Did this have to happen...

To give us one last chance?

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is a rough post, but there’s good news at the end, I promise.

To make sense of things, I have to turn them upside down and inside out, and to examine them in the context of what I already know to be true. I have to find the meaning in what’s happened, the message in it, the good that can come from it.

I know for sure that nothing happens to us, but rather everything happens for us.

I know for sure that difficult, negative, unwanted, “bad” experiences are meant to force us to make needed changes.

I know for sure that if we ignore these “bad” things and don’t make the needed changes, they grow bigger and get worse until eventually, we have no choice but to make the change.

As I try to think about what things needed to change in our society, I’m kind of surprised how many come readily to mind. Our healthcare system, our food system, the oligarchy running things on both sides politically. We just had an election where wealthy donors nixed the Democratic candidate, chose another, and other wealthy donors handpicked, groomed and educated the VP-elect and got number 45 elected number 47.

Mind you, I do not expect Republican leadership to fix any of these things. Under right wing rule, the existing systems will be pushed to their breaking points, and we’ll be forced to recreate them from the ground up.

And maybe that’s what has to happen. Some things have needed changing for a long time, but are so ingrained into our systems and so financially entangled with how the US functions, changing them in any meaningful way seems impossible. Fixing our food system would drastically reduce the number of adults on prescriptions for chronic health issues like heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, multiple cancers and autoimmune disorders—all related to diet. Healthier adults would bankrupt big Pharma. Eliminating ultra-processed foods would bankrupt Big Food. Widely available, cheap, renewable energy will bankrupt Big Oil. It’s all entangled.

Maybe the only way these crucial areas were ever going to be “built back better” was the path that will push these systems to the edge or further. Maybe this is the only way some drastically-needed changes were ever going to happen.

Healthcare, food, and politics are just three of our most heavily flawed systems, but other systems in our country are just as corrupted and just as unsustainable; our policing system, our prison systems, our social services, child protective, and foster care systems, and don’t even get me started on the absolute dearth of mental health care in this country.

And also, the entire social media jungle must be sorted and regulated.

Our efforts to protect and preserve our planet are also far too small and slow, too hesitant and half-hearted to make the changes we need in time. Without drastic, dramatic, inconvenient shifts in our lifestyles, we’re not going to make it, and none of the above systems will matter. The environment must be first and foremost. Yet in this election, it was far lower on the voters’ list of priorities than the price of eggs. And that’s a problem. I promise you, the planet will shout until she gets our attention, and we’re not going to enjoy that process. But we will move her to the top of our list of concerns.

Folks, more and more as I look at it rationally, it was already an unsustainable shit show and we were already doomed if we’d continued on the same path.

Winning this election would have enabled us to be complacent about all of the above, to keep the status quo alive and well, while making snail-paced changes resulting in minuscule improvements and taking baby steps toward justice.

What we were doing was always going to be too little, too late.

But now, instead of dancing around the edges of the fire, we are about to be plunged headlong into the flames. Tossing water at the inferno a teaspoonful at a time is no longer going to be perceived as “progress.” Things are going to get bad enough that we have no choice but to make the drastic changes required to turn them around, because that’s the only way we will. And it’s the only way we ever could. We’ve been kidding ourselves about that.

The news is hard to take

Everything is going to get a lot worse over the next two years because we refused to change our ways, despite all the warning signs that have been flashing for decades.

The coming mishandling of our systems by incompetent idiots who’ll destroy them by accident and cruel despots who’ll destroy them on purpose, will likely collapse many of them. Education, healthcare, environment, food. All of it is at risk, and I know that’s terrifying.

But if they fall, we’ll have to rebuild them, and maybe if we’ve learned anything from all this, we’ll rebuild them better than they were, fairer, and without the rotting stench of corruption.

This is not the first time

I have no idea how bad it will get. I only know it depends entirely on how much pain Americans are willing to endure before we wake up. But this isn’t happening only in the United States. It’s worldwide.

