“Who do you need? Who do you love, when you come undone?”

-from the song Come Undone by Duran Duran

In the latter part of the 1960’s, the Coca-Cola Company ran a series of radio ads with songs sung by then popular singers like Roy Orbison, Los Bravos, and Petula Clark. (If you have never heard of these artists look for them on YouTube. They had some great music.) The songs were unique to the artists but they all ended with the slogan that Things go better with Coke. You cannot prove that by me today. Drinking carbonated soft drinks for most of my life darn near destroyed my digestive system. So now, things go better with green tea and many herbal supplements to heal the damage. I don’t resent that. I am just grateful that I have been able to rebalance my system. The only thing that I do regret is that I did not know what I was doing to myself until there was much damage to contend with. Live and learn, as they say, but it is always troubling to discover how wrong one can be about so many things.

People search for love and acceptance all their lives. Some of us find it, but many of us never do. There are people who are so angry and troubled by this that they set upon a path to destroy others for either having found it, or not supporting the illusion that they are unconditionally loved and deserving of absolute loyalty and support no matter what they do. This behavior comes from a never-ending quest for proof of their worth when in reality worth can never be proven to them because they don’t believe they deserve it. This type of person destroys lives and sometimes will fight to the death to attain a temporary high when they bully their way to a perceived achievement, but it requires a constant stream of verification that is an addiction that can never be satisfied. If you find yourself being stalked for that support by someone like this all you can do is run. They never stop once they get access to you. This is extremely hard to do when they are in a position of power, and God help us, they tend to seek out those positions to insure that others can be held captive by them. We truly are being held captive now because they are in government and they own the corporations that produce many of the necessities of life that people must have.  Untangling your life from their control is monumentally hard, and those in a position to reign in their tyranny are refusing to do so. This is where we stand as a nation, and it is strangling the life out of us.

Everyone has an ideal that they try to live by and those ideals are usually particular to the individual, but societal ideals are all over the place now and many people are damned angry that their personal beliefs on what is right and what is wrong are not as shared in the world as they had thought. Live and let live has been thrown out the door and they are looking to destroy what they see as behavior out of control. What they do not seem to see is that they are reacting in ways that are breeding total chaos. Many are actually proud that this is happening, and as they look to destroy a culture that has diversified beyond their comfort zone, we are seeing the collapse of all reason to force the perceived “wrong people” out of the world entirely or at least force them into an inability to continue practicing their “objectionable” behavior. Would that we could drink a Coke and make things go better.

One issue that I see at the core of what we are now experiencing is that few people are comfortable with knowing the facts of American history. How we evolved to what we are now is an essential element in learning how not to further our downfall. Psychologist and Author, Mary Trump, published a book called, Reckoning in 2021 in which she describes in vivid detail events that have taken place in this country that are exceedingly difficult to read. We have done many savage things to our fellow humans that have been hidden, glossed over, and ignored, that cry out from the past to be reckoned with. I don’t normally shy away from learning a truth about anyone or anything. I prefer to know the truth about everything even if it is god-awful to hear, but I found reading her book to be more than even I could stomach. Many times I had to stop reading and get away from the tragedies written there to rebalance myself. It is a tough, hard, read but to ignore it is to never realize and understand the depths of hell that people can sink to when they adopt an elitist way of thinking, and this is at the heart of all of our problems today. I wrote a post on this blog in 2016 called Brexit - Stage Right and in it I speak about the occupation and bullying that the British empire committed upon other countries such as Ireland and how they are lamenting their own grievances now with the European Union but they have never acknowledged how they have treated others historically and how the payment for their wrongs always comes due at some point. Mary Trump points out in her book how the US is beginning to reap what they have sown in crimes against humanity but now there are so many crimes that we have committed that the payback for them might well be severe enough to collapse our society. I believe that on some level we all know this, but there are some amongst us who believe that they will stop the inevitable by sheer force of will. What they don’t realize is that they are accelerating our own destruction and demise in trying to hold on to what is actually a myth of American power and supremacy.

The people that some believe are ruining the world do bear a responsibility. I see many things that people do which have and are now causing a great many problems that have upended the balance here. Many of these behaviors are truly detrimental to so many of us but especially to our children. We see in the media issues that cannot be explained in a way that a young mind can understand and without keeping our children under lock and key until they reach adulthood it is not possible to protect them from misconstruing and misunderstanding what is happening or why it might be happening. Our education used to come in graduated increments which, hopefully, gave us a chance to comprehend things a little at a time so as not to overload us. Those days are gone. Information, right or wrong, is in your face every minute of every day with the advent of the internet and social media and it is all too much too fast for the majority of us. People are mentally breaking down. Whether they realize it or not most of us have PTSD, ADHD, panic attacks, insomnia, eating disorders, addictions to what ever will temporarily make us feel better, and constant sadness and despair. These are the symptoms of a world out of control and too many people with the less debilitating forms of this are preying upon us in every way imaginable to prove that they are superior and more powerful, and take advantage of our fear and misery while we are down. We do not have a government or a medical establishment who can or will help us. Are you stepping on the rules that are here to help and protect us? It is not enough to recognize it in others while we fail to recognize the part that we have played in what has manifested. Have you had enough of this? Are you willing to look at your own life and face the “reckoning” that has to come? Yes, there are plenty of people “out there” who are to blame for our downfall, but it remains too easy to duck and dodge around the problems for some of us. This makes us complicit in its staggering growth. When you actually have had enough, there will be an answer as to what must take place to end this, but until you have, realize that this is the life we are stuck with until we own up to our individual contributions to what got us here. All things do not pass into the night when we remain unwilling to accept our own responsibility for what we have done.

Without set boundaries and rules to stop a behavior there will never be an end to it. Too many of these behaviors have been let slide and when our government and legal systems refuse to take a strong stand on the perpetrators of lies, tyranny, and gross inequality it is the individual’s responsibility to call this out, but will we if we are also guilty of this in our own hearts?

In the Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities, the gentry in France have been so cruel and uncaring to the lower classes that the people rise up against the rich and make them pay dearly for their crimes against humanity. The anger and anguish toward them results in a rounding up of the aristocracy and sending them to the guillotine by the dozens every day. Obviously, some are more guilty than others for the atrocities but it does not matter what the degree of guilt is then because the people are so tired of being ill-treated and poor that you only need to look rich by then to be blamed and put to death. It is a sad fact that abusers rarely change unless they are forced to do so. In today’s world we are seeing a refusal of the ruling class to hold its own accountable for their crimes as it was hundreds of years ago. Unfortunately, I fear that our fate may not be much different from those who lived during the French Revolution. Innocents will die along with the morbidly guilty because nothing was done to change the inequality for far too long. It is apparent that modern society feels threatened by the anger of the lower classes but they are fairly certain that they have set up a powerful system that will largely be strong and efficient enough to thwart us should we have any ideas about true revolt.

We are truly at the tipping point where something has got to give, and just as it was in France, the citizens aren’t likely to be any more fair and accommodating to their oppressors once they gain a foothold on reversing the tide. The tragedy of civil war is already upon us and it can only be stopped by individual people before they become a movement in numbers far larger than that of the oppressors. All rules will be stepped on and kicked out of the way. This is the way the world ends. We have come much further than previous revolutionaries did. We have the means to destroy the planet where they did not. Finding that one thing that will make things go better has eluded us for far too long. If it exists, we have little time left to make it so.