Broken-hearted people have cracked the shell of ordinary reality
No putting Humpty Trumpty together again
Barbara Marx Hubbard was one of the advance troops ushered in by the Human Potential Movement. She had a rare grasp of the flow humanity is in and she spent her life and her fortune trying to get everyone to jump into that stream: “Our crisis is a birth. We are one living system and we have come to the limit of one phase of natural growth on a finite planet. We must learn ethical evolution quickly. As we seek to facilitate a gentle birth, a graceful and nonviolent transition to the next stage of our evolution, we will discover a natural pattern, a design of our birth transition, and develop a plan to cooperate with this design.” Barbara was a friend of mine, and I’m picking up her baton.
Look. There’s a giant opportunity now to blow the lid off this out-of-date civilization that still makes wars. Since Mr. Best at Everything takes the prize as best of the worst, we get to see pure evil. Not a concept like good and evil, but we feel this evil in our bones where the repulsiveness of Trump will get us smarter about falling for evil again. We are broken-hearted people who are in fresh territory to figure out how to run an equitable world. But no guarantees. As Brian Swimme wrote in Evil from Cosmic Risk, a chapter of my favorite book, THE UNIVERSE IS A GREEN DRAGON: A Cosmic Creation Story, that I urge everyone to read, the universe created humans to give it a way to appreciate itself. However, it took a chance. Other animals operate on instinct and couldn’t harm the creation, but humans have free will where our capacity for evil could hurt it.
After Trump was elected we were in shock, dazed and leaderless, but humanity has started arising. Publicly there’s Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate talk, all the street protesting, the Senator’s trip to El Salvador, Harvard not caving, all game-on. Courage is contagious. Coming from everywhere, people are looking for what their action could be. Last week, There's action in the playing field and I am getting in step got into that. In some grand cosmic creation story, the sleeping giant is starting to stir.
I bet it would be possible to get humanity thinking differently. The new game. We haven’t even tried to play it. Why not? Get the idea of being one humanity to be understood and felt. Use Influencers. Celebrities. Public Relations people. Social networking whizzes. And, most significantly, an ad agency to do a campaign. Then we would deal with overshoot, where humanity would be saving itself.
To help you let out some pent-up energy, here’s my favorite Broadway musical number. In a 2016 revival of Falsettos at Lincoln Center, the incomparable Stephanie J. Block sings I’m Breaking Down when she finds out her husband has a boyfriend. On his recent passing, this is from the L.A. Times about William Finn, who wrote Falsettos in 1992 during the AIDS crisis: “…to anyone for whom our current state of crisis feels inescapable...With lyrics about lamenting the ‘happy, frightened men who rule the world’ and how ‘I feel more helpless than I have in years,’ it’s a cathartic score that allows you to rage, cry and laugh about what is no longer, what could have been and what’s still ahead. Stephanie J. Block is basically all of us.”
And this, for what’s still ahead, is a bookend to I’m Breaking Down. It’s I’ve Got a Dream, from Paint Your Wagon, that I saw on Broadway when I was a schoolgirl:
Gotta dream boy
Gotta song
Paint your wagon
And come along
Where am I goin'?
I don't know
Where am I headin'?
I ain't certain
All I know
Is I am on my way
When will I be there?
I don't know
When will I get there?
I ain't certain
All that I know
Is I am on my way
If you want to hear it:
Here’s me in Substack Notes. It’s a record of where I make comments, and is a rich place to get immersed in the unique point of view I argue for.
This Substack is looking to a revolution. You could say an evolution, to a next phase of consciousness where we act from our interconnection as one humanity. Stay informed and be alert for how you can be contributory.
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