Listen, gang. I’m going to ask everybody to read this blog post and do their very best to suspend the knee-jerk “F-U” reaction that this may bring forward for some. Just try to read this from a 36,000 foot birds-eye-view, and it may make more sense. This is not a quick read. It’s not a light read. It’s a tough read. And it’s a big ask.
In the next coming six months, there is going to be a remarkable amount of information that comes out that disproves many of these conspiracy theories that people have literally built an identity over, over the last seven to eight years.
When this occurs, some people are going to triple down on the nonsense, and insist that it is simply the government attempting to control everyone by discrediting the “theories”.
However, when this comes down, there will also be a remarkable amount of people who have been quietly watching this disinformation become debunked, over time.
This is the group, which has been watching the spiraling decline of Trump with a more critical eye, much to their incredible dismay, that will not be able to turn away from the irrefutable evidence brought forward.
They will be devastated, because they truly believed in who they believed Trump was. Perhaps they believed that he was the best association to a “traditional American way of life”, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. The point is, there will be a large group of people who are caught in an absolute reality meltdown.
This happens when folks who have been part of a very controlled group, such as a cult of belief, then T-bone into the reality outside of the cult of belief, and recognize that the controllable atmosphere inside the cult of belief is no longer viable, long-term.
What I’m about to say may not make sense to some of you, however, do your best with it.
When I look into many of the folks who have gotten sucked into the Fox News hysteria drips, the Newsmax Russian apocalyptic headlines, all of it, I look at people who have felt like things have been spiraling out of control, in the world, for a while. They’re not wrong that this out-of-control-spiraling is true. However, the reasons to which they have assigned the spiral are not accurate.
When people and theories present themselves as “the answers” to this spiral, and those “answers” at least can provide some sort of explanation— no matter how bizarre – to why things have been so crazy, and have been so off, no matter how insane the explanation is—it is natural for some people to gravitate to this phenomenon, as they see the explanation as “stability”.
I think we can all agree that all world governments do all sorts of things that we, as everyday plebes, don’t get to hear about, for a number of reasons. There’s an energy to suppressed information that folks subconsciously key into. This energy makes people feel suspicion.
However the histrionic, conspiratorial thinking that has been born out of trying to put a face and a name and a “cause” on an extremely rapidly changing world—is simply erroneous.
In other words, all the crazy conspiracy theories are just crazy theories to give people somewhere to park their car, because they’re running out of gas.
I think we could agree that in many ways, the world is running out of gas.
And that requires collective change, and collective evolution, as a planet.
With almost 8,000,000,000 people on it, we surpass the planet’s capacity to reasonably sustain life, (which was at 4ish billion people.) I believe that every living human being is aware of this, on some level, at least genetically, if not spiritually. The human race is innately connected to the earth, and connected to one another. We can feel the strain that our mother planet is under. We can feel the strain on one another.
And instead of dealing with the financial inequities, instead of dealing with the corporate greed, instead of dealing with conserving our resources and being better stewards of what we’ve been given in this beautiful garden of life—it seems to be easier for some people to point a finger and hiss, “it’s their fault!”
So here’s the part that may need the 36,000 foot birds-eye-view: there will be an enormous disclosure of information, about Donald Trump, about Russian disinformation campaigns, and about many people who are currently elected officials associated with those Russian disinformation campaigns—and that is going to shake the belief systems of many, many people in this nation, who have depended on those people as a symbol of stability.
Certainly a few people will ignore the disclosures. Because it’s very hard to look at your entire belief system, and say you’ve been conned. I think that would be difficult for all of us if it came down to it.
However, there will be a larger, significant number of people, far more people in fact, who will recognize that there are just too many pieces of information here that point toward the disclosed information being true—being the actual reality that the rest of us have been living in.
And those folks are going to be incredibly devastated, and scared, and have very broken hearts, not even necessarily for Trump, or for these elected officials, or even for the loss of the conspiracy theories and ideologies, but because they truly believed— with their souls, with everything in them—that these folks had the answers to the problems that we’re all facing, which are daunting.
This beautiful group of people, you guys, they’re going to be destroyed on the inside.
Absolutely destroyed.
Because where do you go, if you can no longer trust yourself? How do you move forward, when you’ve thrown away friends and family because of an ideal that you truly, truly believed was real? Only to now see that it is absolutely not real, and never was real?
So here’s my ask. Here is the ask that’s going to push a lot of buttons:
The ask I put out there, is that for those of us who were not sucked into these rabbit holes of fear over the last 8 years, to be compassionate to those who are waking up out of a very long, very terrifying, very hopeless, very dark nightmare.
The ask I put out there is for those of us who stayed on the outside of the conspiracies and the histrionic thinking, to extend tremendous grace to those whose entire current political belief system has been shown to be, well, not a patriotic movement, but the work of a Russian propaganda campaign whose goal was to destabilize the United States, at whatever cost.
