It's Our Turn Now

The Fickle Finger of Fate is Pointing Squarely at Me and You.

History immortalizes heroes who took a stand for truth and usually paid a heavy price. Do we just admire them, agree they should have been treated better, and leave it at that? Or are we inspired to take a stand in our own lives?

Is it our turn?

Any true hero is humble and hopes to inspire others, not to follow them but to do likewise, to take a stand for truth in their own unique way, willing to endure the reactions of family, friends, authorities and all the professional damage that truth telling can incite from those with a vested interest in the dysfunction, deceit, heartlessness, and outright criminality being exposed.

I don’t need history to motivate me; I’m surrounded by brave friends who inspire me with their courage. Most of them aren’t famous; neither am I, and neither are you. But the world needs us, millions of ordinary people taking a stand in our lives, so many that we trigger a tsunami to wash away the insanity of a society that could soon fulfill T. S. Eliot’s bleak prediction:

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

I refuse to accept that as inevitable, not for a species with so much promise and so much opportunity RIGHT NOW to turn the tide. How about, instead:

“This is the way the world thrives, not with a hero but a movement.”

My friend Foster started the Thrive movement, daring to expose elite manipulators, and his films have awakened millions. Ivy works tirelessly to educate people on the health hazards of 5G. Julie warns about the dangers of flawed medicines. Paul is a community activist who helps good people get elected. Ricky is a retired naturopathic doctor who made this film on the dark history of the American Medical Association. Don writes poetry. Lili hosts The Ministry of Fun. I could go on and on; I have amazing friends.

What about you? What about me?

I remember one of the darkest nights of my life, having just returned from a men’s retreat to discover that my former wife had cheated on me while I was away. I wept all night, pounding on the coach while a mantra stabbed at my mind, a gut churning wail that wouldn’t stop: “Things could have been different!”

It was too late to save our marriage. I don’t blame her, I don’t blame myself… like all relationships, ours was complicated. But what I remember now, and what has guided me since then, is that horrible feeling of regret. Things could have been different.

I don’t want to ever feel that again.

But I will, and so will you, if we don’t take a stand for truth. I’m not talking about grand standing. Very few of us will make a film or write a best selling book, but we have a procession of moments in our lives where we either whimper or thrive.

Where there are heroes, there are villains. So, who are the bad guys in this story? It’s easy to point to Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, Victoria Nuland, etc. But what about looking in the mirror? When we do, what do we see? Someone just “phoning it in,” existing without passion: eating, working, watching, playing, complaining (probably), and eventually dying?

Some contribution. Some life. We’re enabling evil with compliant silence.

As we get closer to the finish line (dying, that is), it’s normal to wonder about the meaning of our lives. But what will we do with what’s left of them? They say that a movie can suck for an hour but finish strong and be remembered as a great film, whereas one that’s great for an hour but peters out is a failure.

How will our stories end? How will we be remembered?

No-one is going to make a statue of me! I’ve lived a small life, like most of us. But I’ll keep doing what I can until it’s over. I’ll be guided by that memory of regret - and many others - that compel me to do the hard things, not just to take the easy way.

BTW, we are expert at spectator heroism. Remember the film Network and that scene where crazed TV anchor Howard Beal exhorts viewers to go to their windows and shout: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!”

Faye Dunaway’s character, the producer, learns that people are shouting all over the country, and cries: “We’ve hit the motherlode!” She was celebrating ratings, not activism. Sure, people shouted, then went back to watching TV and DID NOTHING. Just like millions of TV watching sports fans who cheer on their team and celebrate: “We won!” Really? We won, from our recliners with beer and chips in hand?

That’s about the extent of most people’s risk taking… shouting out a window, watching other people excel, or maybe complaining about “them.” My dad did that every day, raving about “those bastards!” who run and ruin the world. His most daring push back? Buying a Yugo, arguably the worst car ever made, because it was built in Communist Yugoslavia and getting it represented a “blow against the empire.”

He did what he could, however misguided it might have been. But what was missing for him, for me, for most of us, is something entirely different. True activism is not first about doing, it’s about feeling.

This is the hardest thing for me: to feel. And I don’t believe I’m alone. Even heroes, celebrated for their brave acts, can be emotional cowards, hiding their wounded hearts behind glorious actions. How many super heroes ever deal with their emotional baggage? They just beat the shit out of bad guys, externalizing their own ignored internal issues. And the song remains the same; nothing really changes. There’s another movie, another real world catastrophe. Sigh.

I believe that a life of compassionate service begins with crossing the threshold into feeling. The idea of “opening our hearts” may sound romantic… until we do it. Then we feel it all. The joy, the grief, the gratitude, and the rage. We feel the world, what’s become of it, the results of allowing untethered sociopaths to run everything because we’ve failed miserably at our civic duties and become compliant enablers of evil.

The first stand to take is to refuse to live with our hearts closed and dare to feel what’s in there. Because when we do, then we’ll be motivated to take a stand in the world. The courage, the power, the intelligence and the wise guidance to do that comes from the inside.

Our first and most important question is not, “What should I do?” It’s “What must I feel?” Otherwise, we’ll just do our best, which is what all well intentioned people are doing. And we witness where that road is leading.

I didn’t cry more than once or twice in the 21 years I lived in a spiritual community where we were all mission driven by spiritual principles, hearts be damned. I was with the elderly leader a few weeks before he died. As he shook my hand his eyes blazed with blatant desperation and an unspoken plea: “Get out! Don’t sacrifice your heart the way I did. Free yourself to feel!”

It took years to really get that memo, which turned out to be his greatest gift to me. When I did and left that community, when I exited the spiritual bypass I had dawdled on for two decades, my world came crashing down. Years of tears erupted and wouldn’t stop. I honestly wondered if I would ever quit crying.

I eventually did, but it took almost a year. By then, I had just begun to feel. An astrology friend had observed I had a rich emotional realm but my heart was encased in ice. His question to me was: “What’s it going to take to melt that ice?”

How about you? What about you and your heart?

Do you live in your head, like I did and still do a lot of the time, or are you learning how to feel? This is something we do need to learn, because everything in society trains us not to feel. Well, that’s actually not accurate. We’re programmed not to feel what’s going on in our own hearts by overwhelming us with media that triggers feelings to disempower us.

Why are there so many horror movies? Sci-fi used to explore innovative ideas, now it’s all monsters leaping around corners to devour innocent children. Why is all the “news” bad? This gets us feeling alright! And it further obscures what we really need to feel, which is the heart break of this world... right in our own hearts.

I’ve lost friends for speaking up about the insane response to Covid. I’ve buried friends who died because they had a reaction to the vaccine. I’ve been shunned by family members for disagreeing on politics. I stood before a circle of friends at a memorial service for one of my best friends and screamed to the sky. “No!”

But Stevo was dead.

So was my mother, the day after I left her in a Vancouver hospice where I heard her moan with regret about her lost life. “I should have …” She had a long list of woulda, coulda, shoulda’s … but it was too late.

It’s not too late for me and you. Our lives don’t need to end with a whimper, our last thought being, “things could have been different.” We can thrive, right now. We can dare to feel. We can let the dam in our hearts break wide open.

Get ready for heart ache. Get ready for self-judgement. Get ready for confusion and pain. Get ready for freedom.

And get ready to forge new friendships with others who proudly and humbly declare: “It’s my turn now!” This may sound heroic and it is but this is a hard path and we need each other’s loving support. That’s what this kind of communication is for.

You are not alone.