Are we on a sinking ship like Titanic; or is there a newer, faster, safer ship to take us into the future?

Chaos

As I look around me at that train wreck that I have earlier posted here, “chaos” crosses my mind. For me this calls up the principle of Attitudinal Healing that says, “We can choose and to direct ourselves to be peaceful inside, regardless of what is happening outside.” I am reminded that such train wrecks occur regularly throughout our history and the future lies in what we can do with the wreckage… put it back together, or build something completely new out of it. Today, the image that comes up for me in place of the train wreck is the image of a sinking ship like Titanic. This is the threshold of a great Revolution in the way we see ourselves and our Mother — Mother Earth

The 1912 Titanic shipwreck

The first and last voyage of the ill-fated passenger liner, RMS Titanic, began on April 10, 1912 and ended on April 15, 1912 two miles down on the ocean floor. She had collided on a slant with an iceberg that tore apart her riveted hull across five of her sixteen watertight compartments. She was traveling at a relatively high speed, and at night she only had the power of trained observers to detect the icebergs that lay in her path. She was powered by huge coal-fired boilers driving three propellers. She had no radar or sonar or satellite communications that could detect the presence of those icebergs. She was, however, the best the world could create in 1911. Moreover, because she was considered to be “unsinkable,” she only had lifeboats for half the number of people on board!
Who she took down with her paid no respect to social position, wealth, or work. Her boilers were fired by a crew of very strong men hidden deep in the bowels of the ship. Her passenger list included the designer of the ship, and some of the wealthiest people in the European world, and some of the the poorest people in the European world. The catastrophe was no respecter of that which created lines of separation and stratification of society… the human animal and its drive to survive that is the source of all hierarchy in humankind’s history.

Revolutions

That “drive to survive” moves us into this continual process of destruction and rebuilding that has gone on for thousands of years. Some revolutions are wars, and some revolutions are conceptual, e.g. the Industrial Revolution that began in the middle of the 18th century. That revolution produced the Titanic in the 20th and continued into the 21st. It caused us to mechanize our lives to an unbearable point of inhumanity. Please take a moment and look around at the many ways we have come to behave inhumanely towards each other and towards Mother Nature, itself – chaos, indeed – out of which another shipwreck looms!

Today’s shipwreck

For me, the shipwreck within which we find ourselves is the product of the untrammeled, “fight or flight”, ego-driven “human animal” whose responsibility is to be continually alert, potentially violent, with only two resources at its command: fight or flight. It has built the ultimate in control, hierarchy, which today has a million varieties, each vying for supremacy. This is a lethal focus. It can no longer be trusted to take responsibility for running the ship of state.
(I am indebted to Nanci L Danison, for introducing me to the concept she called “human animal’. She is the author of Backwards, Returning to our Source for Answers. Nanci had a NDE experience that went beyond just “near death” to “beyond death”, and the discovery that she was a “Light Being”… a Soul. That spiritual part of her is common to all who incarnate for the purpose of creating a constructive experience of life. I “just happen” to know six humans who have had essentially the same experience that Nanci had, returning to tell us that we are far more than we ever thought we are.)
Today, we are in the process of stretching hierarchy to the point where it falls apart. This is particularly clear in relationship to our concept that all that matters is money. The consequence of that has been the diminishment of the lower classes to the aggrandizement of the upper 1%. In this situation, money is everything.
Because of money, we have reduced ourselves to a society of producers and consumers. We are experiencing this incredible belief system that entitles the richest to become even richer at the expense of the lowest income citizens of our society.
The current Republican candidate for POTUS, Donald Trump, gave a speech a couple of days ago in which he had a great scheme for taxation that would benefit everyone. However, Robert Reich compared that plan with the facts of the existing taxation plan. Every one of Trump’s five points of “lesser taxes” increased the income of the top 1% at the expense of the lower and middle classes for whom he would increase the income tax rate! What a shipwreck that will create! Up on the rocks with huge holes in our hull… all because we do not recognize that we are, as Teilhard de Chardin would have us know, “spiritual beings immersed in the human condition.”