I asked that when this happens, we do our very best to not be a chorus of sneering, snarling, finger pointing people, hissing, “I told you so!!!”, waving day-glow fringe-framed banners of Schadenfreude, as people are wondering what the hell just happened to their world, their mind, their common sense, and their life.
Believe me, everybody. The realization that’s going to hit millions of people at one time, is an “I told you so” enough.
I don’t think any of us would like to encounter a situation where the world we truly thought was real, wasn’t.
I think many of us have watched our country shift with this under-boiling of fear and hysteria, even hatred and racism seeping up to become common table talk like it was 1935– and that has made a majority of us feel remarkably displaced. The normalizing of being gawd-awful rude and nasty under the banner of “freedom of speech” has left many of us speechless over the last eight years. It’s been a truly disturbing phenomenon.
Many of us who do not support Trump, or who do not support these histrionic claims of illegal immigrants eating house pets, and children receiving mandatory sex changes at school, have endured chiding and being dressed-down from many people who do believe these things. That dressing-down has gone both ways.
Because of this, a lot of friends don’t talk anymore, and there are even some family members that no longer talk, because of these divides in reality.
I think those of us that didn’t get sucked into the propaganda machine from Russia can honestly say that it is tragic that so many others did. I know many others look at us and think that we are the lost ones, the ones who have not awakened into true reality, the ones who are the sheep, falling into American propaganda.
The whole thing is just broken.
And I’m just gonna call out the white elephant in the room, you guys—
I understand that there are thousands upon thousands, if not millions, that have been deeply hurt by loved ones, and family and friends, who have adhered to this histrionic system of belief that for those who do not participate in it, appears so ugly, and angry, and quite honestly — insane.
I understand that as many folks have been embolden by Donald Trump and his spewing of endless lies and harmful verbal attacks, and calling people names, that many others who admire him have become monkey-see-monkey-do, and then enacted the same behavior. Many others have not enacted the behavior, but turn a blind eye to the behavior, because they truly do not understand how OPEC works, and feel that Trump is in charge of gas prices.
I understand we’ve all probably said some hurtful things in all directions during this timeframe.
However, this is the bottom line— love always wins. Compassion always wins. Sensibility always wins. As both sides of a pendulum swing wildly, the inertia will eventually bring the pendulum to rest in the middle, and that’s where we’re at right now.
My ask is that we start to calm down, so we can help the folks who have been sucked into a lot of awful stuff that’s consciousness-crippling.
We can help these folks by telling them that they still have family. We can help them by telling them that they’re still loved. We can help remind them that the reality of this world is still incredible, and that they don’t have to be afraid of all the things they’re afraid of. And they sure as heck don’t have to align with a crazy authoritarian guy whose dementia has now gotten the best of him in order to believe they have a purpose in this world, or to stand up as an American for all things that they believe are good.
We can’t achieve this if we spew hatred and fear and rage and anger right back at them, because of our own wounds.
We just can’t.
In fact, if we spew all those things, then we become the exact caricatures that all of that Russian propaganda has made us out to be.
We have to be responsible for our OWN wounds, and stop projecting them onto folks. That’s what got us in this mess in the first place—millions upon millions of people projecting their own wounds onto immigrants, and gay and transgendered people, and people of color, and women—at what point do we stop the cycle?
And yes, it’s still true that some people want to believe these awful things, about immigrants and gays and transgendered people and women and people of color.
Yes, some people want to believe that white people are the victims, because they never got their American dream they thought they were promised.
Yes, a lot of people still want to have a reason to be afraid of transgendered people, and gay people, and women, and non-Christians, and people of color, and immigrants, and anyone who isn’t them —and it makes it a lot easier if there’s a big group of people doing that at once, instead of forcing folks to look inside of themselves and ask themselves, “Why am I so afraid of people living their own lives? Why am I so intimidated by the thought of other people who are different than me then having the same freedoms that I have? What does that have to do with me at all?”
As the saying goes, human rights are not a pie. It’s not like one group getting an equal portion as another group means there’s less pie for everybody in the end. In this case, the pie is endless, because we are the United States of America, built on a scaffolding of opportunity, put forth by the Constitution and other founding documents that demand we adjust as our country grows and evolves.
That’s the reality of democracy. It is not an auto-pilot governance.
The reason I wish all of us to meet the folks with compassion who then realize that their histrionic world was all a marketing illusion, is because when people are that destroyed, when they are that broken, when they are that unable to trust themselves, that’s also a very vulnerable place to be.
And there’s nothing more disgusting than kicking people when they’re down. That is not righteous, and that is not justice.
It is tyranny.
