By Mark Lesseraux
There is an old saying, “The cat is out of the bag”, which, as most of you probably know, is used to indicate that something which was previously overlooked or hidden for a long time has come to the fore, that it has been revealed in plain sight. It is a saying I have been reading and hearing more and more lately in reference to the apparent cause/s of the social-economic crisis we are witnessing here in the US and around the globe these days. However, exactly what this “cat” is, despite its acknowledged omnipresence is, oddly, still somewhat of an undefined matter.
Many are saying that it is the now obvious failure of the global neoliberal-capitalist economic model, a system which seems to be imploding almost simultaneously in dozens of countries spanning six of seven continents that is the culprit. Others are exclaiming that it is the breakdown of real democracy itself, due to our inability to implement its mechanisms in their true form, which has rendered most democratic governments of the world mere “formal” special interests dominated shells of what was originally intended to be a system created by and for the People. Still others are saying that it is the collapse of longstanding, now antiquated forms of societal and institutional organization which are the most glaring indicators of the seemingly impending fall of what has heretofore been termed “civilized” society.
While all of these claims illustrate definite aspects of the current crisis, I would like to suggest that they are in fact subsets of a long-standing system of values which is and has been the root, generating cause of all the seemingly separate yet actually interconnected phenomena mentioned above. Instead of spending time going into detail (here) about the different forms which this diseased system has taken over the past century (and longer) I will, as I did in the first article of this series, quote its potential antidote: “Amidst all this confusion though, a new current of thought which places the concrete needs of the Human Being as the central value and concern (as opposed to “market laws”/profit, the state, particular deities, etc.) has begun to emerge and proliferate widely all around the world.”
In fact, I would like to take this suggestion one step further here and say that THIS YEAR (2020) could, if we play our current hand of cards correctly, be a pivot point not only for the US but for the world and the Human species as a whole. I am saying that the year 2020 could, possibly, end up going down in history as the year we began to shift our evolutionary course away from a survival based one which is dominated by an obscenely wealthy few, toward that of a Universal Human Nation in which the central value is Human Life and the well-being of each other and the planet as a whole.
In my next article in this series (which will be out in one week) I will discuss this possibility in more detail. Stay tuned!
Mark Lesseraux is a singer/songwriter/socio-political columnist from Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is a Humanist, a proponent and practitioner of Active Nonviolence and a student of Nonduality.
