"When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember your
initial objective was to drain the swamp."
...
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting
different results."
... Rita Mae Brown (widely attributed erroneously to Professor
Albert Einstein)
This essay,
What's Your Position On Immigration?,
is the sequel to
Thank You For Voting.
Hmmm ... let's see ... where do we even
begin?
We (all of us, everyone everywhere on
the planet)
live unknowingly and unwittingly in
a paradigm
in which evil flourishes. And in this conversation, what I'm implying
by "evil" is "live" spelled backwards. Evil-ness is simply
the antithesis of (indeed the absence of, the hiding of,
the darkening of) live-ness. To have live-ness is not merely to exist
living and breathing. It's living and breathing with alacrity.
And living in
a paradigm
of the absence of live-ness, is the default for humanity. Our rampant,
ongoing folly is to continue to
empower
the evil and remain obsessed with it and on retributing for it and on
blaming for it, while having no mind nor taste for or even much
interest
in
the paradigm
itself in which the evil shows up.
When we vote (which in these United States may translate simply to
holding more boisterous
opinions
than the other guys) we tout the issues on which we vote to be those
which will
make a difference
for all of us, if and when enacted. By voting, we express what our
positions are, on (say) immigration. We're offered a chance to select
from a smorgasbord of issues on a menu that's narrow, limited, and
politicized. In theory it's a great system - except in practice the
issues we vote on (no matter if you vote with the "us" side or the
"them" side) rarely touch on anything likely to
make a lasting difference
for everyone.
The paradigm
ie
the context
in which we vote, is overlooked. Watch: it's the
context that's decisive
(which is a page
straight
out of "Transformation 101").
Here's what's really weird about all this: we vote, and yet we
already know how this is all going to turn out. Yes we do!
Let me spell it out for you:
in the beginning,
we'll enthusiastically vote on and support the new guys and the issues
they stand for. But very soon we'll go luke-warm on them as they fail
to deliver on their promises (and we all know they invariably will).
And then we'll vote them out, looking to voting in the next new guys to
do what we believe
makes a difference
- yet never does, never has, and never will. Rinse. And Repeat. We're
like lemmings in this way. It doesn't occur to us that it's the same
cliff we go over each time. Here's
the inconvenient truth:
what
makes a difference
isn't found in the domain of voting. If you don't bring the difference
with you to the domain of voting, then voting won't
make a difference
(any difference it seems to make is illusory, short-lived - and let's
face it, a waste of time).
In case you're wondering where I'm going with this, here's where: the
issues we traditionally vote on are those which threaten
us ie those which we're in survival about. It begs
the question:
what if we were to ask more pointed,
powerfulquestions
designed to tease out our mettle rather than our survival? Instead of
"What's your position on immigration?", how about "What's your position
on
integrity?";
how about "What's your position on
trust?";
how about "What's your position on
honoring your
word?",
then voting on those qualities instead as filters to screen and steer
the direction we'll go next as a species?
I'm not hopeful we ever will, or even that one day we'll be
interested
enough to
consider
doing so. This is just a "What if ...?". Yet what it leaves me with ie
what this comes down to, is
this question:
should we obsess over divisive hot-button issues as directors of our
voting, or should we focus on
integrity
as a high-value target of our voting?
The questions
are
disconcerting.
Look: we haven't even determined yet if we are
Zen-ready
to ask them (let alone answer them) globally. But if we did, there
would really be only one thing to say about
stepping
over
integrity
in favor of divisiveness, which is that it's disgusting.