A way out

There is a sizable group of human beings occupying that remarkable part of our country called Appalachia. It is hilly country, and the hills are full of coal. That coal is not to be mined again. The region does not have many more good-paying jobs anymore. This stressful situation has no reasonable resolution if we look at the situation through the eyes of the Industrial Revolution.
What it seeks now is some guidance to help it solve its problems. It is very easy to turn to an authoritarian source to lead these fellow human beings out of their tragic state. However, such a source is unlikely to really benefit these people. It will get them angry for its own self-centered purposes.
They and we are all parts of a larger process that is removing heavy industry from our country and sending it abroad. Ironically speaking, we are being challenged to direct our resources into becoming a service-oriented nation. One quick look at Appalachia says that these people are uneducated or under-educated and can’t resolve their problem… or so some believe in their restrictive, outdated thinking. With that, I firmly disagree. It is almost never too late to learn another skill. And we must keep in mind that this requires motivation and resources. I do not for an instant believe that we do not have both in this wonderful country of ours.
However, this loss of paying jobs also compromises good, more costly, nutrition. Compromised nutrition impairs the ability to learn. Therefore, in my opinion, it is incumbent upon us American human beings to provide Appalachia with both good nutrition and the schools and educational facilities that help these people advance in their skills and job potentials. I do not have a shadow of doubt that we can come together to provide both to this beautiful region and its sturdy and worthy inhabitants.
If we look at our governments, we find that their hands are tied… they have been serially reducing their income by reducing income taxes so that we can pay the rich more for being rich. That breaks the bank. However, the 1% hold the majority of the reserves of the national bank. If we do a little reframe here, we can see that these people with their money-making skills have accumulated the financial resources that make it possible to provide Appalachia with the financial and educational resources that bring employment back to the area, using electronic (read Internet) resources to educate and disseminate services.
I am not talking about adding “trickle-down”, but a “flow-down” of those resources that the 1% have been holding without really knowing why they were doing so. I see what is known as “Divine Imagination” at work here! In short, we can afford to feed and educate the population of Appalachia! The result will be increased jobs, increased taxes, and increased across-the-board income.

A suggestion:

This is a way of looking at the present revolution so that it produces the greatest benefit for the greatest number.

I would appreciate hearing from you with your thoughts. Please use the blog menu to post your comments, and rest assured that your kind and respectful thoughts are welcome and will appear unless you request otherwise.

{ 4 comments… add one }
  • Christina Tourin August 9, 2016, 10:33 pm

    Hello Ken, this is a wonderful article! I will be sharing it with many people!you are so spot on and tell the situation in a way people can understand. I will be in Maine from Nov. 17-21, the weekend before Thanksgiving. Would you be interested in pulling together your following and hosting a Thankful Harp Concert. I am working on anew composition about Nigit spreading her mantle of light further than that of Ireland to extend over the world beyond just air eland. You and I could expand upon your message through speech and music. Of course it will be after the fact but can either way thankfulcelebration or that of repairing the world. Blessings, Christina

    • Ken Hamilton Ken Hamilton August 10, 2016, 2:17 pm

      Thank you, Christina. I’m happy that you’ll be back. I’d like to post a paragraph from you about the Thankful Harp Concert in the autumnal equinox issue of Ripples that goes out to this mailing list. Do you have a date in mind? Do you have a place in mind? (The local H.O.P.E. Group meets at the First Congregational Church of South Paris.)

  • Christina Tourin August 9, 2016, 11:00 pm

    That was Bridgit spreading the sword of Light, my phone decides to put it wants to put.

  • Elaine G McGillicuddy August 10, 2016, 2:00 am

    Thank you for your concern and thoughtful ruminations about the challenging world we live in, Ken! About Appalachia, I really appreciate your optimism! “It is almost never too late to learn another skill.”
    Bless you,
    Elaine

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