The Included, the Welcomed, the Powerful

A door opens!

I’m interested in personal and social change both. Now I’m wondering if these two aren’t part of the same thing and if the two aren’t starting to come together at this hour of multiple uncertainties. If the future’s uncertain, doesn’t that also mean we’re out of our rut — that there’s an opportunity to create something completely different? Could a door be opening for us?

By us I mean the left and right both. When I see the faces and hear the voices on the left and the right, it looks like plenty of us on both sides feel excluded, unwelcome and powerless in the face of the system and the war machine.

I know those feelings myself. My background is in dealing with them, both as a social change activist and in the personal growth scene as a small group facilitator.

But here’s the thing: When it comes do our collective and public life, don’t most of us feel that we’ve little room or permission to make a difference in the world? Aren’t feelings like this exclusion, unwantedness, powerlessnessthe feelings underlying our messy and often divisive public conversations: the ones on climate change, democracy, capitalism, for example. Don’t they describe how we feel at the possibility of ignorant and nuclear-armed armies clashing by night and taking us all out.

And here’s the question that comes in from the opening door: Does this have to be?

This is a “big question.” It’s up there with the fundamental ones like “‘who am I” and “what am I doing” that people have always asked. But there’s a simple aspect to it too. We’ve been participating in a story about human powerlessness in the face of faceless power structure forever! As a pattern just take a quick look: Subservience to lord and master has run through all our history in virtually every land. It’s Pharaohs and slaves, Kings and feudal Lords lording it over their serfs. It’s robber barons and the robbed, the mighty Church and the guilty congregation.

This is exactly today’s pattern except now it’s the corporatist structure of our society and world that rules, mostly through the media propaganda machine, the corporate minions that tells us what to believe and how fine it all is. They tells us that eternal war against sovereign nations is our lot, racism is here to stay, that free trade is necessary (while it exclusively serves the investor class), that US health care is not affordable when no limits can be set on military spending, and much else. They tell us this very much like the church use to do. And very much like in the days of old we buy into the story that’s handed to us! With the government thoroughly at the behest of the those corporate interests, the body politic has thoroughly yielded the field to corporate interests to define our role for us.

So it’s no wonder we feel powerless, unwelcome, powerless in our own world! This is the old story but the new twist, if we want it, is that maybe it doesn’t have to be?

https://twitter.com/WaakeUpCalls/status/900100174214725641

If I’m feeling powerless or unwelcome I’m letting the desires of the corporatist state come in first. What if we include and empower ourselves? Why is this not possible and available for us? But it is! We have the media tools to connect with each other robustly. We can thoroughly include each other, welcome each other, one by one and ongoingly into this fight. We know the group processes that build trust and resilience among us. We know more than we’re saying. We can use our smarts to get it done.

Caitlin Johnstone has it right here:

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/how-to-fight-the-establishment-propaganda-machine-and-win-449f94e1d40b

We don’t have to limp along in thrall to the forces that give us a role we don’t want. The propaganda war is ours to win. They have us while we give them our assent.

Take it back. I’m doing it because it’s the right thing and because I think we can do it. But I’m also doing it for me. I want the power back, the inclusion, the welcome.

We can do this. Fight on!

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