April 5, 2022
As I write, the horror story in the Ukraine continues to unfold, women raped, men, their hands tied, tortured and killed.
At the deepest levels, he is destroying himself, he is destroying Russia. Many young people are leaving Russia, the two trains a day into Finland are packed with people who see no future for them in Russia. The press has been shut down, protests happening everywhere, state radio broadcasting Putin’s pretense and lies about what is happening in the Ukraine. The whole country seems to be in a financial collapse and Russian journalists in the West foresee a throwback to the old ways of surveillance and repression.
The Russian economy is collapsing, many corporations have pulled out, and darkness lies ahead.
Over the past 30 years, Russia has been very open to the West, with ties and imports at every level, American goods, medicine, and medications. There were restaurants and café’s open to people, and now suddenly the whole country is reverting to something like the Dark Ages.
And so, the war continues at virtually all levels of the planet: Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, climate change, food shortage, another virus, inflation, oil crisis, asylum issues, migration issues.
And just a day ago, the UN announced that if we do not immediately start doing things right for the Earth, the planet will become uninhabitable.
War? Plato: Only the dead know the end of war. And then the philosopher Hobbes: Peace is simple the absence of war.
Our history appears to be one constant never ending war, especially about religion, an impulse now also present in the political realm, “my god is the right god, no it isn’t, my god is the right god.” The physicist Richard Feynman observed that the less prove there is for something, the greater the hype there is around it.
And so, let’s get serious. “ What regent of the Earth is not filled with our calamities?”
In the modern world, quite suddenly everything seems to be getting worse, the storms, the system crashing, another pandemic.
My take on things is that it is worse now because a whole impulse that has run and ruled the world for so long is over, making a last-ditch effort to assert itself, its power and authority.
And deep within all of the catastrophes around us good things are happening.
- Children were once hanged for stealing a loaf of bread.
And then, at some point people realized this was wrong.
My hope is that we can change, and that we are in the midst of change.
Three days ago in the Whitehouse, President Biden signed into law making lynching a federal crime. The first attempt of a Black mother visiting the President then to ask him to make lynching a crime was in 1898. Nothing was done. And then in 1955, a young Black boy, 14 years old Emmitt Till was brutally tortured and murdered in Mississippi for wolf whistling at a white woman in a store. His mother wanted the casket opened so that everyone could see what had happened to her son. His face so disfigured as to be almost unrecognizable.
At that point, a woman journalist, Ida Wells publicized the crime, and her great granddaughter was present and Emmitt Till’s cousin who witnessed the kidnapping, was also present when Biden signed the bill.
It has taken 120 years since a Black mother begged a president to outlaw lynching. What has happened in all that time? The appalling treatment of Blacks, Michael Bloomberg said that in his state alone, New York, 650 young Black men were lynched.
The kind of fear and terror that Black people have lived in since the very beginning of slavery in America defies description.
And now, a great number of Republicans are trying to pretend it never happened.
- The same day, Pope Francis met with a group of Canadian Native People, many in full Native garb, to offer them a profound apology for what Catholic mission schools had done to their people, children snatched from their parents, subjected to physical and sexual abuse, many murdered and put into mass graves, now showing up everywhere. And it is possible that the Pope will visit Canada in the near future to meet with the survivors.
- And now, a federal judge has struck down a voting bill in Florida, that would make even offering food to people lined up to vote, a criminal offense. The judge said in a very strong and well worded opinion that the bill was clearly based on racism and was an attempt to prevent American citizens from voting.
Many such bills have also been put forward in other Republican states, the President is now there to put an end to all of them.
- And now, two remarkable events concerning women.
When President Biden delivered his State of the Union address, he introduced the two women standing beside him, Nancy Pelosi, and Dr. Jill Biden, by name, observing that this recognition was long overdue.
And the many women, both white and people of color in his government, also accords with a long overdue recognition of the gifts, the power, and achievements of women everywhere in the modern world.
And then, two weeks ago the Senate hearings on the nomination for Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson took place. The Republicans interrogated her with unconcealed contempt. They interrupted her, they talked over her, they asked her frivolous questions and they refused to follow any rules of order, it was virtually a free for all.
She demonstrated a remarkable calmness in the face of what has been a universal situation for both women and Black’s: A Black woman confronted by a gang of white males. Another horrifying aspect of women’s history here along with racism.
It was clearly a move to impress Trump’s base, all these men demonstrated their manliness by berating a Black woman—I doubt that most of Trump’s base has any interest whatsoever in what a bunch of rich white middle-aged males in the Congress think about anything.
The whole thing was a travesty of justice, but someone told her at the end: The joy of this day shall not be taken from you.
And a poll of the American people show that the Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most popular person ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Her ratings are somewhere in the 70’s, compared to those of other Supreme Court Justice’s that were generally in the 40’s.
- And so, here we are in the modern world, and certain facts about our history need to be made clear.
Because here is my hope for us, and that we can change our ways, both our practices towards the Earth, and to one another.
We come out of centuries of male domination, of a long one-sided rule by the masculine principle, out of any connection or even recognition of the Feminine.
Plato’s cave, the cave of history is a very male cave: Male governments, male philosophers, male writers, male rights and privileges, male ideas, male forms of rule, male religions, male scientists, and male inquisitions.
We have been run and ruled by typically male values and we still are. Money can always be found for making wars, not for social programs. Our economies are based on preparing for war, manufacturing weapons of war. And war talk maces our ways, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on crime, and so on. One of the laws of Consciousness, of ideas, that whatever you focus on you get, wanted or not.
And so, all of our many wars simply create more of them.
This is why a generation that detests war will not end war, only a generation who loves peace will put an end to war.
We are living through the end of male domination, thanks to the increasing presence of women coming up out of the shade and shadows of history to the light of this historical day. The women’s movement always said: Women rights are people’s rights.
New values are coming in with the women, the minorities, the oppressed and reviled, the marginalized put down and dismissed, by the high culture of the West, the white male ways of thinking. At the deepest levels of the modern world there is a grassroots uprising of people everywhere against all forms of oppression, against governments that do not serve them.
The power on the planet is shifting away from a world run and ruled by the rich and for the rich, into a world based on the truth and the validity of ordinary people everywhere.
We all function in pyramids of power. At the top is some semi-divine being, a pope, a king, a CEO, and then under them, are increasingly unimportant levels until at the very base are those of no account whatsoever—ordinary people, the Native peoples, women, and the Earth.
Pyramids are only as strong as the base, and those at the top neglect the well-being of the base at their own peril.
The true power lies with the base, and now those at the base are not going to put up with the fear lies and control that have kept them in subjection for so long. This grassroots uprising is happening at every level of society and the modern world.
We live in scriptural times, where the last shall be first, where the rejected the outcast, will no longer put up with the contempt traditionally shown for them.
The hope for the planet, and what is really taking place, is the end of centuries run and ruled by the masculine principle, centuries of male domination, are coming to an end in the modern world.
The light that is falling in is surfacing the darkness before it. The Feminine Principle is reappearing in history, changing everything.
Courage, the current of life is ever onward.
And it is never so dark as just before the dawn.
