The sleeping demon of racism that has lay in hiding, festering in the grass, since the civil war has been flushed out into the open. My whole life I have heard the ignorant rationalize- “racism is over” “slavery ended years ago” “ we have a black president, surely America is not racist”. This infection of ignorance has been now brought to the light. No one can deny the fracture and divide of our racist society now, as half the people of this country voted for it.
The oppression of women traces back to the origin of time. We still suppress the power of the feminine. The masculine is an unrooted power that is desperate and wild to grasp for a control that it can never posses. This frantic desperation translates to the violent oppression we see of women everywhere over the vast expanse of time. No one can deny this now as we have elected a person who identifies as a chauvinist, misogynist and has a history of being a sexual predator.
You can not solve a problem until you acknowledge it. In medicine the first step in treatment of infection is to expose and then clean the wound. This hardly sounds like a silver lining, but it is truth. This is our opportunity to bring real change. This division based on skin color is a defining enduring quality of all humanity. The suppression of women has been conditioned into us for so long that we are idle participants that help tighten the mechanism of oppression. These are not problems unique to America. America is just the front line of this fight, we are the extreme, we are the modern leaders of human evolution and culture. In what direction are we leading?
In my own personal spiritual growth it is only through the embracing of my shadows and darkest most vulnerable feelings that I have been able to find real growth. It is only through the observation of the flow of my thoughts with all of their selfishness, greed, judgement, stereotyping, and attachment, that I have found a sliver of freedom. Who do you love the most in the world? I love me and mine the most and this is why I and We suffer.
It is an unfortunately ironic truth of life that you must hit the bottom before you rise. The trick to know is you can choose the “bottom.” Make no mistake the the bottom is an endless black hole, a free-fall to nowhere, so let this be our bottom. We need to fall no further. Follow the flow of your thoughts to the darkest most vulnerable recesses of your being and there you will find the change this world needs.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti