How can Americans hope any longer? Presidential and congressional elections are a sham. Our government is for sale to the highest bidder, and everyone is subject to a strip search. The Bill of Rights has been shredded, and Americans are adrift with nothing to hold on to.
We're told there isn't enough money in the richest country in the world for all its citizens to have health care. We're told there aren't any jobs, when there's so much to do. We're told there are more important things for our taxes than educating our children. The proverbial rug has been pulled from under us, and we're just starting to feel the pain.
For countless generations, springtime was considered a season of hope. It's a time when the earth awakens in all its glory, when birds are migrating, and wild animals have their young. It was natural for our ancestors to be joyful, when everything new was sprouting around them.
Our ancestors were more in touch with the rhythms of nature than we are. They recognized springtime as a season of newness, and the newness that we need today in America is new thinking.
Our society is in collapse, marked by disorder. Our economic system doesn't work any longer. When most of our country's wealth is owned by a tiny segment of the populace, something is awry. And it's growing worse, like a cancer.
Meanwhile we're being dumbed down, so that kids won't know much of anything that's relevant, or be able to effect meaningful changes in the status quo. Schools and libraries are closing and the educational system is under financial stress, while our teachers and professors are disdained by politicians who flaunt their ignorance and by the corporate media. Where do we find hope?
The natural world is telling those with eyes to see and ears to hear, that we need to change our way of thinking, because it is proving hostile to our survival. We need to go back to our ancestors for the wisdom we have lost, and to retrieve their spiritual values. We need to stop thinking only with our heads, but also with our hearts. We pay little attention to our innate sense of the divine.
Our religious instincts have been co-opted by institutions and organizations, so that many people associate anything spiritual with an unpleasant church experience. We are subjected to a cult of personality and urged to worship human idols by the media. Politicians, actors and sports people are placed on pedestals for commoners to pay homage to. Worshiping a golden calf would be a step up.
The messengers have been deified and their message disregarded. What passes for Christianity today is hostile to human freedom and indifferent to beauty. If it would free itself of its legalistic forms and allow love and compassion to replace obedience to the letter of the law, it would have a powerful effect upon our country's morals.
But freedom and human dignity aren't what it proclaims today, and it is willfully blind to the immorality of gross wealth inequities. Many would agree with Mahatma Gandhi: "I like your Christ, but I don't like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."
Early Christians would have identified what we have today as Mithra-worship. Mithra was a god who died and was resurrected and who initiated a eucharistic ceremony, the only difference being that he was a war-god. Much like the one we worship today when we spend our nation's treasures on weapons of indiscriminate killing.
Mithra-- image from wikipedia
We have an awakening process ahead of us as a nation and the young are intuiting it. They see the world they are about to inherit and realize that they have no reason to trust their elders. Our government should be helping them, rather than saddling them with debts before they've begun to use their minds and talents.
If it is to be considered legitimate, a government must embody principles of justice and fairness. It can't serve the interests of the mega-rich as it is presently doing, and hope to retain the allegiance of the people.
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