#i think its just a byproduct of a feeling that grows with how algorithms and luck get thrown into the mix | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

remelitalia · 3 years

Text

Why SaaS Brand Advocacy is More Important than Ever in 2021

It’s no secret that the field of marketing is constantly evolving, and SaaS brands are not immune from the challenges that arise due to the fast-paced nature of the field. One great way SaaS companies can keep up is through brand advocacy.

2021 SaaS Trends that Affect Brand Advocacy

For starters, consider the overwhelming push toward personalization.

According to a Forbes article, 71% of consumers “feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal.” 74% are displeased with websites that aren’t personalized.

This signals the need for SaaS brands to segment their content assets and interfaces to hone in on messages that speak directly to specific customers. Personalization will continue to be expected in the years to come, and brands will have to figure out how to deliver it.

In the SaaS industry, where every interaction is ideally tracked, the opportunities for personalization are enormous.

Changes to Facebook’s algorithm a few years ago have also caused organic reach for pages to remain in decline, though you may still be able to find some success in organic if you get creative.

There’s also the rise of automation to think about.

New and existing SaaS companies are investing heavily in AI and machine learning to reduce churn and win more new customers simultaneously. From services that provide A/B testing to conversational bots that capture leads on-site, brands are rapidly experimenting with new ways to optimize their content.

Why Brand Advocacy is Such a Big Deal for SaaS

Simply put, your content marketing strategy is at the core of your capacity to adapt as a SaaS brand. Beyond the basic benefits of driving traffic and raising brand awareness, an effective content strategy is essential to consistently nurture and onboard leads.

Conventional wisdom says that we should shell out piles of money for paid media or sponsoring influencer posts to grab people’s attention. However, is this sort of “pay-to-play” strategy really the best way to go?

In an era where social proof is such a powerful currency for marketers, it’s more important than ever for SaaS marketers to seek out brand advocates wherever they possibly can.

Who could possibly be better brand advocates than your own customers and employees? These people are already emotionally invested in your product’s success, and they know your brand better than anyone else.

Encouraging your own network to promote your content and product from their personal social accounts is a potential game-changer for SaaS brands. Rather than spend the resources to chase paid outlets and influencers, brands should focus on advocacy, which can produce better results in a shorter amount of time.

“By creating a product that solved a problem that a lot of people faced, it meant there were already millions of people looking for us when we launched,” Canva CEO Melanie Perkins told Forbes, “so when they found us, they told their colleagues, friends and families.”

Here are some of the biggest benefits associated with brand advocacy, along with some ways that SaaS marketers can get started with realizing them.

1. Overcome Content Overload

In an era where people are on their phones nearly 4 hours or more per day, your customers obviously have a lot to sift through.

While the concept of “quality content” might be cliché at this point, consider how a higher volume of shares highlights a piece of content as buzzworthy. This is social proof at its best.

Content shares and product recommendations work because people trust peers and thought leaders more than they trust brands and institutions.

Bear in mind that employees who serve as active advocates on social media can quickly emerge as influencers on your behalf. Indeed, transforming your own employees into thought leaders is a desirable byproduct of brand advocacy.

2. Expand Your Organic Reach through Brand Advocacy

No matter how you slice it, competition in the SaaS space is fierce.

Considering that there are approximately 8,000 brands in the martech space alone, SaaS companies must fight tooth and nail for the attention of potential customers.

Think of advocacy as a sort of numbers game. The more people promoting your content, paid or otherwise, the more likely you are to break through the noise and reach the people who need your product most.

When you encourage employees to regularly promote your content with their own social media audiences, you essentially amass a small army of promoters you can call on time and time again. Through social brand advocacy, you exponentially increase your social reach and potential to be seen by leads.

Keep in mind – in many cases, all it takes is for the right person to see a link and opt-in for a free trial to pave the way to the sale.

TOPO CEO Scott Albro notes that the smaller the company your prospect works for, the more likely he or she will be to stick with your product once the trial period expires:

“SaaS buyers won’t engage in more than one trial. Our data shows that this is particularly true in the small and medium size business market where buyers tend to comparison-shop less. You need to make sure that buyers find your trial first. You also need to make sure that you don’t squander that opportunity when you get it.”

3. Engage Your Employees to Help Grow Brand Awareness

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of encouraging brand advocates among employees is the actual task of asking them to do so.

While most workers would be glad to promote your content, keep in mind that brands should treat advocacy like any other sort of campaign. That means having a defined strategy and measuring performance.

However, SaaS teams often have highly specialized skill sets. You can’t expect everyone to be a seasoned content marketer and social seller, too.

Instead of having employees post content haphazardly, consider some of the tools out there that help streamline the process of internal brand advocacy. You can also help them with the content of their post.

One such tool is Smarp, which aggregates company news and industry-relevant content to categorized feeds. Team members can pick up the content that speaks to them most and schedule posts for their own profiles with just a few clicks.

This cuts down on potential wastes of time on social media and streamlines the process of sharing new content amongst your workers.

Features such as gamification signal the most active advocates within any given company, providing additional incentives for employees to become eager advocates. In addition to content aggregation, Smarp provides analytics on both a company-wide and personal level to identify top advocates.

This type of system works because it makes employees from all departments into partners in your SaaS product’s exponential sales growth success, a process which Roketto Co-founder Ulf Lonegren compares to the growth of a tree that spawns more trees:

“Make your employees proud of the work they do, make them feel like an important part of the process by reminding them how the software provides value and informing them of the successes, listen to their ideas, and provide a sales chart in the engine room that tracks the progress. Set sales goals and provide rewards for reaching those goals. Provide incentives for team members to make sales. In this world of mass marketing, word of mouth often provides the authenticity that buyers want when seeking a product, so remember that every member of your team could be that one oak tree, and from one tree many nuts can fall.”

4. Supercharge Your Social Selling

SaaS customers are heavily influenced by what they see on social media when it comes time to make purchases.

This rings true in terms of how often they see content and the sharers of that content. If social posts from sales pros, marketers, and brands themselves are deemed less worthy of people’s attention than social posts from peers and laymen, then your prospects are more likely to respond favorably to content shared by a high volume of people.

Research from Sana, published in 2018, indicates that social media is the number two driver of digital sales in the B2B sector, ranking just behind onsite buying. This is how the brand advocacy strategy can really boost your sales. The more people who share your content across social channels, the more customers you attract to your business.

According to LinkedIn, 87% of social customers have a favorable view of products that were introduced to them through their own network. By promoting products via employees, you have access to personal networks that you might not otherwise reach exclusively through a brand channel.

Last year, B2B buyers looked at 13 content pieces before selecting a vendor. Similarly, 61% of customers have made a purchase based on a recommendation from a blog.

