#EVOLVE: A Political Autopsy

Everywhere these days you see the hash tag or protest sign saying #RESIST

The political elite are like the Borg saying, "Resistance is futile, you shall be assimilated"

I have been thinking about the evolution of human kind and have based much of my novel I am writing on this concept. From Buddhists, theosophists, occult teachers and channeled entities (such as Seth and Abraham/Hicks) we are told resisting is to be avoided and (as the Rosicrucians have said) "Where your thought is, there you are. For you are your consciousness and what you meditate upon you become."

I have been a political activist most my life but more and more as I age my spiritual values and beliefs have been hitting up against my political activism. I wish to be "for" something rather than "against" something. At times it is a razor edge I walk. I have been thinking instead of a #RESIST Movement I would like to start an #EVOLVE Movement. I have been thinking of the phrase "Knowledge is Power." I look around and see our government unfunding education and pushing science to the wayside. It disturbs me.

In history, especially in the 20th century, control was furthered by keeping the populace ignorant. Anti-intellectualism has always been an effective political tool. From Hitler to the Khmer Rouge and beyond tyrants, fascists and authoritarians have hated intellectuals. Our current president seems to have the same propensity.

"Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too." - German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine

"Our country would be put in order, as soon as all the intellectuals who were meddling in the region were expelled" Argentina

"The youth-oriented Nazi movement had always attracted a sizable following among right-leaning university students. Even back in the 1920s they sensed Nazism might be the wave of the future. They joined the National Socialist German Students' League, put on swastika armbands and harassed any anti-Nazi teachers." - The History Place Nazi Germany 1933 to 1939

But there may be hope! Here are some quotes that show our world and youth are evolving in my mind.

"In the late ’60s and ’70s, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era ended. Today, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era is only just beginning."

The Atlantic January-February 2016 Issue

"Trump’s election may represent the resistance of those who fear this left-leaning future, but it won’t change that future from coming to pass."

Wired Magazine December 19th, 2016

"A report from the Pew Research Center finds a wide partisan gap between highly educated and non-highly-educated Americans. Not only that, but the share of college grads and post-graduates who are "consistently liberal" has grown sharply in the last 20 years."

NPR April 30th, 2016

"People growing up in the 1940s and 1950s ... were raised in a broad culture that was way more conservative than people coming of age in the 1960s and beyond. And with each passing generation, our culture, collectively, has become more and more accepting of ideas that, many years ago, had negative connotations."

Christian Science Monitor May 28, 2015

“Not a huge surprise that the highly educated would be in the vanguard of this. Those with more education have for many decades shown more consistency in their ideological views: they’re better positioned to figure out exactly where they stand in relation to the parties, and expected to take stances that line up. It’s also not a surprise that the movement in recent decades among the highly educated has been toward ideological consistency on the left. The evidence shows it does seem to make people somewhat more cosmopolitan, more comfortable with social diversity, more tolerant of social difference.”

Neil L. Gross, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Colby College

"Highly educated adults – particularly those who have attended graduate school – are far more likely than those with less education to take predominantly liberal positions across a range of political values. And these differences have increased over the past two decades."

PEW Research Center April 26, 2016

Please Visit KetherMuse

Mother's Day, Peace and Society

I began to write a Mother's Day post focused on the need for peace in the world with references to what is commonly known as the Mother's Day Proclaimation by Julia Ward Howe. I started to think about my own mother who died in 2010. But also swirling around in my mind are the politics of the day. I started thinking about the mess with the health care debate, social security, medicare and medicaid, which brought me to another thought about my mother and something she once told me.

My mother lived in a little place called Garden City Idaho.

“Garden City is nearly surrounded by Boise but retains a separate municipal government. Garden City was named for gardens raised by Chinese immigrants who lived in the area. The name of the city's only main street, Chinden Boulevard, is a portmanteau of the words "China" and "garden." In the second decade of the 21st century, it became a haven for artists' studios due to its cheap rents and eclectic ambiance.” Source Wikipedia

She lived in a trailer court near the Boise River. Also living there where lots of feral cats. My mother fed a number of them every day and they were, in my mind, quite a bother. They lived under and around the trailer except one really scraggly white one with one eye and matted and patchy fur which she allowed in the house. She contacted the city many times about them with no help. She contacted the Idaho Humane Society based in Boise but they said they had no jurisdiction in Garden City even though they had tried to take over the animal control duties for them for years. So my mother was basically stuck.

Which brings me to what she said to me that has always echoed in my mind since.

I said something like, “Mom, why do you do this. They smell and crap everywhere and besides you can barely afford it?”

She said,

“After the depression I told myself that I would never allow

any person or animal go hungry as long as I am alive.”

This brought me back around to the politics of today and thought of what life was like during the great depression and the New Deal.

"The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority.

The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient. The realignment crystallized into the New Deal Coalition that dominated most presidential elections into the 1960s, while the opposing conservative coalition largely controlled Congress from 1939 to 1964. By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents." Wikipedia

I am a liberal. So was my mother. It is clear to me that the New Deal, brought to us by liberals, puts us on the right side of history. And the conservative Republicans are still fighting against these liberal values. Which brings me back to thoughts of peace.

In closing. Julia Ward Howe called on mother's to stand up against war with the “conviction that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.” In war it is women and children who suffer the most. Like Howe I ask everyone to think about this on Mother's Day and every day. Please work for peace not war. Join the Idaho Peace Coalition or any of the many peace organization in the country. Also please visit Kether Muse Peace Resources.