There we all are … for better or worse, in sickness & in health, till death do us part. We are bonded from the start. Betrothed and bothered and befuddled and bewitched and so many other emotional twists that it’s a wonder we aren’t more twisted.
Human beings are in a forced wedlock; to each other, to Self, and to all other living beings in which divorce is not an option. Yet we try … to divorce ourselves from our Selves and Others and the reality of our human insanity in hopes it’ll all go away – or that we can keep Life at bay. But Life doesn’t work that way. It seeps into the crevices and the recesses of our unaddressed festering Collective and forces a shift. Life is constant growth – even in seeming stasis.
It seems we’re in the grips of a gawky growth spurt. Parts of the global body cling to their tried and true while other parts push their way through. If we could objectively look at the face of our Global Selfie, sometimes it would look stunning and other times ghastly. It’s easy to respond to the beauty. But how we respond to the ugly is the barometer by which we gage our true or false engagement with the humanness of our human mess.
You turn on an old faucet that’s sat idle for ages. Those first spits and gurgles of dirty-rusty-gunky water take time before the clear stuff flows … much like our stifled Collective Voice. History repeats itself but this time on the evolutionary timeline is different. It’s in real time. And no matter where in the world you live, it’s been primed by an unsettling trine that’s blasted through bedrock and rocked our misconceptions about who we are and where we belong on the global and personal playing field: POTUS EXTREMUS, his Tweet-Us, and Us in response to it all.
Welcome to our Global Identity Crisis.
On first blush our first gush is also a bit rusty, like that faucet. Everyone’s hashing and tagging and lashing out and “bragging” about their versions of stories old and new, fabricated or true. It’s like Global Group Therapy where everybody spews. On some level that’s good news; healthier to vent than to suppress, implode, and ultimately explode.
It was bound to happen as it often does: a worthy movement sprouts from an urgent call whose Voice has been squelched far too long, the longstanding repression of which yields understandable aggression. Anger is the birth mother of many a worthy emergent struggle. But the risk is still and ever pendulum-swinging, extremism, finger-pointing, gender-bashing, witch-hunting and a “mind-field of reactivity” that’s already toppled careers of deserving and undeserving alike.
Now comes the whiplash of backlash, whose counter-voice might undermine the best of intentions. Temperance and objectivity are necessary to ride the tsunami of collective awakening.
But how do you ask a broken dam to burst forth with discretion?
Before we take out our psychological sledgehammers and further whack away at one another, consider the below response from John Bunzl, founder of a stunning new Global Governance Initiative called Simpol (www.simpol.org) and co-author with Nick Duffell of a compelling read nee must-seed, The Simpol Solution, already lauded by Noam Chomsky.
“Because so many men are in positions of power, it appears that all the world’s ills must be down to men – right? But people think this because they misunderstand the nature of power in today’s globalized world. The people at the top of business and governments – usually men – don’t have nearly the freedom of choice that people generally assume. In fact the market in general, and DGC (Destructive Global Competition) in particular, largely dictate what actions executives and politicians must take.
So this misunderstanding of power leads to women believing, not only in a ‘patriarchy of men’ and that everything is therefore men’s fault, but that if only women were in these so-called powerful positions things would be better. No one is denying, of course, that discrimination against women is non-existent. But I imagine that much of it is driven in the first instance by the pressure on executives or politicians to ‘act in the best interests of the company/country’ rather than by any prejudice against women per se. After all, if market competition demands that you keep costs to a minimum, you’re going to do it by any means possible. And if women tend to be more agreeable and so happen to be more inclined to accept lower pay for equal work, then what are you supposed to do? Increase the pay to women, so increasing your costs, reducing profits and potentially making your company uncompetitive? Or reduce the pay of the men in the company and see them all leave overnight?
So the patriarchy exists all right! But it’s not so much one driven by men, but one that’s driven by DGC. And it’s one that oppresses both women and men (and the planet too) #WeToo.”
We all have our story. We are all at the affect of and have suffered at the hands of our troubled human condition. When I point my finger at They point their finger at We point our finger at our Selves … lo and behold what do we find? That we are all defined by each other in relation to our Self. Maybe the lines that divide will transform into lines that unite in our respective collective differences and defeats.
In the He is the She is the We of us ALL. Let’s remove the insanity and put the human back in Humanity.
#WeToo
Special thanks to Rose McGowanfor taking Sync’s suggestion to shift Tarana Burke’s courageously empowering movement from #MeToo to #WeToo, during Rose’s recent acceptance speech at Munich’s DLD18.