A greater number of brand advocates translates into more brand equity in the minds of potential customers, which makes it easier for sales reps to build relationships on social channels and to close more deals in shorter sales cycles.

This is fortunate, as sales cycles need as much shortening as they can get, in order to remain scalable. The Bridge Group’s Matt Bertuzzi notes that the total contract value for a SaaS conversion correlates with the number of days it takes sales reps to seal the deal. According to his firm’s data, B2B SaaS sales cycles can last anywhere from five weeks to five months.

Dennis Koutoudis from LinkedIn SuperPowers told SalesHacker that he sees prospecting on social media, especially on LinkedIn, being the key SaaS sales opportunities:

“I predict that the usage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator by Sales Teams will increase considerably, enabling them both to zero in on their target prospects with extreme precision and also to delve deeper into Social Selling. The key here is to focus on providing value, build trust and develop solid professional relationships with target prospects that will ultimately improve sales figures. Great emphasis will also be placed on the way we present ourselves as Sales Professionals on the LinkedIn platform since with such fierce competition, now more than ever, we need to not only stand out in our professional field but also to engage in actions that will significantly increase our visibility on the LinkedIn platform.”

Prospecting platforms are major game-changers in this regard. Social selling teams can use them to scale operations, thanks to smart libraries of content assets that reps can append to posts on the fly, as well as sophisticated contact intelligence data that can be used for qualifying leads mid-discussion and enriching CRM entries.

5. Keep Your Content Budget Under Control

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 46% of brands spent less than $1000,000 on digital marketing budget in 2020. Given the emphasis on automation and other tools that could potentially cut into any given SaaS company’s budget, a leaner content marketing strategy just plain makes sense.

When your employees and customers are doing the legwork of promoting your brand, you cut out any sort of middleman when it comes to promotion. While there might be a time and place for paid media or influencers, SaaS brands should focus on an organic promotion strategy that keeps costs down.

Encouraging brand advocacy costs next to nothing compared to paid media. Additionally, popping up more and more via social media could actually score you earned media mentions as an added bonus.

Rather than paying for promotion and distribution, creating your own advocates represents a more financially sensible strategy.

Conclusion

As competition continues to emerge in the SaaS space, having voices on deck to promote your content becomes a critical piece of standing out from the crowd.

Not only does advocacy keep content marketing costs down, but allows SaaS brands to seamlessly signal their authority. Rather than pay for that same credibility, why not generate it yourself?

While marketing strategies at large never stay the same for long, brand advocacy is here to stay. If you want help growing your brand awareness or with any other content marketing needs, let us know!

The post Why SaaS Brand Advocacy is More Important than Ever in 2021 appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/saas-brand-advocacy/ via https://neilpatel.com

See the original post, Why SaaS Brand Advocacy is More Important than Ever in 2021 that is shared from https://imtrainingparadise.weebly.com/home/why-saas-brand-advocacy-is-more-important-than-ever-in-2021 via https://imtrainingparadise.weebly.com/home

#IM TRAINING PARADISE - Home

0 notes

antoniasteffens · 4 years

Text

MANUALIS IN VACUO ( part 1: November 2019)

(intro with a soft hysteric undertone that you can skip but it offers a moody ambient as an entrance):

We don’t need to kick our own ass if we are peaceful beings. Sometimes in masked peace we will encounter situations that kick our ass in such ways, that we will necessarily respond. So the notion of ass kicking is not to take for granted as a necessary “lesson of life” itself ( oh how poetic ) but an implicit byproduct of (mh.. maybe ..?) Capitalism- for those of us that can’t help but being sensitive.

SO NO, these lesson are not meant to produce another product that masks and embodies the masked and embodied violence of a capitalist society.

That would mean to become the provider of a placebo of a lack. Rather TRY (and fail a million times since you swim against the stream to ) to respond to violence, by attempting to demask your environment.

Capitalist realism could also be called:

Me dying from you, you dying from me.

Is it a responsibility? Is there no alternative?

Is it a duty to provide for killing the other?

A force of nature of universe ☀️☀️☀️ that pretends to romanticise ONLY

Fake gardeners ( since they intervene in the virgin eco system), fake trees (since they pretend to be generous air recycler, but grow only high to overthrow their neighbour tree) , fake sunlight (since without light there would be no brain, but it provides skin cancer in exchange and depressive thoughts)- it seems to me that some basics of capitalism were never and option but always a rule. Seems we have to deal with some basics of being then:

May Darwin win. WIN WIN.

ONLY REAL COMPETITION.

Perma culture is another word for eternal life. Eternal life another word for paradise. Paradise another word for death. Let the middle age fetichism come back. Put your money on the after life.

Since you know better. You extinct.

FOR THOSE STILL ALIVE

When I encountered the void few years ago I made temporary peace with my sexual organ and declared infinite war to each and everyone maintaining psychological intactness in my direct environment. If you look closely, of course, there are not many left, to truly have an upright fight with anyhow ( most of us suffer anxiety, sleep disorder, depression already or still). But there are a lot of those, that for many apparent reasons keep up pretending to maintain psychological intactness. I may call this a coping mechanism.

All of you depressed, suicidal, frustrated, rebelling, confused- all of you are still standing (if you have not died yet) and all of you that did not give in yet even if deformed, distorted, disfigured by us- I love you and it is you I believe in - your depression is a poetic response to the madness around - your tears are thunders releasing tension within a field of human consciousness, completely corrupted in a cloud of dense ignorance of daily inattentiveness.

You are the absolute absolute absolute reason I can be hopeful. Every and each of your doubt is a holy grail, a guideline to paradise. Even if that means we won’t survive this, which we anyhow won’t.

When knifes smile to your wrist, balconies invite you to fall off from them, waters seduce you to drown, dreams are your only refuge, but sleep starts to become harder to reach, I have a single one and only solution!!!!!

1st. chapter:

Stay with your environment! STAY STAY STAY.

The remains of a sandwich lie on the ground of a public space. You can see the traces of the teeth that bit of the toast bread, ham and cheese in between. The quality is this cheap paper like bread that cannot really be called bread but is the dutch joke for nutrition. Still, the bread is not responsible for its own ridiculousness- I pity it for being such bread without any pride and respect for the history of bread. But as in pity lies always love, I cannot help but love it. I sincerely honour it for revealing to me the dishonour of those that are in charge of producing it, along side so many other breads, equally dishonoured.

The humiliated bread has its own pride because it is transparently showing to me all that is left of its former idea. And that is indeed very complex, validating and demasking a history of bread and capitalism, nutrition and mass production.

