Breaking Point or What’s the Point?

It doesn’t matter — Change is coming

I read two great stories from Sherry McGuinn and Timothy Key about breaking points and current events and how these stressors make a concerted effort to pull us apart. This is my story in this chain, on how I cope with them.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. Anne Frank

I want you to go back up and read that quote again. This time, with the knowledge that it is a message of hope, written by a young woman, while in hiding from the Nazis in 1944. Her young life filled with heartache and the pulsing hopelessness of a world war around her, and yet, she sits writing in her journal about changing the world.

This is one of the reasons why I am not giving up. Why I refuse to believe that change is impossible.

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change. Confucius

While our current leaders may mirror these words spoken 2500 years ago, it does put things into perspective. Before all the great innovations of the last few hundred years; before modern medicine got a handle over some of the world’s diseases and before all the great things we believe we have achieved, leaders was still struggling with the inner demons of hubris, vanity and the congenital inability to get their collective heads out of their asses.

Somehow there’s a little solace in the knowledge that people struggle with important decisions. This is as it should be. No decision that changes our lives and the world we live in, should be made while kicking back on a lawn chair, beer in hand. We need to think about these things long and hard and intentionally get our minds wrapped around the concept that we are all one people. That we all came from the same place.

Who says Mother Nature doesn’t have a sense of humor? Go back several million years, all of us, and we’ll find our ancestors on the plains of eastern Africa, doing what people did that far back. Living together.

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one. Dr. Seuss

I try to keep things simple when I am dealing with the subject of leaders and their penchant for moving vast quantities of bullshit from one place to another without changing anything. I look for the small opening in between, where the sunlight shines through and reason can still be seen. Then I focus on reason. The hopefulness. The possibility that change — perhaps in some small insignificant way or in some major upheaval, will occur.

Like Timothy said in his article, I wall off the majority of the “things” happening out there and focus on one or two pieces at a time.

But I am also like Sherry, in that I am emotional. As much as I try to emulate the principles of Mr. Spock, I have grown to understand myself pretty well. Before I can wall anything off, I must first feel it.

If it’s anger, I feel that anger. If it’s hatred or the perceiving of hatred from others, I feel that as well. It may seem a little masochistic, but in the end, it bleeds off enough pure emotion to prevent the mind from drowning in its own horrors.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. James Baldwin

Then I begin the process of changing something. Doesn’t matter what it is. Change my mind on a given point. Change a feeling I conveyed to someone I care about, and go back and fix it. Change how someone else thinks, by pointing out the truth. Whether they see it or not, is immaterial. The effort to change is what’s important in the end. It’s this action that gets repeated, and not the message itself.

There is over 330 million people in the United States, and something on the order of 450 people in our national government, if you count the Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court and so on.

What is that, less than .00000000001% of the population telling the rest of us what is and is not right and just? Seems a little out of whack.

We elect people based on how we see them. Based on what we hear when they speak. Based on how these words and sounds interact with our own words and feelings and together — they generally produce a real mess.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The way we select the leaders of our nation needs to be a process uniquely distinct from the process we use in selecting a mattress or a brand of adult diapers.

We need to do a better job. And we do that by first committing ourselves to the process. Taking the time to learn who they are, and what they stand for. How their decisions will affect our lives. How their lives will affect their decisions.

Voting for a President or Senator or Representative is an honor that was handed down to us by those that came before. The ones who actually did offer up their own lives as a means of showing solidarity in the principles of this nation. If we have such high regard and a place of pride for our flag, our veterans and our nation, then why aren’t we devoting the time needed to preserve these rights for everyone? Who out there believes, that a government of a few people, for a few people and by a few people, will be accepted by everyone?

Everything around us can seem crazy and alarming at various times during the day, because they actually are crazy and alarming. Not in, let’s get this man committed, but in the fact that the words being spoken have been altered, distorted, or made up, so as to make us feel disconnected from reality. Desperate to latch onto anything that will orient us back into this world. And too often what we latch onto is false.

We must police our information in the same way we take care of who our children play with; what we download into our computers, or who we let drive our cars. We need to stop an outdated process of accepting information at face value because it is delivered to us by someone wearing a suit or speaking as if they know what they are saying. Those days, may they rest in peace, are behind us.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Maya Angelou

I believe that changing the world around us begins by changing ourselves first.

How we think. What information we use to think with or cast our decisions from. Thus, this is what I do each and every day to cope with the onslaught of information and images. It’s either constant vigilance or a rapid descent down the rabbit hole.

There are a lot of bright people out there saying some incredible things, so I have to believe that they have in place some mechanism that helps keep them sane and effective.

Change is happening all around us. The global pandemic seems to have done a good job at making all of us a little more real and a little less arrogant about the powers of man. It’s important to remember how much can be accomplished when we all work together. Let’s do exactly that.

Thank you, Sherry, for the chance to write this and to Timothy for plowing the furrow a little deeper.

I’m placing the same tags from Sherry’s story here, plus a few more.

P.G. Barnett, Caroline de Braganza, Chris Hedges, Stephen Sovie, Marla Bishop, Jim Latham, Desiree Driesenaar, Gurpreet Dhariwal, Jan M Flynn, Kevin Buddaeus, Kim McKinney, Rasheed Hooda, George J. Ziogas, Paul Myers MBA

Joe Luca is writer and editor for ILLUMINATION and a published author and writer of children’s stories, short fiction, non-fiction articles, screenplays and poetry. Publications include Child’s Life, Children’s Playmate and others. There are some other articles below — have a read. And thank you for stopping by.