The Tree Doesn’t Match The Seed
From the time I was a kid I have railed against injustice, poked holes in sacred cows, pointed out cracks in faulty belief systems. I have stuck my neck out on more than one occasion to speak truth to power, even when it cost me greatly. I once exposed an ayahuasca shaman for taking advantage of women who came to him for healing (myself included.) I faced serious blow back for that. When I am passionate about something I use my voice and I refuse to be quiet. (Thankfully I’m learning to listen as much as I speak!)
While my fierce inner warrior ignited in response to the pogrom in Israel on October 7th, the rapid, menacing spread of antisemitism, and the disinformation war that ensued, it quickly expanded to include other issues. As my friend Diane put it: “I am pulling back the curtain behind extreme progressive ideology including people’s very naive turning towards socialism and communism and not really looking at how horribly those experiments failed in the past.”
Another courageous woman, someone much more courageous than I am (no comparison really!) is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She recently wrote, “Western civilization is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilize a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fiber of the next generation.”
(When you factor in this interview with KGB expert Yuri Bezmenov on psychological warfare, read The Free Press article about TikTok (aka digital fentanyl,) and remember what Ronald Reagan said about freedom never being more than one generation away from extinction, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s warning seems worth heeding!)
Another exceptionally brave human, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder, has been trying to get the world’s attention for a very long time. In his address to the UN last week he said many salient things. He also mentioned that October 7th is Putin’s birthday, and intimated that the attack on Israel was sort of a birthday present for Putin. Sounds conspiracy theory-ish I know, but it definitely gave me pause, especially in light of what Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote...
Heated and horrible as the Israel/Hamas war is, there are much bigger and more far reaching things going on. Things that affect all of us. Things that endanger open, free, and democratic societies everywhere. And however (understandably) discontented people are in western societies where meaning is scarce and capitalism is king, and however much they take their precious civil liberties for granted (including the liberty to express their discontent!) they do not want to find out what it is to live under an autocratic, dictatorial regime. I know I don’t!
As I contemplate my outer freedom, I also contemplate my inner freedom… The freedom to respond to the world’s insanity in a way that is aligned with my vows and values, the freedom to keep my mind and heart open, and not operate from a narrow dark/light, wrong/right binary. I can’t say that it’s always easy or that I’m always successful (sometimes I want to punch a bitch!) but I find that it’s essential to clarify and recommit to my values, to not lose my faith, my humanity, or my ability to hold nuance and paradox.
I’m also contemplating ideological freedom, and I realize that I have given some of mine away! In what I thought was a pretty balanced article in The Atlantic I recently read:
“ ‘Decolonization’ has colonized our academy.”
Ouch. Those words stung because I could feel the truth of that statement and how it lives inside of me. It helped me (not for the first time) articulate how utterly stifled I’ve been feeling by the tyranny of political correctness, the constraints of “allowable discourse,” and the cognitive dissonance I feel when good ideas become painfully oppressive and dogmatic.
(I don’t know how “love thy neighbor” became modern day Christianity. The tree doesn’t match the seed. I don’t understand why as humans we can’t seem to adopt good ideas without squeezing the life force out of them and getting rigid and tyrannical about them, but it seems to be an aspect of human nature.)
Group Think, Echo Chambers, Ideological Possession, and Feelings Over Facts—
One of my core values is intellectual and ideological freedom, but I have to admit that I didn’t notice the slow and steady corrosion of my critical thinking abilities, nor the colonization of my own mind. (I know I’m not the only one and I blame social media for a lot of it. I have deleted all but one of my social media accounts and I can honestly say that I feel like a new woman. It’s almost as if I was under a spell! Influencers, who want us to adopt a certain point of view, and journalists, whose job it is to present facts with as little bias possible, are not the same thing… but social media intentionally blurs all lines.)
I break for comedy.
Workplace Harassment from Inside Amy Schumer (Watch until the end!)
Liberal and progressive as I am, I don’t want to participate in a (cult)ure where you can’t get someone’s pronouns wrong without being canceled, but you can chant antisemitic hate speech without repercussions or reprimand. There is an upside down, backwards illogic happening in the woke world and I refuse to abide by it.