It has dignity by itself because each and every detail of the cosmos has dignity and respect, as long as being attended. It has dignity because it is. And it really is. It truly lies there on the ground, with its whole pride of being.

Some cheese and ham rest inside, or if you want, the elaboration of an idea of value of a cow in our un loyal society, hostile to animals, humans and plants, now presented in a sliced format that can fit perfectly the two bread pieces. Cutting edge technology towards how stupid one should become to grasp ones own nutrition in the manual sense and in the metaphorical one.

They became a temporary company of their own. They ended up being a small family of textures tracing history, half eaten and then thrown on the ground. There, on the ground that is a public space and supposed to be held clean by someone.

Here, someone else, that is not the cleaning personal, disrupted the order. We know the toast should not be there. But here it is, singing silently a song about hope.

Why and how to be hopeful about that sandwich?

Look at the details of the grains, the cheese, the bite trace. Look at what it wants to tell you. It becomes slightly comical, this revelation of dysfunctionality.

It is more than that, it is a real trace, that within the urban habitat, hints towards the fact, that there has been life here. A living thing, a prey for the hunter, which is the human. But first you have to understand what you are looking for, hunting. While looking at the bread, you may hunt for another kind of sense of nutrition. A nutrition, that goes beyond the functionality the bread stands for, which is to feed. Now halfway eaten, halfway used and thrown on the ground its obvious function got dishonoured as it is put into a place where it is deprived from meaning. As it does not invite to be eaten and do its task for nurturing, maybe you that you are looking at it, maybe you look for another kind of nurture, that it has to offer to you. The nurture that lies within the bread on the ground may be in experiencing its functionality by listening to what it has to tell you, in relation to its direct and indirect context.

Yes I know, the context of the public space can seem pretty empty, so scheduled and untouchable, that all you feel is being alienated from any source of nutrition.

You are a hunter deprived from your prey, and instead capitalism gives you a placebo effect that temporary stills and steals your desire to encounter your world by letting you buy sandwiches in supermarkets. That you may then half way eaten, throw on the ground. Here they become a true trace for an alternative nutrition, an alternative prey.

Think about this kind of prey as a prayer. When praying, you might be led to a sense of hope, a nutrition that grants you with a sensation of crating mechanisms of belonging to this world. In the toast bread case, before it becoming your prayer, you need to learn to read the language of the traces, otherwise you cannot become a hunter of the prayer.

So read the bread well. Can you figure, that this trace can bring you out of a labyrinth of mechanisms operating on the appearance of “for grantedness” in a world where nothing ever was for granted and therefore everything is precious. Even that toast? In days where you had to read your environment in order to survive, the world revealed itself as a speaking scenario, with present, history and future, with character and humour, with multilayered and playful pathways of things and beings ending up and meeting each other. A toast bread would be a curiosity and not a default. It was a place where things could be touched and felt, smelled and seen, interpreted and misunderstood. We were in a speaking world. Not a muted, ignorant one that pretends to be overthrown by algorithms, have clean public spaces, where people eat perfectly packed sandwiches, that disappear in their stomachs as if eating is nothing else but an oiling of the machinery, that has to happen in the meantime of one metro line and another.

The algorithm failed, the toast lies on the floor. Let’s start by the hope that the algorithm fails constantly. In minor and major gestures. People will throw the bread on the ground for you to read and at the same time trash the algorithm. Thanks GOD! Or whoever.

So, This is just an example. Look at your world. The toast can speak. It can tell you about its history in just one slightly elongated blink of an eye, where you recognise the toast and what brought it there. Become a listener, a friend to the toast. Half way eaten, humiliated on the ground. And never ever take it for granted for what it is and became since it came there by a complexity of relations.

This is how you learn the language of loyalty with your environment- do that with trees, animals, buildings, empty bottles, rain drops, trash, clothing, packages, super market signs - do that with the back of the neighbour you never talk to, see how it is hunched or maybe in perfect upright position of a spine. but ask yourself if that speaks necessarily for the metaphorical dimension of this person actually having a spine, however.

Stay with your environment. And let it reveal itself to you. Love every message and let it linger and resonate before thinking you know how things have to be, should be, if they have relevance or importance or not. Read your traces as messages from the environment. Let them speak their poetry, songs, their stories and just listen. But you must stay. Stay stay stay stay stay. Reading traces is still the only way to survive.

Why life can always be a gift if you are not totally fucked up, dead sick, traumatised and a victim of mayor relational conflicts of humans and their environment, such as war, crisis, violence and situation where the gift of life is impossible to elaborate on itself

When you let the traces of your world speak to you, the house wall, lid by daylight, every single brick, the trash on the ground, the colour of the clothes of people in the street, the rattling of the leafs of the trees, the giggling of the water in the rivers, the song of the nightingale in the absurd cold night of November, the weird sound of people using language and laughing about their jokes, will become aware of you, they will start to flirt with your perception, and thank you in showing you how complex, masterfully weird, intense, jolly, annoying but cute, rewarding they can be. When you let those traces reveal how they came into the world in a long and precise development of steps that made love to each other, merged and accumulated, excavated and fought, went through the hole range of whatever their expression and impression of emotionality may be in order to come to being, then you can see each gesture of life as a powerful gift elaborating itself to you. Almost like a daily choir of encounters and things singing and reflecting upon its own sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful existence. That what seems mundane becomes a playground of sensations telling their own story through you, being the perceiving human. If you perceive you make yourself available to receive. If you are able to receive life on a level of such profanity you will encounter richness. Abundance of a sort, that is so mystical, complex, useless in a sense of beyond capital utility, lonely, collective, temporary and fleeting, that you might feel glad to be alive. Not juts glad you will vibrate a sense of aliveness that can connect you to your environment as an intrinsic experience of itself. And you will not feel that alone any longer. Try it for a bit.

More of will you see, lonely drives, defaults and mistakes implemented in a world, that is not perfect. A world that tries to push through its ideologies, desires, ideas, that has a crazy, malicious and fascinating drive of being. Since it loves being so much, and so too much that all that it can think of is to be, All the time. A narcissist choice of an imperative of being that reveals itself in the defaults of relations. Birds fighting for food, cars fighting for space, humans that stop connecting with love, but talk in between the lines, anxiousness of being left to die, disgust towards decomposing materials or toast breads on the ground and so on. There again, is also space for humour, to lean back and discover how decisions are being made, reactions are hysterical ticks, things will be postponed by fear, fear will be clumsily integrated in the bigger picture of traces, organising our life and being and its dramaturgy.

