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HOME2017-06-30T23:24:08+00:00

Rebooting American Dynamism

Every day and all day our world, dominated by online media, demands that we stare at our feet. Especially the flames at our feet that politicians, pundits, influencers, family, and friends warn us are ready to consume us all. Most of these folks fan the flames rather than attempt to extinguish them in a twisted attempt to get attention at the expense of our well-being. Fear mongers have become endemic in our society in the last several years. “World War III is imminent!” “Our democracy is about to collapse!” “Immigrants are rapists, drug mules, and murderers!”

Of course, most often what the fear mongers are saying is “Look at me!” to feed their vanity and to influence those they wish to manipulate. And while doomsayers can cause expectations to spin up into manifestation—the proverbial self-fulfilling prophecy—generally all they actually accomplish is increasing our anxiety to the point of our exhaustion. Their claims, while possible, are not probable based on facts and reason. These fear mongers are political and social parasites gnawing at the feathers of our better-angel wings. Their pessimism promotes peril at the expense of prosperity.

We live in an open society by choice with limited guardrails as a democratic republic. Openness, which is also known as (small “l”) liberal, is what our founders wanted for us after escaping the tyranny of religion and monarchies in Europe. Self-determination, which is a concept born of the Protestant Reformation when the Calvinist notion of pre-destination was set aside in favor of the notion that any person could become worthy of a heavenly afterlife through their own volition and perfection, together with individualism born of the same Reformation that allowed a direct relationship between people and God (without, in particular, papal intermediation), became two of the pillars of liberalism.

The ideal of a self-directed destiny is the most fundamental value in our founding documents as well as the foundation of the American Dream. Writers in the 19th century, from Charles Dickens, to Alexis de Tocqueville, to Frederick Jackson Turner, all lauded the spirit of Americans who they considered as curious, intriguing, and at times, inspirational. As the journalist, John O’Sullivan wrote in 1845, it was Americans “manifest destiny to overspread the whole of the continent.”[1] Americans are, after all, an irascible bunch of high achievers.

In America, we decided to embrace capitalism as our economic system and democracy as our political system. Both have served us extraordinarily well. Together with some other basic structural advantages like being on a continent protected from most foreign threats by large bodies of water, and the only industrial capacity left in the world after World War II, The United States under capitalism and democracy became a superpower. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a lone superpower. We were actually granted the unusual and perhaps unprecedented opportunity to quit staring at our feet to instead look out at a horizon of promise to set the example for the world and affect the advancement of […]

By |October 6th, 2024|Categories: Current, General, Recent, The New Realities|Tags: , , |

The Election as Reflection

If humankind survives, someday historians and eventually, archaeologists, will look back at today to wonder how a society that had largely achieved all of its ambitions—that successfully achieved an abundance of prosperity—went to war with itself. That some external threat or cataclysmic event did not do them in; rather, that they defeated themselves. They will study how the greatest empire in the then-modern era—the United States of America—imploded. Jared Diamond’s, Collapse: How Societies Choose to […]

By |September 22nd, 2024|Categories: General, Recent, The New Realities|Tags: , , |

Reverence for Me

As a writer, I am always searching my mind for what I think, know, and believe. Moreover, trying to find patterns between them to explain myself, the world, and the relationship between the two. Then, to write it all out coherently enough to maintain my bearings—my sanity. Finally, to share it if I think it might benefit others.

Painters paint with the stroke of colors, chefs paint with food and spices, and writers paint with words. […]

By |September 8th, 2024|Categories: General, Recent, Spiritual|Tags: , , |

Three Steps to Resilience

Every so often in America we experience unsettling times. In my lifetime, I recall the late 1960s, late 1970s, and early 2000s as being spans of two to three years when there was decidedly more uncertainty in America than certainty. When political, economic, social, and/or security concerns left my head and heart troubled. Every day had an edge to it and, at times, it was unclear we would come through it. Occasionally existential dread, but […]

By |August 25th, 2024|Categories: General, Recent, Spiritual|Tags: , , |

Our Secret Superpower: Intuition

Freeing oneself from the chaos of disinformation in our world today is imminently possible once we learn to nurture and honor our intuition.

One of the great challenges of the modern era is discerning truth from falsehood. In what I have characterized as the Age of Deceit that has been with us now for twenty years, assessing the firehose of inputs we receive each day in our digital era can be overwhelming.[i] This condition […]

By |August 11th, 2024|Categories: General, Recent, Spiritual|Tags: , |

How America Wins Again

Historians like to look back in time to identify moments when everything changes in such a dramatic fashion that the structure and direction of societies and our civilization is forever altered. The week that followed the assassination attempt on Donald Trump could have been one of those moments when a week changes decades to come. But it wasn’t. The collapse of Biden’s campaign and the assassination attempt of Trump offered Trump an opportunity to close […]

By |July 28th, 2024|Categories: General, Recent, The New Realities|Tags: , , |

The Sacrifice of Innocents

The faces of those murdered always look the same.

Stunned with eyes wide open; the glint of wonder that once animated their eyes is lost forever. Just dark colorless empty pools of pure horror. Frozen in the moment their hearts stopped beating. There is a reason people pull their eyelids down after death: no one wants to look into those eyes. Their last question is the one none of us can answer: Why did this happen […]

By |July 14th, 2024|Categories: General, Recent|Tags: |
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