“Once asked,
“And what is your religion?’ artist Gottardo Piazzoni hesitated, then replied,
‘California.’”
--Crocker Art
Museum curatorial notes
A strange wind blew through California this last March revealing a great many things. We see that Gavin Newsom is poorly equipped to lead. We see that government leadership within the two
parties has fallen capture to corporate interests and an unholy trinity of pharmaceuticals, media, and
technology has emerged. We see our
government demonstrating that they are effectively captured
and controlled by a corporate greed
death mentality that's been destroying everything for generations
already. This mentality extracts
the planet's resources and makes us sick. It medicalizes, drugs, tracks, and monetizes everything. The corporate greed death cult's mentality has
created fertile terrain – in the physical, biological and the psychological
senses of the word terrain – for “the virus” to hurt and kill far more people than it should be able to.
The unholy trinity that is attempting a coup of the nation and the
world will attempt to convince everybody, including everybody who is actually
healthy, that they are constantly and everywhere at risk of getting sick and
dying; thus, the need to be scared and hide and sanitize everything and not
behave like humans anymore-- that is, until they provide us with their preferred treatment. We can
see the overarching challenge is, as the writer-philosopher-thinker Charles Eisenstein frames it, that humanity is stuck in a story of Separation for the last couple thousand years—basically the entire
Judeo-Christian era. This story repeats itself inside every societal value and moray,
and informs our inner voice almost exclusively: "I am separate from
everyone and everything. Life is a zero sum game and a struggle for resources.
Winners and losers. Me versus them."
You can see the younger generations
straining against these binaries that have defined the parameters of our
thinking, and thus living, and they yearn for a new dream that isn’t so heavily
defined by the story of separation. It's not how we are
supposed to be living. It's not how we evolved to live. And many of
us, deep down, know this already; many more are remembering; and still many
more continue to slumber within the nightmare.
We
need a new dream, one that is centered on an affirmation of life. Too many humans have forgotten that we
can change the dream; we can change our story. What is happening in the world right now is an unveiling
and unmasking of the nightmare. It is also a call to remember, if we choose to listen; to re-humanize ourselves, to reorient and rededicate our selves to life
affirming practices, beliefs, and structures. Let's harness the collective frustration stirred up by these strange winds and anchor a new story
and dream together. We can even dare to dream up a new political party; for the sake of this discussion moving forward, I will call this the California Defends Childhood party.