Cynicism in a neoliberal embrace

At some point in the story we have been encountering a desire for organisation and form. The expressing world, the traces that changed in the course of time and locality wanted to get fixed, to hold on to them. With symbols emerged language, as writings, gestures as ambitions for creating, cave drawings, into memoirs, into Torahs, Bibles, practices, into constitutions into positions in between humans in relations to agreements, animals, plants, into functions defining what the drive strives towards. And those into ideas of what serves who and who serves what, into a system we are dying from right now that is not called life only but now also capitalism.

A brand of capitalism behaves as Neo liberalism. As I become a neo liberal being, with every breath I take I immerse myself into the logics of those ropes holding my hands into place, my thoughts on track, my feelings in a rhythm of its metronome, steadily accelerating. It seems an economical structure is embracing me, keeping me alive, and making others die, or vice versa, with every toast bread I buy, every plastic bottle of water I consume, every job I say yes to, as a contribution to a bigger picture. An annoy of my own voice rages inside me, comes to judge upon my feeling, saying: we know that. Bring me solutions, bring me answers. Or shut up. I know this annoy is a byproduct of my fear of being submitted to the structure. A byproduct of a history of separating content and form. I am the content that holds the form, I think. The form indoctrinates me with content, with what I am, I think. Very Brecht. This idea of the product of environment.

As I choose to shut up, to not bother myself, the other or the ideology, what expresses in me is an alternative of some cynical sort. So cynical that tears show up to resist the bitterness of a system that entered us in our most private and intimate encounters of our world, our friends, our steps, our relations and choose to corporate anything and anyone’s effort to make sense of their own being. A system that tries to keep us away from making use of our ability to read our world, to talk to our world, to listen to our world. There it comes dark and sad. Cynicism.. it feels toxic but at the same time it measures my engagement simply in a cryptical way, diminishing a message underneath that might be coming from a true desire to express. Letting it revolt my fake humbleness of shutting up and showing me the face I carry out while facing a mask of a world.

The cynicism is a form of hope. So don’t you disguise it when it comes your way. And its only way of being operative is by choosing to customise itself in the form of a dark joke. But again, if you were to read your traces well you would not ignore the cynical dimension of life and try to read its origin, so keep in mind my hint: STAY with it. When it comes our way. Stay.

So here it comes:

The handbook for spineless beings in post somatic realism. For dancers and non dancers and people that lack a sort of directionality or have terrible back pain. How to live without loyalty.

The era of centre is over. There is no central authority, giving direction to the system. There is no central exchange. Emerging decentralised markets are connecting sellers to buyers by peer-to-peer trading. Exchange is not a meeting point of different interests but an operative chain of motion, weaving a web through gigantesque and sensible systems of advertisement and promotions, connecting the “(a)like” minded in a market philosophy that works through confirmation rather than communication. We congratulate each other and shake hands. The perpetuation of the 20th century ontologies, that are based on the idea of use and abuse, implode in an infinite chain of copy-paste algorithms, that completely deprive anything and anyone from being worthy enough to be seen on a distinctive expressive level of being a being, that can speak and move, humans, animals, plants, objects, matter in its singularity and in its encounter with matter. Capitalism has led us into a world where we can only think in quantities, in masses, in fragmentation against a sum of things, where this equals and unequals that. On the other side, waves of identity politics emerge, calls from perspectives that are over jumped, overran by those that cannot make sense or money out of the perspective of difference, or those that are simply “riding a ( for some king of reason mysteriously unquestioned) wave“ of a career. As Bracha Ettinger describes it well, the phallocentric psychoanalyst world view is a binary one. It is you or the other in the oedipal conflict, marked by the fear of castration. And the other side of that thought is indeed the naive idea of eternal and infinite symbiosis. In both cases “difference” cannot be acknowledged. Neoliberal societies then throw identity politics back into the machinery, where they become a distributable good in the decentralised organism of production and consumption. When everything can be consumed, nothing matters. Matter is just there to be strategically dispersed, organised, being made available, demystified, objectified and distributed. No one sees the matter crying, dying, being compressed into toast bread, being compressed into depression. An idea of matter has triumphed over spirit, like the tarot card of the 5 of swords:

Geburah(Severity on the Tree of Life) always supplies disruption. In the 5 of Swords, Venus rules Aquarius which implies weakness rather than excess of strength. Hence, weakness is the cause of the disaster. Here, one has succumbed to the body's fear of discomfort, and losses the will to "fight on". If you're still breathing, you can't be defeated, for the Soul is the one who provides the breath in the body. So your immortal "secret lover", is still within you. However, if you are not in communication with your soul, because your identity is controlled by "fear of rejection" and/or the survival mind of the material world, whom you have made as Foundation/ Master of your own body, you'll be defeated by your own fear of death, which translates into all other fears.

To deprive matter but also to deprive the moment when something matters, from its own sensibility is the ignorant core of a capitalist and neoliberal society. What is deeply connected to this ignorance, is the fear of meaninglessness “that nothing matters” once the system of value collapses. The idea of being or having to encounter a sort of nothingness is still the core believe driving the binary of “to be or not to be”.

Once the sneaky mask, identifying and distributing our values ( good, thoughts, relations) for the favour of that binary, which means giving value to only parts of the environment and the inhabitants while devaluing others parts of the environment and exploiting their inhabitants as unworthy of being- once this mask was to slide down- what could it mean for our goods, thoughts, relations, how could they bloom, flourish, express what they always had to say? Could that maybe happen if one was to give up- And then what is to truly give up? Is it just to give away? How to give up even?

I say it is about reanimating our perception towards an intelligence, sensibility and spirit of the forms we encounter and let them express what they do, can do, could do. To understand that these forms are never fixed and always in vibration through communication. Even the toast bread wants to communicate. It is a form that wants to have a form of conversation with its environment, one could say.

A form of conversation means that conversation is a form. A form of something that can livingly exchange and express itself through an architecture or a system, incorporating different expressions that encounter one another. So if capitalism itself could be seen as such a conversation could we think of altering the way how we speak and listen to one another within that relation. If we were doomed to capitulate to that form, as the only possible way of living, we truly had no alternative. We were truly speechless and in ourselves unintelligible to exchange. We were to make an important mistake, as Negarestani explains in Intelligence and Spirit:

if concepts themselves are absorbed by capitalism, then the very idea of capitalism becomes ineffable.Talking about capitalism and diagnosing its pathologies will then be little more than exercises in producing subjective and arbitrary narratives about something that is, in truth, unintelligible.