The Mayans and numerous other indigenous cultures believed that this type of thing happens over and over. According to their calendars and mythos, we live in a gigantic cycle of people advancing too far, too fast, abusing their power, and then self-destructing. But we’re never wiped out entirely. We always start again, and build again, and go too far again.

I theorize that at some point our wisdom will outpace our knowledge, and we’ll advance beyond any previous society into the Utopia we all dream of. In fact I believe we get a little further every time, before we bring it all crashing down.

Now, that’s not to say for sure that this is the time of our next crash. I mean, it is due, though. The Mayan calendar expected this cycle’s end to begin in 2012 and culminate around 2080 with the birth of the next cycle. So we’re well into that period, but there’s still time before it’s complete.

Maybe this is the cycle where we get smart enough, fast enough, to prevent disaster, to carry our culture forward into the next. Maybe we need to strip it down, get rid of the corruption and ignorance, and move into our next phase free of all that, but maybe we can do it without losing all the good parts of our society, without being reduced all the way back to zero.

Maybe this isn’t the end of a cycle of humanity at all, but just the end of democracy in the US, and maybe only a temporary end at that. Maybe it’s just a brief break that will be reversed in four years or a generation.

Maybe experiencing the worst of the worst will be what it takes to push us toward the best of the best.

Here’s one more thing I know for sure…

No matter how hard the times, it’s possible to thrive through them. Our well-being doesn’t depend on our government or anything outside ourselves. Our well-being is entirely an inside job. There are people in mansions who are more miserable than some who are in prison cells.

We don’t have to collapse alongside our familiar systems. We can thrive anyway. We can be well, healthy, and happy, regardless of what’s going on around us, while at the same time working for a better world.

We must learn to separate what is happening around us, from what is happening within us. We must remember who we really are. We are Divine Spirit experiencing a physical lifetime. We are livestreams of a single, all-encompassing Consciousness. We live in these bodies in order to experience as many parts of physical existence as we can, and to experience ourselves in the form of others. Everyone alive is a part of the same Consciousness, the same Whole. We’re here to experience everything, the so-called good and the so-called bad, in order to fuel our growth and expansion. Every experience expands the Whole.

The kicker is, when things are good, we grow at a snail’s pace. But during those unwanted, awful experiences we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy, we grow rapidly. Hard times are rocket fuel for expansion.

Which, if you take the notion further, means that what lies on the other side of the difficulty is always far better than what came before the difficulty. The greater the obstacle, the greater the leap we must take to surpass it, and the bigger the leap, the greater the improvement.

Imagine the other side of this. Imagine our next iteration. Imagine when we get to rebuild our systems already knowing all the potential pitfalls, aware of all the problems that cropped up the last time around. It’s going to be a quantum leap.

It’s going to have to be. And that’s a good thing, because the only times we make big changes are when we have no choice, and these are changes that must be made. We were moving too slowly on climate, on equality, on empathy.

I feel like this is our last chance

I really do believe things had to get very bad very quickly to force us to act in time, to give us one last chance to prevent the collapse of society as we know it. We were not moving fast enough, we were not going to make it, not at today’s pace.

I think the election of an amoral criminal to the most powerful office in the world was the quickest way to bring things to a head and force us to make the drastic changes required to save us all.

The blatant misogynoir, racism, hate, and fear that fed into this event are fueled by the same extreme disconnection from Source and lack of understanding that feeds the rest society’s ills. Those must be left behind with the rest of the rubbish.

That’s how I’ve made sense of this in my own mind, a lot of it kind of coming into focus as I wrote this post. I don’t know if it’s any help. It’s where I’m at, at the moment.

I’m sure my thoughts will evolve. But through the lens of everything working in our favor, and the arc of history always bending toward justice, this theory makes sense to me.

It had to happen to force us move faster, because that’s the only way we can still save ourselves in time.