Yes. People are free agents, but most of the time there are built in brakes that kick in when people or countries go off the rails. For instance, when the A-Bombs were dropped on Japan. . .When Hitler. . . etc. etc., The human spirit rallies after Hilters and Hiroshimas. .It regenerates like the phoenix. It generates a new poetic, it makes a revolutionary adjustment that affects how people see each other, it starts having visions of a new social paradigm, a new order.
Yesterday (North Palm Beach), Shirley and I rallied with over 1000 others along a busy boulevard to protest all the sh*t-policies of the Trump administration. In NYC, the protest was 20 blocks long. I found myself smiling a lot, and thinking, "Here we go again!" The feeling I was swimming in was, "something's happenin' here". That is what this country is best at -- making change at the very last moment. And it either gathers momentum or not. Usually not, unfortunately, but sometimes there is momentum and things change for the better. But in just four generations, there have been such plunges into darkness, that the above example of how we, of conscience, are responding to Trumps ascendence, is losing viability. I am 74 and I am here to tell you that I have seen that happening. I don't trust the speed of change anymore. I think our rallies and protests this summer, will amount to little more than a release of steam from a global pressure cooker.
The pressure in the cooker has to do with genocide, Climate Change, mass extinctions, the rise of fascism, proliferation of nuclear arsenals, abdication of free thought to a quantum AI intelligence with its own agenda.
I'm not saying that reducing the pressure in the cooker is not going to help. But what we need to do now is turn off the heat. We need to ask very basic questions about ourselves because we have come to a point where the danger is not that history is going to repeat itself (i.e., another Hilter, another Hiroshima) . . The danger is that history is going to end. That is why I have been writing / posting something every few days, because I belief that we have it in us to make history. But, we also have it in us to end history.
When Netanyahu goes into Gaza and begins exterminating Palestinians and wiping out whole communities, that kind of destruction is forever. It makes me think of what is happening on the global scale, with culture, languages, animals, habitat. even big dreams. Thank you, Netanyahu, for showing us what our shadow looks like. It looks dark. Darker than dark.
It's time to turn down the heat on the pressure cooker. Like I said, I was smiling yesterday at the protest in North Palm Beach. I was even happy for a while. What we were doing was acting like human beings. Would you like to know what my sign said? It was a Dylan quote: "Keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again." And you know what? I'm dead serious.
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