What does that mean? It may mean that by capitulating capitalism, we cut off ourselves from our own ability to converse in intelligible manner. Intelligence here means maybe not the driving force of creation in a product orientated sense, but a creation of a movement, or of many movements. Movements that can vibrate and alter the form and course of beings. Therefore one has to start to see forms as beings and beings as flexible, elastic encounters of vibrating matter, with frequencies that have a temporal appearance and structure but which are always fragile, malleable as they are always in relation to a synergy of a conversation. That synergy, that conversation our forms are taking part into, can alter the forms, can change their vibration. Synergy is the idea that a conversation is a meeting of energies that can alter each others frequency and therefore no form ever can be considered as something fixed. Not a thought, not a stone, not an idea, not a foundation. Let us step back further and further from the form as a fixed encounter towards forms as fluid, intelligent moments of exchange.

As our intelligence creates movement, our perception renders into our attention the intelligence of our environment. Through relation we are able to create thoughts, ideas, an attempt to express our poetics into the space we inhabit. Which means we attempt to attend that space. Again, these attempts to attend are not to be confused with fixed views, but rather temporal spirits and inspirations that chant towards and in the meeting with our environment. The meetings become tangible as movement traces, incorporating the reflection of past events and the hope or desire for future vibrations.

Here and very important when elaborating those, we need to make sure that the creations of those movement traces, which can be our identity politics, our socio-political ambitions, our dreams and hopes won’t be eaten up and incorporated as ready-made sellable products within the neoliberal ideology of a corpus itself.

Going back to the neoliberal decentralised market, one might recognise that wether by default or strategy, this market is often targeting our most intimate and private relations and takes our goods, that is sometimes all that we have, in order to feed it ideology of movement and finally product orientated organisation. How those encounters are being capitalised upon is mostly more easily felt for, let’s say, a freelancer working within a small community, than a worker in a big company. But what is urgent to understand by all of us, is that the system we operate inside of, where each and every gesture we place into, has a real effect and creates a direct reality to the world we inhabit and thus, right back at us.

Acknowledging the intimate conversation at the threshold of each encounter with the neoliberal system is a first step towards altering the communication we can have with and inside of it. SO again STAY STAY STAY.

Let me dare to make an analogy. If we see the loss of centre as having psychological and physical consequences within our bodies or body-beings, what would it mean to us as individuals and our way of moving and being moved within a neoliberal, decentralised fluctuation. Instead of one centre, we encounter a couple of centres that take over the conversation around value, on different levels of existence. Being doomed to being, being doomed to survive, the body-being will experience a certain stream or locomotion that it has to follow up with and feed such being fed by. True critic is suicide, as it appears that a true critic will only catapult you out of what seems to be the only choice in the 21st century.

I dare to say, that as we are pulled and pushed around and against this mechanism of decentralisation, we become deprived from directing our own intelligence to make conversations with our environment. As the era of centre is over, the era of conversation and direction as well. What is masked in the idea of “decentralisation” is not that power truly exists and operates, that is pretty obvious and smoothly functioning. Whats is masked instead is rather the notion that someone’s actions and motion can be held responsible, that someone can enter a conversation and their activity can leave a trace in the environment to reveal what brought it there, for what reason, with which agenda and default mechanism. That trace that leads into communicating with the environment is what is masked by the operation of decentralisation. The only loyal environment to hold on to is one that is in a complete state of flux with a constant alteration of “what a front” is and “what it means to confront something or someone”, and thus multi-directionality acting upon the directions of the body-being and its attempt to receive and direct expressions from its environment.

One could also say that attention will be all the time distracted producing a sort of soccer play, where the eye of the mass is focused on the ball and not on the environment and in a hypnotic survival exctacy the bigger picture will have to be left out. The focus is permanent but what to focus on is forever exchangeable.

When the social being, the human being is deprived from its way of directing conversations and attending its environment, by such manner the physical and psychological experience results ultimately in a loss of communication finally resulting in a general “loss of spine”, as the delicate arrangements of vertebras collapse inside the speed of a vortex and the stretch of a hyper elastic moral, being twisted and intertwined, for whatever reason may sell us further. Spineless beings. Spineless beings that cannot attend one another.

This happens not just in the human bound body but also in the body that binds humans to generate bigger corporations, as in communities, collectives, scenes. And here is where intimacy get corrupted into a game, that I am not sure who wants to really play it in the end.

0 notes

benjamingourblog · 5 years

Text

Active Hope: The Salish Sea I love is dying. What can I do?

By Hannah Coughlin. Originally published in Cascadia Weekly, October 23, 2019

I have been called to the water for as long as I can remember. As a kid, you couldn’t get me out of the pool without tears. As a teen, every angsty after-school activity was at one of the dozen beaches within my 20-mile radius. As an adult, the water is where I went when each of my parents died before their time, when my sister had a psychotic breakdown, before I said my vows to my husband, before my son was born. Water has always been the refuge I turn to.

But something has changed over the years. I used to go to the water for peace, for clarity, for that sense of connection to my “place in the order of things,” as poet Mary Oliver put it. After five minutes I could feel my tensions melt away. After 10 minutes, a shift in perspective as a (desperately needed) parasympathetic state settles in. After 15, I’m nearly entranced as my eyes are full of the endless horizon, my ears full of the reassuring pattern of lapping waves, my heart full of the mystery of water’s power and almost maternal healing hallmark—mysteries my ancestors have experienced and explored in countless ways for countless generations.

The fact is, I love the Salish Sea with my whole heart. I always have. I love it as my oldest, wisest, most nurturing grandmother. She feeds me. She heals me. She restores me to balance.

However, amid the wonder and tranquility, my experience at the water is now interspersed with apologies for the degradation we’ve caused. My joy is layered between moments of grief and sorrow for the loss—the pollution, the algae blooms, the warming waters, the species die-off. And in the break between waves washing ashore, I think about my son’s future. I worry about the rising seas, the droughts and the storms that will shape his experience. He may not get to take his children fishing or crabbing. He may not be able to safely jump into the water for a swim. He may never know the joy of eating an oyster off the beach, and may never see an orca whale in the San Juan Islands. I trust he will adapt, and may not even experience loss over what he does not know. But I may not be able to share with him some of the most awe-inspiring ways of interacting with the natural world.

Facing these feelings is overwhelming at best, at worst, it’s crippling. I know these are common feelings. Most of my colleagues and friends feel the same. And almost every gathering with friends ends with the question, “So, what do we do?”

In all of this sorrow, I have found peace and hope in this truth: the contributions I make are creating little pockets of beauty and healing. While climate scientists have their supercomputer algorithms to analyze tens of thousands of potential catastrophic outcomes, they cannot predict the positive influence of a growing movement of respect, compassion and generosity.

And the truth is, there is so much that can be done. Today. Right here. There are reparations that my community and I have the ability to effect in my lifetime.

