The whole world is in an uproar and the Occupy movement is sitting smack dab in the middle. As if a stick stuck in the spokes of claiming business as usual during the most precarious times our civilization has ever seen.
We are facing the degradation of the environment, which is resulting in increased storm activity and sporadic weather patterns. We participate in a global economic system that creates abject servility in most of humanity to prop up destructive lifestyles indoctrinated by western culture and further grind the gears of a broken-down machine called the military-industrial complex; a system on the verge of a collapse, an event that will dwarf the Great Depressions of the 1920’s. We have mostly turned a blind eye to the nearly complete bastardization of North American democracy in the Untied States and Canada on behave of our disproportionately elected representatives. We are suffering the loss of the familial and social values of community, compassion, and empathy, resulting in a drastic increase in homelessness, mental illness, and crime. We are controlled into a total manipulation of our lives perpetrated by bias media conglomerates that are controlling our view of the world, furthering an agenda of sensationalism and profit instead of an accurate depiction of the NEWS. We are seeing the results of the values of corporate profit-seeking utilizing psychological science and the corrupted media to convert our lives from ones of creation, wonder and honest relationships into that of good worker bee consumers, effectively materializing our emotional experience and creating an industry around useless products.
At a deeper level, we are living out the cultivation of a fear-based forfeiting of our personal power to the systems that operate around us in the hopes that that system will take care of us. When in reality this system has been infiltrated and manipulated by egocentric, greedy intentions and whose function is only to extract your human essence as a resource and exploit it in the efforts of creating more profit, taking from us more then we are able to give and leaving us spiritually void, confused and over consumptive. We are left to try to fill this espoused void within ourselves through a material satisfaction presented up by the same system that helped us deplete ourselves. A material satisfaction that ultimately does nothing to enrich our souls and only results in a deeper sense a void, effectively stealing from our ability to embrace the true wonder of life.
The Occupy Movement is an uprising of people around the world, from all races, ages, sexual orientation, religions, political affiliation and every other diverse aspect of our existence standing up and saying “It doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t want it to be like this. We see where it is broken and we want to try something new. Let’s talk about this and make a real, lasting, mutually beneficial change”. From an aware and realistic perspective, this is exactly what the entire planet is in need of right now. So why isn’t there a higher ratio of people on this planet signing up?
Though there are infinitude different contexts and personal reasons for resistance, I will attempt to address 3 generalized reasons: Projection, apathy and personal gain.
Projection
Without going into depth on the psychology and philosophy that founds these upcoming ideas, to me, the Occupy movement is an externalization of an inner sense of unrest that is universal throughout the collected consciousness. It is people standing up to take their power back and use it in the effort to create a lasting change that is beneficial to all people. However, part of this process requires some level of taking responsibility for the role you have played in creating the problems we face. Not very many people are ready to do that.
A lot of people around the world – especially in places like Canada where we have been blinded to the tyrannical actions being taken by our increasingly fascist government – don’t support occupy because they are resistant to accept responsibility for their own destructive actions and inactions. When we see people talking ignorantly about Occupy, writing brash blog rants, coming down to try to circumvent intellectual rapport with childish rhetoric or just sitting at home hating Occupy, what we are seeing is the their own inner frustration with themselves being projected onto an event that forces an address of the source of this anxiety, lack of self-love and inner confusions.
Though the source is the broken societal system being run and perpetuated by the same people that we have forfeited our power over to in hopes of security and prosperity, it is hard to look up and accept that the people you put so much trust in have betrayed you. So instead you hate the person who attempts to reveal the truth to you, fearing the lost sense of identity that will come when they accept that the paradigm they have built their identity off of was a fallacy.
Apathy
I find that a lot of people in my demographic: 20 something, intelligent, somewhat engaged, working hard to get by, struggling but ultimately working it out as best as possible, are the ones showing the most perverse apathy, or at least here in Calgary. Though many of our grandparents and parents were forced out of their small towns and into the city in search of social-economic prosperity and bought heavily into the system, the generation of current young adults — if not deeply invested in capitalizing off the currently established system of disparity — have lost most trust in the government. With a shrug and a Whatever they allow their power to make change be forfeited over to accepting that there is nothing that can be done: “that’s just the way it is”. So they go about living their current social context knowing that they’d love to see real change but instead of creating even minor action, they just focus their energy into social culture. Avoiding dealing with the frustration of recognizing the power being stolen from them by failing to embody their true inner power to create a better world, even when that opportunity to do so is laid out in front of them.
When we become so manipulated by the current establishment that we allow the apathy it breeds to inform our decisions, we leave room for those in power to make the choices that deeply affect us to be based on the influence of corporate lobbyists. Because these lobbied opinions are the only opinions our supposed representatives hear, these choices not made with human welfare and the progress of humanity’s true value in mind. These choices end up being most beneficial to large corporations and the investment portfolio of the country itself.
As young privileged Canadians, we mostly have yet to truly experience the suffering that that would inspire us to step outside of this indoctrinated apathy and take responsibility for the world we will eventually inherit, complete with all is broken parts and debt. I wonder how much social-economic and political violence against us it will take to shake such self-centered and weak-minded thinking out of the Canadian youth.
Personal Gain
The currently established system does benefit some, which may be part of the problem but is also part of what continues to hold it up. There are many people, especially in Alberta who have and continue to gain from the puerile extraction of both environmental and human resources for the purpose of profit gain. People who have worked really hard to climb the corporate latter and see Occupy as a threat to that. Though this is incredibly egocentric, destructive and selfish, I don’t believe it is a reason to cast-out, hate or judge the people in this position. They have identified with a dying system and to see a new form of social life starting to thrive off their host’s soon crumbled ashes is terrifying. So on behave of the system they identify with they fight out like a wounded animal cornered by animal services, whose only intention is to help them get back to health.
I know there are people who recognize the severity of global disparity and actively choose to continue to profit off it for their own interests, some who have even had a hand in creating this situation in an effort to profit off it. But I also know that that perspective is not universal amongst the “%1”. Like the projection I spoke of earlier, they do not want to face up to taking responsibility for their actions or forfeit the lifestyle they have worked for, so there is a subconscious deletion of any information that does not support their current view of reality. To a person in this situation – certain outspoken Calgarians are a great example – there really is no problem here.
With the direction this machine is moving, I highly doubt they will be able to avoid the truth of our world forever. As cost of living and resources rises with debt and inflation and the personal rights of being a living natural person are further circumvented, eventually, they will feel the violence being perpetrated by the current system and their choices will change.
Regardless of how hard this dying system fights to avoid the recognition of its inevitable demise, change is already here. Regardless of whether or not Occupy camps are taken down, change is here. However, what that change looks like will be determined by what our choices are. Do we continue to forfeit our personal power and allow apathy to further the destruction of every valuable aspect of organic human life for the sake of a small group’s benefit? Or do we take responsibility for our lives and for life in general and actually make some level of effort?
Reading articles and watching YouTube is great, keep informing yourself. However, if you think that just posting links or complaining on Facebook or twitter will accomplish anything, you are sadly mistaken. Awareness is key, but without intelligent action to go with that awareness, it is valueless. Put your energy into something bigger than your own social interests and help create the world you know in your heart is possible.
Stop listening to mainstream media’s lies, stop projecting your problems on other others and stop perpetuating hearsay. Start being honest, embody your inner power and BE more. You’ve already got everything to you need to change the world; you just have to own it.
Originally Posted @ OccupyCalgary FreePress
Help James write more like this via his Patreon page
Or DONATE VIA PAYPAL
(other support options, e.g. bitcoin, here)
