What is happening around the world is so much more than a pandemic. And on many levels, I have to say, I am glad for it. We are entering a true leveling up of humanity, and it is amazing to watch it finally unfold. I have been feeling the tremors of this eruption for more than a decade now, as I have watched world leaders try desperately to hold tight to control, keep the stitches of an already stretched thin fabric together, keep their fingers in the holes of the bursting dam. People are tired of being treated like mindless, voiceless sheep, and many are ready for real revolutionary change. Change is here.
To be clear: I don’t love Covid 19. I don’t love the fact that people are sick or dying from a novel virus surprise dropped on the global population. I don’t love that people are losing their jobs, their access to resources, their livelihoods, or their homes. I don’t love the real pain and suffering that so many are going through, or that this virus is hitting hardest those who are already vulnerable.
A Better Way
I do think there could have been a better way to get here, to this earth shattering shift. I think we could have risen up in peace, seized control of our own lives, separated out into smaller, self governing communities of like minded individuals, and chosen to live lives on our own terms. I think the “powerful” are grossly outnumbered by the “powerless” and really the only think required for that shift would have been an awakening to that realization.
Indeed, many people have been all too awake to it for far too long, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. But change is here now. For all of us.
It Didn’t Have to Be This Way
I don’t think it had to begin (read: continue) with death and suffering.
But here we are, dying and suffering en masse.
Every single person’s life has changed.
The stronghold is broken. The blinders are off. The illusions are shimmering out of view.
Clarity.
For the first time in perhaps ever for some people, we now have to look upon what we have wrought through our unwillingness to participate in change.
We must watch our empires crumble, the large and the small, and look at the pieces of the rubble, wondering at how we contributed to our own downfall.
Painful throes: change is here.
We are chomping at the bit over spending too much time with our own children and spouses.
We must watch our Black and Brown brothers and sisters dying at vastly unequal rates.
We see the consequence of living packed on top of each other in overpopulated cities.
We feel the hurt of outsourcing our food and other basic supplies to far away locations.
We witness just how fallible our leaders and representatives are, and just how gullible they think we are.
We feel a fear unlike any we have ever known, not because Covid might come for us (though it might) but we because we have no idea what is coming next. And we have for so long convinced ourselves that we have it all under control so well that we sit in abject terror of the uncontrollable.
So much is broken, and we never knew how to fix it.
Our abysmal education system that has been failing our children for generations is finally showing its lack of real value in our lives.
Our extended work hours, daycare hours, and school hours that kept us from our friends and families, from making real connections, from our 6 o’clock dinners and daily family walks, now seem unnecessary and trumped up.
Our need to be busy, to fill the air with noise, to never be alone or quiet is now visible for what it was: fear of going within.
None of it was ever working for us.
The truth is, we have been growing less happy, less healthy, more stressed, and less wealthy for much longer than that.
Prior to the lockdown prompted by the pandemic, Americans had less leisure time, less time with family, less spending power, and, yes, less sex, than Americans from 50 years ago.
Today, a two income household supporting a family of four can’t do that.
And we know it.
But we don’t know how to fix it, any of it.
What do we do instead?
We Numb
We drink bottles of wine and beer, smoke pot, watch Netflix, scroll through social media, self isolate and self segregate, get in fights with people on the internet, and settle ourselves into this life we’ve been handed and all that’s happening to us.
This is our lot in life, we say.
Whaddya gonna do?
As Charles Eisenstein said in his essay Coronation, Covid did not change our lifestyles. It intensified them.
We were already spending more time isolated from each other, locked into our screens, drinking too much, smoking too much, numbing out, following orders blindly, relinquishing our freedoms, ignoring the realities of the outside world.
The lockdown has only served to shine a light on the way we have all been living. What we’ve been accepting as the status quo.
And, honestly, who can blame us?
How many of us, given the opportunity to go back and take the blue pill, wouldn’t?
How many of us wouldn’t just put our hands over our ears, close our eyes, and sing against change “Lalalalalalalalalalalala?”
And it is what we have been doing as government leaders and representatives have been screwing us over, getting into bed with business owners and magnates to keep us “happy” and malleable. Give us our football and our Facebook and you can take us for everything we’ve got, turn us into modern day sharecroppers, sugared up, self hating consumers in debt up to our necks, and just eager to have a job that just makes ends meet.
Covid has put a halt to all of that.
The house of cards is coming down.
The global pandemic, lockdown, isolation, death and suffering is just the beginning.
Most of this part of the change is pissing me off, as I’m sure it’s pissing all of you off. Because it was so avoidable. So preventable.
And much of what comes next is going to piss us off even more.
But then?
Then it will set us free.