In this country, we are lucky enough to be able to leverage the laws and processes of a democratic society. A groundswell of public will, if applied correctly with strategy and accuracy, can have incredible strength. I’ve witnessed it multiple times over my two decades in activism and 10 years working at RE Sources. There are multiple bright opportunities on the horizon today that can bring about unknowable repair and shifting in the collective psyche that is so fractured and adrift today.

In some cases, these changes are what ecologist Joanna Macy calls in her book Active Hope, “Holding actions.” This is basically holding the line to prevent further degradation and destruction. It’s only one leg of the stool, but it’s an essential one.

Today, Trump’s (Anti) Environmental Protection Agency is providing us many opportunities to strengthen our holding-action muscles. As EPA director Wheeler systematically works to strip waters of bare minimum protections, and strip states of their constitutional right to establish their own environmental oversight, it could be seen as an invitation to flex the muscles of our individual and collective holding power to say, “We cannot allow that.” We have every likelihood of winning in these cases. The law is on our side. The strategy, intelligence, and legal knowhow is on our side (thanks to justice-seeking organizations like RE Sources, our North Sound Baykeeper, and the partners we work with in coalitions like Waterkeepers Washington). We have the roadmap for a movement that can, and will, win.

Holding actions, like standing in the way of corrupt government actions and corporate greed, are critical—we can’t lose any more ground. But the Salish Sea needs us to do more than hold the line. Many of the changes we need to make are “Structural Changes”—the second leg in Macy’s stool. As the architect and systems thinker Buckminster Fuller said, “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Here in our backyards, we can do just that. We have a powerful point of leverage to make the existing model of ever-expanding fossil fuel extraction, shipment, and use obsolete by simply deciding we won’t allow it. The deepwater port at Cherry Point—one of the few remaining of its kind on the West Coast—has been an increasingly sought after locale for the export of coal, coke, tar sands crude oil, fracked gas, and petrochemical byproducts over the past four decades. But as Whatcom County residents, led by Lummi Nation, have proven time and time again, we are the thin green line that will not allow the Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve and ancestral grounds to be turned into the gateway for expanding fossil fuel shipments the world cannot even afford to burn.

You remember how citizens across the Northwest banded together to hold the line against the proposed Gateway Pacific coal terminal—which was backed by some of the most powerful deep pockets in the nation—for the six-year review process? Then, when victory was wrung in through the power of Lummi Nation’s great stand, we found a way to close the book on the recurring fight for Cherry Point’s future.

RE Sources, activists, families, business owners, students and fisherpeople urged Whatcom County Council to write into law legal protections that would have lasting reign over Cherry Point’s future, allowing it to remain intact as a place of ceremonial significance, an important component of honoring tribal treaty rights, and one of the state’s eight Aquatic Reserves that produces the basic ingredients for the entire Salish Sea web of life. After three years of process, the County Council will finally decide if this history-making code amendment should be written into law in the next few months. I hope you will be inspired to speak up for the Salish Sea, and support the acceptance of these code amendments.

Here’s another example for how we can create new standards and break the mold for how much bare minimum we can bear. In November, the state is inviting the public to participate in the rewrite of an important aspect of the Streamflow Restoration Act. This rulemaking process will address emerging concerns about our limited supply of freshwater and will affect the amount of water in the Nooksack River and the groundwater that is connected to it. Streamflows in the Nooksack basin, an important area for five species of salmon, are frequently too low to actually support the salmon that depend on it for survival.

If you care about the die-off of the Southern Resident orcas, you need to care about the Streamflow Restoration Act and participate in every chance we have to strengthen it. This law can make or break the Salish Sea food chain. Tackling water use now, before hotter summers and population growth make it an all-out crisis, is a powerful structural change we can easily effect if we apply ourselves to the task.

Another structural change we can spark locally is through the Whatcom County Shoreline Management Program. This lawmaking process dictates what can be built within 200 feet of any salt or freshwater shoreline. Water experts have emphasized the importance of shoreline functions for habitat (like the eelgrass beds at Cherry Point that support the Salish Sea web of life), for climate change preparedness (like projects to protect homes and businesses from sea level rise and flooding), and filter polluted stormwater runoff. Taking steps toward proactive climate preparedness and protection, before the damage is upon us, is a fortifying structural change. In order for the County Council to improve the plan to protect our shorelines, Whatcom County residents have to call upon them to do so. In January, they’ll need to hear that you’re paying attention and that you care.

When we respond to opportunities like the few I mentioned—and there are so many more—these holding actions and structural changes will naturally elicit the third leg of Macy’s stool: a shift in consciousness. Macy calls for these three ingredients as the catalysts for the “great turning,” the third revolution in history, the transition from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining model—a transition that will occur much more rapidly because it has the conscious participation of humanity, and because it has to.

Whether you call them holding actions and structural changes, or embodying the thin green line, or a cultural paradigm shift, or everyday activism—the truth is that taking action helps answer the question, “What can we do?” It turns helplessness into a rewarding opportunity to link arms with our neighbors and embody something bigger than ourselves. Action offers us hope that the future just might have some silver linings. And it gives us courage for today.

The other aspect of my relationship with the water that has emerged, as I sit close and breathe in the sea air, is one of reciprocity. Humans’ relationship with the natural world, with the sacred waters of life, have always been and always will be just that—a relationship. I take, I give. I benefit, I care for. She loves, I love back.

Let your love for the Salish Sea be your call to an awakened chapter of action: Visit re-sources.org/signup and sign up for something that speaks to you. Take a risk, attend an event, link arms with your community. Make your money do something truly valuable and support organizations that are fighting for the world we need.

Photo by Thomas Gotchy.

Active Hope: The Salish Sea I love is dying. What can I do? published first on https://medium.com/@OsmoWaterFilter

0 notes

gongorawork · 4 years

Text

Endings, in search of happy endings

Endings

In search of Happy Endings

By Anthony Gongora

How do we find the end?

More specifically the end of systemic dysfunctions?

Dysfunctions, which manifest in every form of oppression.

When we look at racism, poverty, gender inequality, LGBTQ discrimination, corporate greed, political corruption, cradle to prison pipeline, global warming, white supremacy, hunger, the decimation of the rain forest, addiction, false information, testing regimens in early education, which only measures the excellence of people who are good test-takers, or the huge debt incurred pursuing higher education, religious dogma, and war we can measure oppression.

Each of the above systemic forms of oppression was started by men which means that they can all be ended.

But how?

How do we end societal structures that no longer serve humanity in terms of becoming our best possible example of what human life can be?

How do we find and create endings?

Looking at life as an example for endings there is a clear cycle of - birth to death. Every single living entity on this earth, irrelevant of the span-of-time, lives then dies. And so too, everything that humans make, we can unmake. Nothing is permanent. Nothing.

