One

We are One People.

We are One Planet.

We are One Heart…or are we?

We are only one people, though some people want to divide us.

We have only one planet, though some people want to destroy it.

There is only one world economy, because there are only one set of resources on the planet….though some people want to steal them for themselves.

We have only one heart, that cries out when the children are starving, when the elders can’t get the care they need when a family is foreclosed from its home, when someone is unjustly jailed…or when someone is tortured or killed.

Yet the same people who want to divide us…are the same people who want to destroy the planet, they are the same people who want all the planets resources for themselves, leaving others in poverty, they are the same people who starve the children, they are the same people who deny the elders health care, they are the same people who kicks families out of their homes, they are the same people who send us to jail for smoking pot, they are the same people who torture and kill.

We are one people, who wish to live in peace, share with our neighbors, protect the mother earth, and see equal justice for all.

But then again, we are not. We are not One, after all then, are we? We are Two, there are the We and there are the They. There are seven billion of us and only a few million of them. And yet, they have all the power.

It is hard for us, those who are of the One Heart, who know that we are ALL of the One Heart, to exclude anyone. It makes us sad to even think that way.

But wait, there are actually THREE of us. Those of Us of the One Heart that wish to live in Peace, those of Them that wish to divide us……and the people that they have been successful at dividing from the One Heart. Those of Us who do not understand that they have been divided, those who are confused about which group of Us they belong to.

But wait! There are actually FOUR of Us!

Those of Us of the One Heart that wish to live in Peace, those of Them that wish to divide us, those of Us that they have been successful in dividing from the One Heart…..and those of Us They have divided…..who are now waking up to the stone cold fact that They who would divide Us would as soon kill them and their children as give them the time of day.

It is indeed painful for those of the One Heart to contemplate and realize that there is not just One. Of Us. It is hard for us to have to fight against Them. When all we want is Peace and Justice and prosperity for ALL of Us.

But the only way we can have peace and justice and prosperity IS for all of Us to fight, non-violently and with as little hate as we can, against those with the power to divide us, those with the power to starve children, to create economic inequality, to wage war, to torture. it is only through pointing out what They are doing and how They do it that we can decrease the size of Group Number Three and increase the size of Group Number Four.

Increase it until there are so few of Us who are still confused about where the true interests, the true Greater Good lies….that They are left all alone. With none of Us to do Their bidding.

This is a unique time for Us. A time when They, empowered by the Selection of one of Them…

…FAR overplayed Their hand.

They crashed the economy, and then We bailed Them out, and then….

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are becoming bigger, richer, and more powerful, while unemployment, home foreclosures, small business bankruptcies are going up. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are not only too big to fail, they are so big that everyone else is failing. As Paul Krugman pointed out, the things they do actually are harmful to the rest of the economy.

They killed our children, our brothers and Sisters and our parents and our elders in one bad war and one, at the very least, badly run war. They tortured us to death. They continued to rape the earth and blow the  tops off of the mountains while refusing to even acknowledge that we are committing Climaticide. They sowed hate and fear, while alternately laughing and snearing….at Us. They so corrupted their own nest, The Republican Party that it barley exists….while still having an vastly inordinate amount of power. And they had their media pretend that none of it was happening.

All at (coincidentally?) a historic turning point when for the first time WE have a way to speak up and make Our voices heard.

Fewer and fewer of Us are falling for their tactics of division and fear. More and more of Us are waking up to the way things are, and have always been. More and more of Us are speaking up, and more and more of their weak defenses of Their right to be the Ruling Class crumble.

All at THE critical time when literally everything, when the future itself is on the line.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? … What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly – our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. Arundathi Roy

This is just the beginning. The powerful idea that we are not a planet full of tribes who must war against and kill…and torture…each other only came into the mass consciousness of the Human Race, the One, a short, as these things go, 40 years or so ago. At a time when (coincidentally?) We first saw our little blue oasis of a planet from the moon.

And realized how fragile and interdependent the lives of all of Us truly are. At a time when We first realized that there are limits to what this gift of a planet can give us. At a time when we started to realize that the way that They would have Us live would eventually kill Us all. Even Them.

Since that time, those realizations have been growing and spreading. Inexorably. Each successive generation embracing Peace more, embracing living in harmony with our little planet more, embracing justice more, embracing  both economic and individual equality more. And as We embrace and try to live out these principles, we cannot help but ask what are, WHO are, the obstacles to these principles.

And we slowly come to realize that those who are the obstacles are …. the same people who want to divide us…are the same people who want to destroy the planet, they are the same people who want all the planets resources for themselves, leaving others in poverty, they are the same people who starve the children, they are the same people who deny the elders health care, they are the same people who kicks families out of their homes, they are the same people who send us to jail for smoking pot, they are the same people who torture and kill.

And we slowly come to realize if WE want the power to create a world of peace, a world of harmony, a world of justice and equality for all of Us….that We must first take that power from Them.

If we want to have this planet intact for our children, and our children’s children….We must first take that power from Them. And of course that We cannot use Their methods to do so. To live in Peace, one must practice peace. But our fundamental problem is how to deal wit, how to defeat, those who do not want us to live in Peace.

We know what We must do.

The only thing we are not quite clear on, here at the beginning, is how to do it. How to become not Four, or Three, or Two….but how to truly become….One.

But we do know One Thing….all we have, if We don’t want to become like Them as this shift of power occurs, is that all We have is each other….and our individual and collective Voice.

Yell Louder!