A Perfect Storm (September 2020)
The Shadow is real, and America’s is showing. This 2020 essay is still relevant. The conflict, chaos and doubt of 2024 is part of a much bigger process.
From space, a hurricane looks like an immense white bagel with a dark, ominous, unblinking eye. A monster wide enough to swallow Puerto Rico or Cuba in a single gulp and sometimes capable of smothering a medium-sized American state.
If you or I were looking down from the edge of space, wouldn’t we experience awe or fear at the incomprehensible destructive power of this force of nature that shows no respect for and no mercy to the tiny physical creations — houses, factories, schools, villages and towns — of the ant-sized human population below?
And it may be as a summer rain compared to the Perfect Storm that in 2020 (and 2024) blankets these United States.
The perfect storm of 2020 was not composed of tiny droplets of water suspended in the air, but of two distinct atmospheric forces converging on the country like a convention of tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis: (1) a killer pandemic galloping like Tolkien’s Nazgûl on the jet stream to our homeland and (2) the dark spume vomited out of the dank catacombs of America’s past.
As if it weren’t enough that we were invaded by a deadly, invisible viral army, the lid’s been blown off the Mason jar hidden at the back of the collective pantry, and the Shadow of America runs rampant in the cities, in Congress, in the courts and in the media.
In the pulps, in movies and on old time radio, the Shadow — Lamont Cranston’s alter ego — was the good guy, a crime-fighting superhero blessed with pithy lines like, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
In the world of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (and the world of 2024), the country’s Shadow is a composite of suppressed, repressed, disowned and denied parts of the collective psyche. The inky shroud cloaking the Shadow of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has been tailored over hundreds of years from things like the dense, tightly-woven fabric of white supremacy, patriarchy, racism, misogyny, slavery, genocide and superstition.
The curtain behind which America’s Shadow had been kept out of public view was ripped open by things like the #MeToo movement, the torch-lit marches in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, the caging of children of illegal immigrants, the rancorous battle over Civil War monuments and professional sports team names, and the cries of the two major political parties that, if the opposition candidate is elected, it will be the end of the America that we know (and love).
This is the perfect storm! And it could well bring an end to the America that we know.
As Jung pointed out, so long as the Shadow remains our denied and disowned stepchild, it can rule our lives. Only when we acknowledge it and bring it to consciousness can we begin to deal with it and reconcile ourselves to healing the split in ourselves and in our nation.
This is certainly more than a tempest in a teapot. Isn’t it incredible that these powerful forces converged on America at the same time, that they were and are unrelenting, and that with their confluence we’re experiencing a 1,000-year cataclysm?
Like, where did the inspiration for the new, dystopian movie, Civil War, come from?
It is so easy to embrace the idea of Free Will and declare that, for better or for worse, we are the makers of our lives. Think, “I did it my way” and “My country right or wrong.” But how do we account for the oft unpredictable outcomes of our actions, favorable and unfavorable, the unexpected twists and turns in our lives, and that occasional gnawing sense that maybe something or somebody else is living our lives? Something larger than ourselves?
What about Life, Itself (or God, if you will)?
In The Path to No-self, Bernadette Roberts declares that Life’s objective (she says God’s) is not to make us happy, but to make us grow. What if Life has decided that we’ve been high-centered at a particular stage of consciousness long enough and it’s time to move on and move up?
What if the answer to all the chaos, death, destruction, uncertainty and division that we’re experiencing is not out there, but in here — inside each of us?
What if it’s all about consciousness?
What if all of the separate elements of this perfect storm — individual rights versus the common good, states’ rights versus national direction, conservative versus liberal, us versus them, life versus death, law and order versus law and justice, and on and on — have converged in order to bring us collectively to a crossroads or a gateway?
What if this is our wake-up call? What if Life (or God) is telling us, “It’s time to grow up. You can do much better. You have the potential, and it’s your destiny.”
What if this is an epochal individual and national wake-up call? What if this Perfect Storm is a manifestation of the evolutionary process of Consciousness? What if this really is the end of the America of the past and a new beginning?
What if we stand at this threshold and pause, review the past and acknowledge our achievements, our failures, our lessons, our strengths, our shortcomings, our joys and our sorrows?
What if we then bless and release it all and step over the threshold to manifest our truer selves, to manifest a truer America?
What if?
Postscript:
What do you feel, if anything, when you reflect on the thoughts in this essay? My heart breaks when I know the suffering, injustice and other harms that so many Americans, so many “others” around the globe have experienced. How about you? Aren’t you and I harmed and don’t we suffer when others are harmed? How long are we willing to let this go on?
How long? How long are we willing to suffer this to continue?
© 2020, 2024, Paul Wesley Burke. All rights reserved.