If something appears as fixed and unalterable, question it, and remember that a human-made the illusion of its permanence, which thankfully can be undone.

A symptom of systemic dysfunction is choosing consciously or unconsciously to forget.

For myself, forgetting comes from sheer exhaustion. I’m guessing that this could be true for others too.

Being active and present to fight the good fight requires a lot of energy, which after working 60 - 80 hours a week is hard to come by.

By the way, nobody that I know works the mythical 40 hours a week.

American culture has reduced the human experience to work, eat, sleep, and consume.

We are being worked to death physically and psychologically.

This is not accidental.

Being forced to stay in a nearly constant state of mental and physical fatigue builds a society that is numb. A passive society makes it possible for the people in power to keep power.

The gatekeepers - the ultra-rich, create and cultivate a culture that demands that people work constantly.

The few people at the top live for life. While everybody else works for life.

I'd like to share my life as a worker as an example. As an Artist/Educator and someone who was raised in poverty and within the welfare system, I have always lived in what I have labeled as “survival mode,” which means living from paycheck to paycheck with nothing extra. No savings and no emergency funds or family monies or inheritance. I have, from the age of 10 years old, always had multiple jobs at once.

As a child, I sorted returned soda bottles at the convenience store and I also worked on an Ice cream truck. I was paid with products, not money. When I shared my candy rewards with my mom, she said, “next time get milk or bread”. I did.

As an adult with a terminal degree, and as a full-time professor, to make ends meet, I had to supplement my income teaching adjunct at another university. I worked constantly. Though I have done everything prescribed by our society to get ahead, and I have done it well, I still have not achieved financial security. At 54, I still live hand to mouth in survival mode.

Something is broken and it is not me.

The myth that if you work really hard you will get ahead is not true.

The myth is kept alive because if the workers don’t go to work the ultra-rich can’t stay rich.

Myths that cause dysfunction need to end.

Do you ever wonder why the accumulation of wealth is the dominant measure of “success” and why are we all encourage to pursue that singular end?

My thinking goes like this, if we make money, a lot or a little, we tend to spend what we have to buy the newest object, which we believe will make our lives better. To reinforce this nearly every surface that we glance is selling us something. Through savvy marketing - pretty pictures, alluring words, and now algorithms that convince us that we have to have the object of our affection, we spend our money.

We spend our hard-earned cash to get the things that we don’t necessarily need.

Why?

Because we have been manipulated.

In the end, we are left cash-poor all the while making the rich richer - it is that simple.

In our minds, the thought of making more and more money is a constant tick.

Do you ever wonder who placed that tick in your mind?

The kooky part is that we make the money and then we give it right back. We temporarily feel successful and fulfilled because we own the object. However, now that our cash is gone we have to do more work to get more money to buy things that we don’t necessarily need.

Truth be told at the end of the day, having been overworked, and underpaid most are too exhausted to deeply question anything.

And if we find ourselves questioning our present state of being we quickly defend our status, answering ourselves back with, “I’m doing fine, I have a roof over my head and food on my table.”

FYI, African slaves had the same provided by their enslavers. I’m just saying.

Advertisers are paid a lot of money to get us to spend our cash and their work works.

Is that power?

What is power?

Artist, Lauren Hill killed it when she penned the lyrics “If you can get the money you can get the power.” Truth. But, who has the power, truthfully, our politicians and government leader?

No. It is the ultra-rich who uses extreme wealth to influence and manipulate politicians to move and act in ways that favor their potential to accumulation more wealth.

Excessive wealth is Power.

Ultra Rich’s point of access to power is in the wallets and purses of our politicians and government leaders. Why else do you think the super-rich give huge sums of money to specific politicians as they run for office.

Believe you me it’s not out of the generosity of their hearts. It is to be able to pull the strings of their puppets and to wield their power. Otherwise, they’d give equally to each party.

This practice of giving is called being a donor, which seems to make it okay.

It is not.

Whenever an ultra-rich person gives a donation to a politician in order to tip the scales in their favor, specifically to accumulate more wealth, corruption is happening.

Why does and should this matter to every American?

Because, if the ultra-rich are manipulating our elected officials to represent their causes then nobody is there to represent the rest of us.

I’d like this to end.

I’d like the corruption of our politicians to end.

I want my elected officials to represent all Americans not just the Ultra-Rich.

Do you ever wonder why the collective cultural and possible global mantra, for all, starting from childhood is, “get a job?”

Remember, as a child, being asked over and over again, “What are you going to be when you grow up?”

Are you making the connections?

If not, here is how it goes. From day one we are being programmed to be workers.

Look at the trajectory of life that we all prescribe to, first-day care, then preschool, elementary school, high school, then pay a lot of money to learn a trade or go to college - start your adult life in major debt. Get a job. Make money. Spend everything to fulfill your dreams (does this ever happen?). Teach your children to do the same. Die. The End.

All of the above my friends is systemic cooperate greed realized through

our bodies, our labor, our spending/consuming. We are the fuel that keeps corporate greed running.

Whether we intend to be or not we are complicit. What makes us complicit is that we do not collectively make it end.

Cooperate greed is a byproduct of Capitalism, which we know is the pursuit of constant growth, which we know is an impossible reality to continue to strive towards.

And why would we want to?

What “growth” means - really means is the accumulation of more wealth for the already ultra-rich.

You can not have a constant growth of anything forever especially when all of life is contained on one planet and that planet is not limitless in its resources. There is x amount of atmosphere, x amount of landmasses, and x amount of sea. There are fluctuations but for the most part, what we have is what we got.

We have to learn to see the earth not as limitless in its potential to serve our desire for more-more-more. But rather as a miraculous grouping of ecological systems that balance off of one another. The balancing mechanisms may not be invisible to our eyes but they are there non the less. When we level mountaintops for coal, or clear-cut forests, or pollute the seas with plastic, or cause catastrophic oil leaks - we the humane race are tipping the balance.

COVID-19 is a perfect example, somehow, somewhere the balance tipped and something stable became unstable. More than likely the destabilization was caused by man.

If we do not change our mindless and greedy treatment of this planet it is not the planet that will suffer it will be us. The Earth does not need humans to survive. Humans need the Earth to survive. If we continue to unconsciously pollute and deplete the earth's natural resources we will end. The earth will still be here but we will not.

Governments are, in part, formed to help manage the complexities of life here on Earth. Our current government's miss-management of COVID-19 is the perfect example and evidence of a government that is not doing its job.

In a time when our elected government leaders should be focused on protecting all life, they instead choose to keep the cash flowing to the rich.

