Keeping Hope Alive In These Days Ahead

At this time , only 62 days to the election, it can get very hard for many of us, in the midst of all the political jostling, distorting and posturing, to maintain a hope that there will be enough of us to make sufficient impact to make the changes we believe will direct us to be a more holistic and healthy nation.

Even one whom we have become to hope in, such as Barack Obama, trashes, by deliberate omission, the Palestinian people, in order to avoid the power of a group such as AIPAC, a very powerful collective of Jewish (and hence unequivocal Israel supporting) organizations which could quickly derail anyone that even attempts to suggest that maybe, just maybe (there actually is no doubt at all, in my mind) Israel has become, to a considerable extent, very much a mirror image of the type of abuser and oppressor that it's people suffered so horribly for so long. By marginalizing the Palestinians, by ignoring their just grievances, by brutalizing and disproportionately killing their people, by robbing them of their lands and livelyhood, by humiliating them - thus they begin to resemble those that have abused them in the past..

Complicit in this are those of both the Christian and Islamic religious fanatics throughout the world who will fight to the death ( and to everyone else's death) to procure supremacy for their own religion in the 'Holy Land'.

Arthur Janov would understand this progression well. He discovered ( see his revolutionary book, 'The Primal Scream') that anyone ( and for that matter, I extend that to include, any group) which has suffered and has not fully been able to fully feel, comprehend holistically and, by much continuing work, 'exorcise' the feelings surrounding that suffering, is bound to continue to project their pain out onto the world around them, both to their children and the society and world at large. It is far easier to lash out at the image of our oppressors than to work to diminish our inner ghosts.

It is , for me, hard to comprehend why Americans would even remotely consider electing another Republican government. But then this is a nation that chooses to bury it's own history, a history which includes as it's founding base, the destruction of a 10,000 year own peoples and their civilization, so maybe we should not expect too much self honesty.

If I think hard the only 'positive' steps that this administration has taken are those which are so diametrically opposed by so many of us. In other words, advantages and gains have been handed out to those other than those we feel are going in a healthy direction.They will, however support the status quo, a position which many of us feel will inevitably lead to disaster.

Oil, coal, natural gas,wind, corporate farming and other companies that are just chomping at the bit to rape the landscape ; stockholders, who have a clearly selfish vested interest in not threatening their wealth - no matter how, and at what expense achieved; large corporations that , in order to protect their bottom line do not want to meet environmental standards; companies which are profiting greatly by the offshore ( mainly China) production of all the goods we use at the tragic expense of 100 years of hard earned worker rights, benefits and workplace standards; western religious groups who seem hellbent on creating (and hence,by doing so justifying their 'beliefs' in ) the storied 'Armageddon'.

Greed of every kind is the prevailing anthem.

How do we keep our hopes alive ? How can we counter those that so blindly follow all that we see as so destructive. How do we not disintegrate , both individually and collectively ?