This is something I’d worked up in early 2024 and had forgotten about. In that way the universe has of delivering on schedule I think it crossed my path at the right time. You will recognize what I deal with from a different angle where I explain why. - Suzanne
SAVING THE WORLD (work in progress)
I’ve been doing a lot of complaining about how commentators with their lights on are gadflies and we don’t have a unified voice. I am a contributor to Robert Reich and Chris Hedges and Michael Moore and Thom Hartmann, and in their posts and the many comments they get nobody is talking about what we can do if we come together.
Maybe becoming a force is mine to act on. I got marching orders for that more than thirty years ago with Inside the Intelligence that’s addressed to me. Is it time to do what it tells me to do about getting the world turned around?
I can taste how we could be. It will come from a collective “aha” that throws humanity’s switch from being selfish to being cooperative. We humans are so damn smart, and if it was a fair world where people could work their way up and we helped each other, by and large everyone would be having a good time. With death in the mix there will be pain. Disease will create misery. We’ll have tragic weather events. But we won’t suffer at the hands of each other.
Looking to stimulate thinking about how to create a collective voice, I’m declaring 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? I’d give $1,000 to each person who sends me a roadmap that inspires me or educates me about getting us where we could be going! So, imagine the world you’d like to be in and tell me how we could have gotten there.
Taking the challenge, this would be my story:
TIME MAGAZINE COVER STORY
How someone with no official position became our oldest Person of the Year
By 2024, the year our country flipped from being destructive to being cooperative as we’d been trying to fix this and that without attention to what gave rise to the ills that plagued us, Suzanne Taylor, who for years had been injecting consciousness perspectives into public conversations, had gotten us out of the implosion we were in.
First, our Wisdom Council, that gives we-the-people a voice, gets selected by Suzanne’s egalitarian methodology that Marianne Williamson, who had run for political offices trying to uplift humanity, first had stepped up for. Marianne got Timothy Snyder to accept her pick as number two, the two of them picked MacKenzie Scott, the three picked Arnold Schwarzenegger, the four Oprah, the five Tim Shriver and so on in getting the most respected figures in the U.S. on board. Still, when our Council speaks, everyone listens. Our Suggestion Box for what goes to the Council came from Suzanne’s proposal to get we-the-people personally involved in our forward motion.
The first deliberation the Council made was about the grotesque split between the haves and the have-nots, and it was only when everyone got food, shelter, education, and health care that we became a real democracy that could progress. Picking up on our success with Universal Basic Income, the other countries created versions of it so it’s gotten to all civilized people as the game-changer to where caring about each other is as important now as caring about ourselves.
Fleshing out Suzanne’s model, that we still rest on, the Council got the sign-ups for her proposed Human Survival Coalition that made it so large that what it gets behind can’t be ignored.
Here are some things we are enjoying and appreciating to thank Suzanne for:
The CIRCLES OF TRUST where 8 people save money on therapy and get help with their lives
Political candidates just talking to the camera and having conversations instead of debates
Not being subjected to commercials for diseases most people don’t have
Our FIRESIDE CHATS, a la Roosevelt, where celebrities and thought shapers make compelling appeals for unity
The vegetable gardens that made decorative lawns a thing of the past
Billionaires in contests for who can do the most good
CEOs no longer holding shareholder value as their only objective
Emulating Norway’s prison system of rehabilitation over punishment
Copying Japan, where there aren’t mass shootings, on gun control
Programs teaching very young children about kindness
Suzanne’s main contribution was getting us to become a united country. She was behind the immunity we gave Trump from all prosecutions, that got him to deliver his stunning mea culpa about the coup and the steal. It didn’t even need the part about being prohibited from running again because he was convincing enough about being evil, which was the condition of the deal, that he’d made himself traitorous to his followers. And he even was bearable to us with his pride at being the best at being the worst, so when he pointed to his saving the country we didn’t even feel the need to argue with such a poor soul. And, in fact, that was the sea change that got us being the gentler unified peoples we have become.
We were in such dysfunction that we were due for the massive change that got Suzanne Taylor on our cover, and she is there because she demonstrated how an ordinary person can do what catapults us into overcoming our limitations as we ever-improve the workings of our beautiful civilization. For alerting us to the danger we were in Greta Thunberg became our youngest Person of the Year, and Suzanne Taylor, our oldest, is this year’s Person of the Year for doing what it took to get us beyond it.
Back at you with my thoughts from today, February 4, 2025. The resistance to Hitler wasn’t as fierce as American resistance to Trump is, and although Hitler came into power legally I think our fear of fascism is a red herring. This is what Chat GPT said when I asked about that:
“Active resistance within Germany itself was relatively small, though notable groups like the White Rose and individuals like Claus von Stauffenberg, who attempted to assassinate Hitler, are remembered for their courageous efforts. Many Germans were either supportive of or passive toward Hitler's rule, at least until the later stages of WWII when the full scope of his policies became more apparent.”
