Just watching things happen in the world is really not enough.
We are flooded with information day after day after day. It is fruitless to allow ourselves to be simply overpowered by the sheer relentless, unceasing bulk of it, and do nothing.
What’s the point of having this immense access to information via all of our handy devices, if we don’t use the information to grow our actual knowledge and to be empowered by it? It says something about our educational system that we fail to think critically, and respond accordingly, with ample information in hand.
Every day, it seems, we are hit in the face yet again by some ridiculously egregious statement or falsehood or act or failure to act by many people who were elected to “serve” the public. There is such a preponderance of this type of thing, that we don’t even flinch anymore. We barely even notice it. Our eyes scan the latest revulsion and we don’t react.
We are better than this. We, the people, are better than this. It’s really time to recognize our state of learned helplessness and get over it.
The people I come across in daily life actually do care.
They actually are concerned about the environment and the fate our planet.
They really do care that children are being held by our government, and some of them, now, we find out, dying in “detention” or abused. People actually do recoil at the notion of children suffering and dying under bombings from which someone profits.
Folks don’t like the extensive and intrusive scrutiny of their daily lives, nor do they appreciate the massive system of criminalization and incarceration that looms over us.
People really do care about their ability to access to health care.
Everyone sees the ridiculousness of shutting our government down in order to have a hissy fit over an issue on which all parties have failed to find consensus or wisdom or responsibility or empathy – operative word there, failed.
The average Joe cares about an economy that doesn’t work for them, they just work for it. Or they don’t. People care very much about their ability to find meaningful work that pays enough to cover the ever-rising cost of living a life.
Even folks doing reasonably well actually do care about all this stuff, because we’re people, and at heart, we care about other people. And we know that a community where everyone is basically okay, not just some people, makes for a better community.
Really, just pick a topic. Our elected “servants” fail us daily, demonstrably and extravagantly and offensively. It is not enough to simply observe it. These people are paid by us to do a job. Anyone else would have been canned long ago, summarily and without a look back.
We are people: unique and wonderful and creative and compassionate. We are the fuel that runs the engine. And one has to wonder why we sit quietly under a hand that suppresses the very best in us.
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