If millions of people suddenly have their world pulled out from underneath of them, and they are recognizing that that world was never real, and that their candidate was never real, and these theories were never real, and all of a sudden, millions of other people are poking them with pitchforks and hissing at them how stupid they are, well, that is a recipe for terror, folks.
That’s millions of people feeling like they have no safe place to regroup.
That terror brings on a primal instinct of fight or flight, and ends in absolute violence. People who are pushed into a desperate place will do desperate things. Very desperate things.
The ask I make is big. Because no matter how hurt you’ve been by others during this timeframe of Trump and the Russian propaganda machine, no matter how absolutely dehumanizing and awful this timeframe has made you feel about humanity, or certain people that you hold in the highest esteem—any of it—no matter what actual real-life heartbreaks you’ve encountered, maybe losing family and friends to this insane tidal wave of disinformation, illusion, division and hysteria— my ask, and it is a very big ask, is that you reach deep down inside of yourself, and find that last half-a-teaspoon of compassion that this world has not yet robbed from you, and pour its soothing liquidity onto the internal coals within all of us, that could easily explode into a raging, destructive fire.
Stay up at the 36,000 level birds-eye viewpoint with me for just one more moment— and remember that there will be millions upon millions of people whose entire reality will shatter, in the coming months. And with the exception of a handful of hard-core folks who just will not be able to let go of the illusion, a majority of these other folks will be devastated, utterly, by what they’ve given away— friends, family, social groups, words they’ve said to people that they can never take back, destroyed by the con they been part of, that they’ve been “had”. Horrified by the role they’ve played in assisting Russia and China and other governments in the de-stabilizing of American culture, rather than focusing on our highest attributes and attitudes.
For those who adhere to the ideology of patriotism, recognizing that they’ve been an effective Russian asset is even then again far more devastating.
Millions of people will be making this recognition.
It won’t be all at once and it won’t be overnight. But over the next six months as more of this information comes forward, it will be a letting-go of the histrionic mythology, by many, many people.
And my ask, my deepest ask, is that we do not turn into that which we have deeply resented, and been wounded by, this whole time—a seething mob, ready to take our anger out on those at their lowest.
Because that will make us no different than the most extreme right-wing folks, who see all illegal immigrants as vermin, LGBTQI+ people as mentally ill, people of color to be lesser-than, indigenous Americans as utterly invisible, those in poverty “seeking a handout” — the list of stepping on those who are already down, is long.
My deepest ask is when this irrefutable information comes to light, that we do not become the horrific monsters that many of us have feared—would be coming for us.
If our unchecked wounds are so great that we give them a voice—just as some of those on the extreme right have given their unchecked wounds a voice—and we choose to be the new monster when others’ worlds are shattered, we lose. Because we, ourselves, will be responsible for keeping this evil alive in the world. It will have a different face, and a different banner, and a different name, and different angle of hatred, and a different form of oppression, and marginalization and discrimination.
Yet it will still live in us.
If we learn nothing from this dystopian 8 years—we stop no cycles, we do not create new pathways, we arrest no hatred, we do not grow, and we fall back into that which we claimed we abhorred. We stop evolving as a nation.
When millions of people have their reality shattered, the buck will stop with those of us who have stayed on the outside of the disinformation campaigns, to show the entire country that there is a better way. And if we do not rise to the occasion, if we do not choose to stretch ourselves, if we do not arrest our inner need to beat down another in their most vulnerable time as we have felt beaten down, if we refuse to be the patient in the healing of a nation—then we are the very, very WORST kind of hypocrite.
My ask is that we are the responsible stewards of our own wounds, so that we do not continue batting the pendulum to the farthest ends of its most dysfunctional spectrum, just to distract each and every one of us from our very own hard work of inner healing.
Because at that point, it will no longer be “them“ being the “tyrants”.
It will be “us”.
My 36,000 foot birds-eye-view ask is that we achieve this compassion, in the many coming months. That we get ourselves prepared for this onslaught of broken hearts and absolutely destroyed ideologies. That we welcome people back into love, who have been encompassed, often willfully at first yet then trapped by their own inability to find their way out, by the relentless and pounding arms of dark stories in a false, apocalyptic world.
The slow drip of fear and hysteria that millions of people have been hooked into, for years and years, becomes a drug in the brain. The brain begins to feed off of the adrenaline and fear as a daily regimen of purpose.
This disinformation and hysteria has been a drug of choice for many. A drug to escape from their own lives, to escape away from a planet now well past its ability to support the people living on it, a drug to keep people distracted from the fact that perhaps their own life is really not where they wanted it to be.
Or, others have simply mistaken the co-opting of their conservative belief system by a wild extremist virus—as current truths.
Any way we slice it, there will be millions of people with frightened broken hearts who have realized that they’ve been had.
So please. My ask is to be kind. If it were you, wouldn’t you appreciate some grace, as your world utterly collapsed around you?
I’m certain all of us would.
