I’ve been doing a lot of complaining about how commentators with their lights on are gadflies and that we don’t have a unified voice. I am an active contributor to Robert Reich and Chris Hedges and Michael Moore and Thom Hartmann, and in their posts and the many comments they get on their critiques of our misguided country nobody is saying what I say. I’m talking about what can get us beyond where there’s lots of woe-is-me and little that moves us forward. I was thinking about how I want to move us forward when a light bulb went off – I am just a gadfly, too. Maybe the idea that we need to become a force is for me to act on.
I got marching orders for that more than 30 years ago. Addressed to me, the document is called Inside the Intelligence. I’ve been working at following its directives, gadfly that I have been, but is it time I accept its cheerleading for me to turn the world around?
I can taste how the world could be. All it will take will be a collective “aha” to throw humanity’s switch from selfish to cooperative. We humans are so damn smart that if it was a fair world, where people could work their way up and we helped each other, by and large everyone could be having a good time. With death in the mix, there always will be pain. Disease still will create misery. Nature will create tragic weather events. But we won’t suffer at the hands of each other.
Looking to stimulate thinking about how to create the collective voice we need, how’s about a “What if” challenge? What if it’s a future time and mutuality prevails? Starting with yourself, what story can you make up about how we got there?
Here’s my what if story:
TIME MAGAZINE COVER STORY
How Suzanne Taylor, with no official position, became our oldest Person of the Year
By 2023, the year our country got on course, Suzanne Taylor had been injecting ideas related to consciousness into political discourses that were dealing with surface realities, where power prevailed, for a long time Everyone was trying to fix this and that without attention to the belief system that sustained all the ills that plagued us. Suzanne deluged popular gadflies who were speaking truth to power with calls for them to turn their attention to what would allow a force for the good to emerge, and she spoke so intelligently about the need for system change that she woke everyone up to the things we implemented that got us out of the implosion we were in.
We put into play the most basic idea she’d been promoting, where we-the-people needed a voice so as to be able to influence our dysfunctional government. The Wisdom Council we established was able to do the end-run around legislators from both political parties, who answered to funders over constituents, who had to listen to the overwhelming force that good people had become.
Suzanne even had come up with the egalitarian methodology used for creating the Council and had hit paydirt getting Marianne Williamson, the only Presidential candidate who has understood the primacy of our mutuality, to start it. Marianne picked Tim Shriver (who was persuaded to overcome his resistance to being a Presidential candidate), the two of them picked the third, the three picked the fourth, and so on until the most respected people in the U.S. were on board. When they deliberated on what to do, everyone listened. Plus, there was the Suggestion Box that Suzanne had proposed for offering the Council ideas, so we-the-people have had direct involvement in our forward motion.
The first serious deliberation the Council made was on Suzanne’s suggestion to address the primary issue keeping the country in such jeopardy, the grotesque split between the haves and the have-nots. When everyone got enough money for food, shelter, education, and health care to come out of the preoccupation so many had with survival, we were a working democracy again, able to progress. And that’s when other countries, picking up on our success, created versions of our Universal Basic Income that are in play now for all civilized people around the globe. That was the game-changer that moved all of humanity out of a focus on self-interest to where caring about each other as much as we care about ourselves has become our ground of being.
It was another of Suzanne’s suggestions that the Council create our Human Survival Coalition that’s larger now than the Democrats and Republicans combined, that commands a voice that can’t be denied in running our country’s affairs.
Here are some other things we can thank Suzanne for:
8-person CIRCLES OF TRUST everyone is in, that counteract the miseries of loneliness and where sympathetic listening reduces needs for therapy.
Thank Suzanne for political candidates no longer having highly produced TV commercials so they just talk to the camera, and they have conversations instead of debates so we get a real feel for who people are.
That we are no longer subjected to commercials for diseases most of us don’t have was another of Suzanne’s advocacies.
Suzanne started our FIRESIDE CHATS, a la Roosevelt, that have gone viral on YouTube, where celebrities and other distinguished people make such attractive appeals for unity that billionaires have gotten in huddles to be helpful and there are CEOs who no longer hold shareholder value as their only objective.
We restructured our prison system to emulate Norway’s after Suzanne educated a populace that didn’t know how compassionate treatment of prisoners serves the greater good. With Norway’s recidivism rate at 20% and ours at 78%, the benefit to us of stressing rehabilitation over punishment will be validated after enough time goes by to have measurable results.
And thank you to Japan for having a system where there are no mass shootings and to Suzanne for popularizing what they do for gun control that educated us to where we were able to deal effectively with an issue that had been tearing us apart.
Pre-school and kindergarten programs teaching our children about kindness spread like wildfire after Suzanne spotlighted a few that were in play. With a kind world being a loving world, where love is the bedrock we want to rest in, Suzanne has been greatly responsible for kindness catching hold as the new standard for how we behave.
Perhaps Suzanne’s main contribution, when we were imploded in factions and our democracy was threatened at its core, was showing us how we could become a united country. Suzanne predicted that offering Donald Trump total immunity from all prosecutions, civil and criminal, where he’d stay out of jail and remain rich, would get him to do what turned out to be his stunning mea culpa about the coup and the steal that released his followers. Trump ended up delivering a great service to the country in creating the unified America we have become. That echoed the lesson we learned from Norway’s prison system, about how serving the greater good beats vengeance, a principle we regularly employ now as the gentler, more unified peoples we have become.
Living inside a giant idea, where end-stage capitalism had hit the wall, we were due for the massive changes that got Suzanne Taylor on our cover. She demonstrated how an ordinary person could contribute to humanity moving toward the beautiful civilization we now are well on our way to becoming. For alerting us to the danger we were in, Greta Thunberg became our youngest Person of the Year, and Suzanne Taylor, our oldest Person of the Year, has been chosen this year for helping us get out of it.
I’m thinking to offer money prizes -- maybe $1,000 to each person who sends me a roadmap that inspires me or educates me on things that could be done to get us where we could be going! What about putting on thinking caps, imagining the world you’d like to be in, and saying how we got there?
Being new on Substack I don’t yet have a lot of people commenting but I’d really like to hear your opinions about whether this is a good idea – or, send me your what if story!
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My other "What if..." would be What if we really started to pray? I mean serious prayer where we completely believed in this proundly simple yet beautiful act of directing a pure flow of mental energy with love and intensity. Be reminded that Mahatma Gandhi referred to prayer when properly understood as "The most potent force of action", while Tennyson pointed out that "More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of..."
A wonderful post, dear Suzanne but my feeling is that nothing will change if we don't tend to mothers and babies from pregnancy till the baby is three. The brain structure changes massively, and a stressed mother for whatever reason, will bring up a child who is not full of loving kindness to his or her fellows or environment. Depressed mothers, ill mothers, drink, drugged, poor, maltreated whatever mothers cannot be genuinely attentive. The baby will not then internalise a loving sense of self. About two thirds of us have good enough mothering. It's the other third who cause the trouble. Look at the terrorist mindset from middle Eastern countries who strip women of rights. Read Sue Gerhardt's 'Why love matters'.