Our attention should be on stopping the march of the oligarchs who present the real takeover danger. With more than half the country that didn’t vote for Trump plus more and more of the people who supported him becoming disaffected from him, I’m watching for some moment when there’s a dramatic incident and virtually everyone turns on him. Law-abiders are at a disadvantage dealing with someone who has no regard for the law and has power, but I even wonder about a coup. Not a bloody one. Does acting lawfully and losing our country make sense? I’m just asking…
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Love your passion and creativity. It’s a welcome break from living in that pot of boiling frogs, now with a lid on it! Despite the heat, I continue to believe that the way to fix a culture that’s gone rotten is to study the why behind it. Understanding how we got here brings one to the road that takes you out.
I’ve been developing a series of lessons on this topic to share at my Substack. I had not intended to write. I joined to read and learn. I figured my book was enough.
I recently decided it wasn’t enough because people don’t get why they need to read my book. It is filled with important lessons. So here’s one of these lessons in response to your craving for a thoughtful culture.
We’re lost in a maze due to corrupt schools that failed to produce citizens and instead produced power seekers. We, the old people, were educated properly. We think like citizens but we’re stuck in a world that thinks like - I take that back. They don’t think. They climb through life. And they think they can climb over Trump - so why not!
The movie world had their Harvey Weinstein, who forced sex on his underlings. The education world has their fascists, who force stupidity and superficiality on theirs. That’s what paved the way for Trump.
Read my book A Graver Danger: White Chalk Crime, The Stunning First-Ever Explanation for School Shootings & How We End Them which will soon be published internationally as How America Got Trumped: An Eye-Opening Journey into America’s Democracy-Destroying Education System and you’ll know the source of the evil that’s upon us. You’ll also understand that I used school shootings in the title to get a book about how we lost democracy read in the US. It was an important chapter, but only 5% of my book. Yet, these shootings are the warning that something’s amiss in our schools.
I taught at these schools. I knew that our schools had made an understanding and love for democracy obsolete. But keeping their child alive might get them to read a deep book.
We were never a “we’re all in this together” people. We’re a bell curve ranging from that to a “grab what you can before they do” people. Our schools used to sway us to the former. When that stopped, decades ago, evil slowly took the lead.
I do not believe we can accomplish what our schools failed and are still failing to accomplish without first knowing what they did to our culture. That knowing is the way out of this maze of evil.
That’s why listening to a teacher explain what has happened to our schools may be your first light out of this darkness. And I priced my ebook as low as I could so that its light can do that.
Yay to recognition of bravely and wisely and old! And for a woman Suzanne! In a world where our femininity has been feared for so long and where today, so many men now too, are paying the price for how patriarchy discounts the unquantifiable qualities of our hearts and souls. Perhaps as the stardust we all are, more suffering together will help save life here on Earth.
Love your passion and creativity. It’s a welcome break from living in that pot of boiling frogs, now with a lid on it! Despite the heat, I continue to believe that the way to fix a culture that’s gone rotten is to study the why behind it. Understanding how we got here brings one to the road that takes you out.
I’ve been developing a series of lessons on this topic to share at my Substack. I had not intended to write. I joined to read and learn. I figured my book was enough.
I recently decided it wasn’t enough because people don’t get why they need to read my book. It is filled with important lessons. So here’s one of these lessons in response to your craving for a thoughtful culture.
We’re lost in a maze due to corrupt schools that failed to produce citizens and instead produced power seekers. We, the old people, were educated properly. We think like citizens but we’re stuck in a world that thinks like - I take that back. They don’t think. They climb through life. And they think they can climb over Trump - so why not!
The movie world had their Harvey Weinstein, who forced sex on his underlings. The education world has their fascists, who force stupidity and superficiality on theirs. That’s what paved the way for Trump.
Read my book A Graver Danger: White Chalk Crime, The Stunning First-Ever Explanation for School Shootings & How We End Them which will soon be published internationally as How America Got Trumped: An Eye-Opening Journey into America’s Democracy-Destroying Education System and you’ll know the source of the evil that’s upon us. You’ll also understand that I used school shootings in the title to get a book about how we lost democracy read in the US. It was an important chapter, but only 5% of my book. Yet, these shootings are the warning that something’s amiss in our schools.
I taught at these schools. I knew that our schools had made an understanding and love for democracy obsolete. But keeping their child alive might get them to read a deep book.
We were never a “we’re all in this together” people. We’re a bell curve ranging from that to a “grab what you can before they do” people. Our schools used to sway us to the former. When that stopped, decades ago, evil slowly took the lead.
I do not believe we can accomplish what our schools failed and are still failing to accomplish without first knowing what they did to our culture. That knowing is the way out of this maze of evil.
That’s why listening to a teacher explain what has happened to our schools may be your first light out of this darkness. And I priced my ebook as low as I could so that its light can do that.
Yay to recognition of bravely and wisely and old! And for a woman Suzanne! In a world where our femininity has been feared for so long and where today, so many men now too, are paying the price for how patriarchy discounts the unquantifiable qualities of our hearts and souls. Perhaps as the stardust we all are, more suffering together will help save life here on Earth.