Power to the People

Have you ever felt like the tail is wagging the dog instead of the other way around like it's supposed to be?

Every day, I become increasingly aware that the autonomy of individuals, the initiative of professionals, and the prevalence of common sense are being replaced by rules, laws, mandates, ordinances, stipulations, requirements, and edicts that usurp each of the above.

Founded on the basis of laws ensuring equal rights and opportunities for all, we have become a nation of line-item legislation that regulate the most excruciating detail of every aspect of Americans' lives, written by non-initiates known as elected officials who are trying to make a name for themselves, or passed down judiciously through some frivolous law suit.

We are a nation of wasted paper and meandering paper trails, backed up in triplicate. We have become so hamstrung with Bureaucratic "red tape" that we risk being chocked to death navigating the gauntlet of slow, painfully difficult process.

For those who still bravely fight for ideals and strive for excellence under the oppressive directives, we nonetheless grow weary from the constant rub of going against the grain and the constant hoop jumping, only to be "rewarded" in the end by more paperwork and more hoops to navigate. Our society has created a climate where the incentive is to do less, get more. To swim with the current and eat a buffet along the way. We've been trained to think that what were originally our privileges have become our sanctioned rights. We have been conditioned to shirk our responsibilities and duties in favor of demanding that we are entitled to the results without the effort.

We are at a point where we are blindly, pathetically disregarding the Heliocentric Theory of the Universe in favor of the fictitious, fragile Egocentric Theory of America. We have been spoiled by the commercial luxuries and conveniences, encouraged to live beyond our means to buy things we cannot afford and do not need. We've grown hedonistic and hypersensitive, believing that every problem we have, every bad thing that happens to us is someone else's fault, for which there is an "inalienable" right to compensation and special treatment.

We are empowered to be mediocre, apathetic, indifferent, and righteously sinful.

"Judge not lest ye be judged" has lost its original message of tolerance out of love and compassion and has become a misused Biblical verse that defends shameful, selfish, narcissism.

In an era motivated by greed and self-interest, where Big Businesses with "Fat Cat" executives and Major Banks with specious lending practices are bailed out by our own government, why should we expect culpability on an individual level in everyday dealings. The trickle-down effect works with both the good and the bad.

More money and lip service is paid for remediation, re-remediation, intervention and rescue programs that were are getting used to inconsequential rashness and foolishness. We spend more time and defending our actions and lifestyles than we do actually trying to improve our own cause through good old-fashioned honest toil.

Integrity and accountability have become such foreign, abstracts that an entire presidential campaign recently succeeded under the mantras of "Hope" and "Change," but I have a feeling that many who supported those messages were hoping for the idea of change . . . . for others. Not blaming anyone who wants a better lot for themselves, it cannot come magically through any anointed messiah, especially when the anointed one works among the most avarice group in the nation--the legislature.

But I am hopeful that we have in fact entered into a "new era of responsibility," and that more of the good, and less of the bad, will trickle down. We mustn't be content with holding onto handrail of mediocrity, for it leads down the downward spiral of despair and degradation. We mustn't be satisfied with words alone, but with actions, and in doing things of which we are proud and of which we have no need to defend or desire to exaggerate through boast.

Change must be from within, a grassroots movement of like-minded, responsible people who have the endurance to wend through the labyrinth of hoops and red tape, those who, as Lincoln said, gather strength from the fact the "right makes might," and not from the perspective of "might makes right."

Imagine living, once again, not with the chronic stress of ephemeral chimeras and petty self-interest, but rather under the comforting lasting qualities of Truth and Timelessness, where we can cast off all the artificial value and meaning of the possessions and attributes of little substance and liberate ourselves from a shallow existence of suffering and overcompensation, free from a world where we cannot even protect ourselves from the consequences of our own imaginations, a world where common sense is common practice, a world where life itself isn't viewed as an antagonist, where people are less concerned about image and more about substance, where we don't sit and think about living, but rather get on with it, a world with magic mirrors, where people who look in the mirror see who they really are.