This is how it's going down:

First, the economy crashed. And, in only three months. Due to shelter in place orders from the top. The ultra-rich stopped making their vast amounts of money. For them, that was not acceptable. The economy had to be reopened. Our top government leaders, specifically the one at the tip-top, who also happens to be one of the ultra-rich, then passed the buck, laying the responsibility and discission making upon local governments.

Mind You, all of this is being done while trying to navigate the deep and murky waters of an unprecedented GLOBAL Pandemic.

local governments are now tasked with the dilemma of prioritizing life or money. And it is not money for me and you. It is money for the ultra-rich. Workers are putting their life at risk, but it is ok according to our current leaders because our life is less important than their continued accumulation of wealth. The wealth that they use to hold power. If you are not in the 1% club your life is disposable. This is where our present-day democracy has arrived - Money versus Life.

All of which, by the way, is a horrific loop back to our beginnings. Starting with the genocide of America's First People and then the enslavement of Africans. So in a tragic way we are back to where we started. The sacrifice of life for the profit of the white man.

I don’t know about you but I would like to END this version of reality.

Remember as a child questioning everything? It is from that state of mind that a new form of society can be born. There are other ways of being and it is up to us to create them.

Pause here and think about this - a Pandemic stoped a huge portion of the “working” world. People were able to step off the hamster wheel of life. Many had the time and space to relax. We could do this because we were not being worked to death. Then within that same time frame, a single action, the brutal murder of George Floyd, by a police officer - ignited a collective global reaction.

The Black Lives Matter movement awoke the globe. Let this sink in, because of the pandemic, most people were out of work and because of this, we all had the internal space and time to process and question the status quo.

We can at any time and in any place begin to compose endings. And, orchestrate new beginnings. We do this by constantly questioning and adjusting and updating our understanding of reality. Present-day reality is not fixed. Nothing is permanent.

Just think, inside the brains of some amazing beautiful humans is the design for change. Change that supports all life - all life meaning the planet and its oceans, nature, wildlife, and humans alike.

Don’t be fooled by those that say change takes time. Change can happen instantly. Think of 911 and Hiroshima. Change does not have to take hundreds of years to fulfill itself. Change can happen instantly. Sadly, these two examples are violent ones. However, on the other end of the spectrum, there is non-violence. Change through non-violence can happen quickly too.

Systemic Racism, Capitalism, corporate greed, and all the above-mentioned inequalities, which perpetuate oppression can be changed for the betterment of all of humanity and the planet.

How?

By holding our elected officials accountable.

By being sure that democracy is working for all people, not just the minority - the ultra-rich.

As a gentle reminder to all, Democracy is defined as government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

“Supreme power is vested in the people,” say that again to your self ten-time and see if it feels like the democracy that you are living in now or ever.

This is why it is so very important to be informed and to vote. When you vote you are exercising your supreme power.

Democracy only works when every citizen participates.

Another reason why our democracy is challenged is that we have not stood in the truth of our inception and then worked rigorously to make right the wrongs that we have done, we remain trapped within a 240 - something-year-old self-deception loop. Stuck repeating ourselves over and over and over again. Which we will continue to do until we make our wrongs right, which is a holistic way to end things that need to end.

As we think about endings can we please add war to the list of things that desperately need to end.

The United States of America was formed out of a War and we have perpetuated war ever since. We claim to be making peace but war can never bring about peace. Never not ever. Because war is peace’s opposite and the two exist as a polarity. It’s like asking night and day to flip flop. They can’t.

As long as we perpetuate the illusions that war makes peace, reality can not be altered. If we want to live on this planet in harmony as a peaceful nation we have to discover new ways to solve war-like issues without going to war.

Come on people, honestly, at this stage of the game why is anybody still at war. Nobody wins everybody loses.

Whose bodies are sacrificed in war?

I’ll give you a hint it is not the rich.

Believe it or not our brains hold alternative ways to solve global crises.

How about using our minds to solve war generating problems rather than spending billions of dollars to perpetuate senseless death and the illusion of being peacemakers.

Food for thought - our government spends billions of dollars teaching people in our military to kill.

Funny. But not, we charge college students hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn a profession that serves the betterment of humanity.

If you want to be a medical doctor (save lives) it cost about three hundred thousand dollars.

Let this sink in. Really sink in.

Human life should not be disposable especially when it comes to financing someones’ helicopter or yacht purchase, their fourth home, tenth car. Do you get it? We stay at war because it is a billion-dollar industry that lines the pockets of the ultra-rich.

How do we end such a long split tong tale?

By being inquisitive again. Re-Awaken your child-like mind and ask why. And then ask why again until some depth of understanding is ignited and your curiosity guides you to new and different realizations. The place where your knowledge exists within your being derived from a place of deep contemplation and consideration, which is the opposite of being told what to believe. The full comprehension of any given idea not only expands your mind it opens your heart. And nobody can do this for you. We are each one of us responsible for expanding and opening our minds.

While we are at it can we stop teaching our children a one-sided history? The history we presently teach needs to be updated. History needs to be holistic and inclusive, including the ugly shameful parts. We can only repair what we know. It’s the bad parts that keep us stuck and spinning. Repeating.

In the vacuum caused by a one-sided history, nonsensical conspiracy theories rise to fill in the void.

Why do Conspiracy theories easily replace reality or trump history?

Because following and attaching to conspiracy theories entertain. One gets to weave their own possible outcomes, which is far more fun then dealing with a past wrought with anguish and suffering.

No work is required to be entertained. To be entertained is to have something done too and for you, one has to simply receive entertainment.

To untangle and make transparent a history that has erased the history of others who coexist within that same history is hard work. And, with so much time stretched out between the tale

telling, forgetting feels easier than remembering. One might hear their internal voice say “I’m not responsible for what others did so lone ago.”

When one attaches their thoughts to the phrase, “I’m not responsible…,” a profound intellectual disconnect occurs. The potential of participating in making what is wrong - right, ends. By disassociating one takes the passenger seat on a motorcycle side-car zipping along the stream of interconnectedness. It is irrelevant if one chooses to tag along, rather than jump in the mud, because life is going to do what life does, with or without us.

All of life - everything on this planet is connected. We do not choose to participate in interconnectedness - or not. The planet Earth, by its nature, connects every element of existence. It is that simple. Interconnectedness happens with or without our participation.

Remember nothing is fixed or permanent all of like is in flux.

COVID 19 and The Black Lives Matter movement might be the forces needed to realize the beginning of the end of oppression. And if not, at the very least, we are witnessing, participating, and hopefully learning what creating endings looks like.

Inevitably. Everything on this earth man-made or otherwise does eventually end.

Let’s make endings by our design and not leave it up to chance.

0 notes