can we blame history's most influential art form for creating this in us and our children? Of course not. We can wish these most powerful and insidious of all media's would be more responsible and dedicated to the promotion of higher values, but we, after all, have bought the tickets. And we have not raised much of a hew and cry against mindless and heartless programs presented on TV. We simply insist on the right to turn it all off and not go to the movies we abhor.

We do this in the name of freedom of expression, something we say we are willing to fight for. But when it really comes down to it, when it comes down to how we feel now after this miserable, goddamned act of human evil, we remember what is really important don't we?

It's certainly more than loving ourselves, it's much more than that, it's loving one another. Not just our blood relatives, but everyone here in this country. All we Americans.

Now we grieve, not for just one kid shot down in a fire fight on a cobblestone street far away, now, as one, we grieve with all these thousands of families right here in our backyards.

And more than that, once we really think about it, it's loving the people all over this planet who believe as we do, that everyone deserves to live without fear.

Bottom line in fact, everyone deserves to live.

We talk about this all the time. We shake our heads in disbelief when we see the absolutely senseless loss of life in Palestine or Northern Ireland or Bosnia, or Lebanon or Somalia or anywhere around the globe. "Why can't they work this thing out?" we wonder. Why in the hell can't they see that this revenge cycle kind of thinking leads to no good end for anybody?

When we lost all those members of our family in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.................some danced in the streets of Palestine.

Can they ever hope for or expect empathy from us again?

If there is any "gift" in this for us as a nation and for all of humanity, it must be that it is past time to wake up.

Way past time.

We cannot tolerate the murder of innocents any longer. Not on any level. We must begin to value our responsibility to the community of our Nation and to the community of humankind. We must begin to care about what is really worth caring about; life, family, community and individual freedom.in that order.

That is what has to come out of all of this, all of this sorrow and loss and anger that we have undergone and is yet to come. We must face the reality that we have to fight again for the freedom to be able to invest in these things, and then, once we have regained them, not forget.

Not ever!

If we do, we will be doomed to replay this tragedy over and over again, like the endless videos of the towers crashing into the streets carrying all those hopes, all those dreams and all our hearts with them.

Those of us who lived through World War ll keep saying; "This is just like Pearl Harbor." and news commentators go to great pains to remind us that it is not like that December 7th attack because we're not at war with other nations. That's not what we're talking about. What we are referring to is the sense of unity that immediately flooded the country right after the last bomb fell. We remember how all we disparate Americans suddenly became, in theory at least, "one family". Not entirely of course, the marginalizations and the bigotry and the suspicions continued, diminished to some extent, but still very much alive even in war time. But now, after all the struggling we have done making civil rights and equal rights the law of the land not just local options, that particular dream is more realized than it has ever been before. And that means that the dream of that one-family idea is closer to realization than even that long ago attack by foreign powers caused it to be. Now we can really act from a unity we have begun to achieve as no nation on earth has ever know.

They have awakened the Beast again... and we will have to embody it fully in order to live free of the terror they would impose on all of us. But once we can lay down the sword, we must never let fall asleep in us what we have learned from this horror. We owe that to every life lost.

We owe that to every life yet to be lived.

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Dick Prosapio aka, Coyote is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, ceremonialist, psycho-
therapist (ret.), author, leader of men's experiential workshops, & Co-founder of The Foundation for Common Sense. He lives with his wife and daughter in Stanley, NM

For more info about Dick Prosapio, visit his web-site, Spirit/ Earth Path
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