Stress, Celebration, and the Current Situation
There is so much to say! How much would you like to read?!
If you want to know why you’re feeling so stressed out, we can talk about that.
We could talk about how, when there’s a ‘stressor’, the (involuntary) Sympathetic Nervous System activates the ‘Fight/Flight Response’, that pumps hormones into the blood stream - hormones that help us feel tense and alert - and how those hormones remain in the physical body, even when the stressor subsides. It takes quite a while to recover from having been worried.
We’re all breathing in and out of the same energetic field, too. And the energetic field is currently electrified with stress, trauma, loss, and grief. There’s a lot going on.
So yeah, you’re feeling it.
If you want to talk about how to lessen the burden and feel more at peace in the midst of collective and personal overwhelm, we can talk about that too. My dear friend Jonas Cain and I will be offering an experiential course on “Releasing Stress, Healing Trauma, Accepting Loss, + Allowing Grief”, starting in January 2021. More details to come on that, soon. I promise.
In the meantime, Steve Bhaerman’s current post (below) is well worth the read. [If you don’t know Steve Bhaerman’s work, you want to! He’s also known as ‘Swami Beyondananda’].
The Blue Wave That Wasn’t: How the Right Got Right and the Left Got Left (by Steve Bhaeman)
“Just because the right is wrong doesn’t mean the left is right.”
-- Swami Beyondananda
While it looks likely Joe Biden will get his 270 electoral votes, the “blue wave” that was going to sweep conman Trump out of office in a landslide and hand the Senate to the Democrats, just didn’t happen.
What did happen?
In the wake of Tuesday’s results, emails and posts from shocked progressives slammed the American people for being hopelessly stupid, racist, and selfish. How could anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear possibly want to put incompetent, unscrupulous Trump back into office?
Here’s what seems to be so.
Trump voters supported him for the same reasons the rest of us didn’t – fear of a totalitarian dictatorship.
With visions of Hitler dancing in our head, we saw Trumpism leading to an authoritarian regime. With the same fervency, Trump voters feared the totalitarianism of a technocracy that would begin with mandatory vaccinations, and lead to a transhuman dystopia, where real food and natural medicine would disappear, and we would all be tracked with implant devices.
Meanwhile, both fears – of authoritarian dictatorship on the left, collectivist dictatorship on the right – were intensified by weaponized social media (see The Social Dilemma) and so this election escalated into a life-or-death existential crisis.
Consider the email I received from a correspondent in Wisconsin on Monday night. A lifelong Democrat, she was voting for Trump because she feared that the Biden administration would impose mandatory vaccines. She knew herself, knew her body, and knew that she would never accept a forced vaccination in order to function as a citizen in society. After a sleepless night, she pulled the lever for Trump.
Makes you wonder how many other thousands or perhaps millions of Americans found themselves in a similar dilemma. I watched several videos from vaccine choice proponents, and they said the same thing – for the sake of your own medical freedom vote Republican in this election. To them, it was life or death.
The announcement of Operation Warp Speed, a Defense Department program to develop and distribute a vaccine by early 2021, fueled a viral (and false) rumor that the Biden Administration would make vaccines mandatory. In reality, at an August town hall Dr. Anthony Fauci said the coronavirus vaccine wouldn't be mandatory in the United States, adding that people have a right to refuse it. “I don’t think you’ll ever see a mandating of vaccine, particularly for the general public," Fauci said.
So … obviously this was a case of “fake news,” right?
Well...
I think there was another complicating factor, and that is that the mainstream press has never allowed a genuine debate – or even conversation – about the entire COVID response, the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, and the prospects for alternative treatments. All three of these conversations were shut down, and ideas that didn’t conform to the COVID orthodoxy were censored. Thanks to this “bandemic”, alternative views were relegated to the conspiracy theory pile, and good information was polluted with the bad (see the debunked rumor above). It’s human nature – forbidding something makes it more desirable and more popular.
Something that made the “mandatory vaccine” rumor more credible was the progressives’ blindness to their own prejudice and totalitarian tendencies. As I watched wave after wave of coordinated narratives emerge from the mainstream press – on COVID, on Black Lives Matters, and on the relentless highlighting of Trump misdoings – it began to feel more like propaganda than news. Because progressives feel they are more in possession of the “facts”, they have allowed alternative narratives to be summarily de-platformed.
When we look at campuses today, it’s hard to believe that the Free Speech Movement half a century ago was a radical left idea. My colleague, Mark Crispin Miller, in his class on “propaganda” at NYU (Mark, by the way, wrote the introduction to the 2005 edition of Edward Bernays’ classic book, “Propaganda”), presented an alternative view on the efficacy of masks in preventing COVID. Even though he didn’t challenge the mask policy at the school, an “outraged” student initiated a “twit-storm” calling for his firing, and the university is considering it. Professor Miller has initiated an academic freedom petition in response.
Meanwhile, even when the Presidential election is resolved, it won’t be resolved. Each side has been adrenalized by the fear of totalitarianism, either through autocracy or technocracy.
This intractable crisis may also be our greatest opportunity for true democracy since the Declaration of Independence itself. The same technology and social media that has been used to scare and manipulate us can be turned on its head and be used to launch what my colleague Richard Lang has called “an eco-system for civic engagement.”
The focal point for such an eco-system, Advisory Voting (go here and scroll down for a brief video) offers an authenticated, verifiable advisory vote on any issue – independent of political party, government, corporations or media influence. No data collection, no bots, total transparency. Imagine what would happen when 50 or 100 or 200 million registered voters speak in one unified and independent voice, on topics like electoral reform, restoring the natural world, health care.
Then imagine what would happen if this eco-system for civic engagement was developed further to create national conversations for the two sides to re-humanize one another (as is already being done through Living Room Conversations and Braver Angels), and then begin to collaborate across the divide to develop sane and functional policies?
Keep in mind that the 2020 election reported the highest voter turnout in 120 years.
And while it was perhaps fear that motivated more than two thirds of eligible voters to exercise that right, this may also represent an awakened awareness that it is up to we the people to hold our governance accountable. Seeing “The Social Dilemma” SHOULD make us angry … not at one another, but at the way all of us have been played by those who benefit from our being divided.
Ultimately, we the people of this country are responsible for how well or poorly we are governed. The antidote to divide-and-conquer is “unite and prevail”, and perhaps this “near death experience” for democracy will help us shift from battling one another to working together to bring forth the transparency, integrity, honesty and justice the vast majority of us desire.