As I watch my fellow citizens, I don’t see the struggle of soul that
I went through for years, the wrestling with my soul to discover
who I was and what was my place in the universe and that I
engage with even today.
We take our schooling, jobs and our career and our families as some excuse to
escape our engagement with our souls. We don’t engage with those questions
that should drive our engagement with ourselves. The average person doesn’t
ask themselves if about who they are and what are their possibilities or
what is the meaning of life or what does it mean to be human?
The truth is the answer these questions drive our other actions.
for example, is being human about the capitalistic vision of life
where the point of life is the materialism that America is known for.
To answer this, we must understand what is really important.
We must engage with who we are to discover that
materialism as an ideology is a failure. It is unsustainable as
as a way of life. We cannot maintain our American way of life.
It is as simple as that… but that leaves us the question of what is the
next step and no one is thinking about that.
As we understand history, we humans simply move from
one situation to another without any thought as to the
consequences of one situation to the next. What is needed
is the human engagement with our future. In other words,
we must work toward our future as a choice. We must decide
what is our future path and then work toward that. The future is
no longer just an accident of random forces, but the future becomes
a choice. We decide what kind of future we want and we work toward it.
It is not an individual choice but an collective choice. We don’t need
to have an unanimous decision as to what our future is going to be,
we can move on with a majority decision. For that is the essence
of a democracy, decision are not unanimous, but majority based.
should we deemphasize our dependence on the GNP and the materialism
our society is based upon. Yes, but we should have a choice as to what
direction our society takes. The decision as to what direction takes ought
to be a bottom up decision, not a top down decision. And we can no
longer allow minorities like the 1% decide what our choices and decisions are.
We decide as we are the majority. Let us take our political system at its
word and begin to act upon it as a majority. In other words, if the majority
decide to allow guns and the NRA to dominate our lives, so be it, but if
the majority decides to remove guns and the NRA, then we must abide by it.
But who thinks this way? who thinks about the future that should be created, not
only individually but collectively, together. The answer lies not only in our
individual choice but in what we choose collectively as to what future we shall have.
And that is the point, we are linked and we cannot to continue thinking
individually, but we must begin to think in terms of our actions within
a society, within a collective. Will my action help or harm the society
I live in. That becomes the new norm of how we think about our actions.
It is not enough to engage individually, but we must begin to engage collectively,
as a society, together. How will my actions affect you and how will your actions
affect me. We begin to rewrite what it means to be a human being in
our modern society. We become responsible for each other as a choice,
not as it is now, whenever we think about it our responsibility. We must
hold human beings to a higher standard as we live in a society that is as complicated
as our society has become. It is not enough to be responsible for just me,
I am also responsible for my place in society and that means we all become
responsible for society and its actions. We cannot allow the state to speak
and act for us without holding the state and ourselves responsible.
If the state, as our nation has done, bombed innocent civilians,
then the state and us, must be held accountable. If the state takes
it upon itself to act in our name, then the state must held responsible
and we must be held responsible. The war in Iraq which has cost
millions of lives is our responsibility as we are the citizens in whose
name the war was fought for.
If we as private individual are accountable for our actions, then
the leaders of the state must be held accountable. The notion of
the modern world that we must engage with is responsibility.
Being held responsible for our actions individually and, AND collectively
is the modern understanding of our engagement with our society/state.
But who ask themselves these questions?
The modern tyranny of the economic has taken away
our modern rights and this must end. If we want to become
who we are, we must end this economic tyranny that exists.
but who thinks of such things?
do you struggle with your soul as to who you are and
what is your place within society? do you engage with
what our society is and what it ought to be? do you engage
with your soul?
Kropotkin