Tag Archives: animal past

The American Dream: A Fix For America

Walking the line between sensuality and reality leaves me a little dizzy. ‘Give me Freedom or give me Death’ is obsolete. There are varying shades of freedom and death in Blueray and Digital surrounding me. A colorful vortex sucks at my bones; luring me with promises that I know will leave me docile and apathetic. Jump in, be happy!

Jump in, be happy! The American Dream is your ‘fix’!  And, everything comes with a promise. How do you know who will keep their promise? Who can you trust? Trust is much more than a word. How do you chose without knowing? How do you find the truth? It takes a ‘pioneering spirit’ and time; you can’t buy time, control it, or ever seem to have enough. If you are not making time to filter through the muck; that colorful vortex is sucking at your bones, luring you with promises which are leaving you apathetic and docile! And the truth no longer matters!

Where to begin? Let’s step back in time and examine what shaped our society. Sigmund Fraud wrote about  ‘human psychosis’.  What does Fraud have to do with the ‘American Dream’? A little history. Fraud discovered humans had feelings we repressed because they were too dangerous: remnants of our animal past. As he witnessed the horror of war mounting; he believed war to be terrible evidence of exactly how we should have expected people to behave given the knowledge of our psychoanalysis.

I surmise that our ‘animal past’ gave us a limited ability to communicate; and as a result, we were more inclined to battle for what we wanted. However, our evolution into intelligent beings, with increased communication skills, should have curtailed our nature to battle for what we want. This being said; is it our ‘animal past’ that keeps us in the battle or is it purely economics?

It only took me a couple of minutes to ‘filter through the muck’ to get to this information.

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” 

―  Smedley D. Butler

How did people of our nation come to accept everything that the medias’ feed us? Without question, we believe the glossy advertisements as truth and we buy what is being sold.  We have to go back in time a little to look at how we were duped and continue to be duped.

We have let others tell us what the ‘American Dream’ should be! Fraud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays was the first man to show American corporations how to make people want what they do not need; manipulating the masses; linking mass-produced goods to our unconscious desires. Out of this came a new political idea of how to control the masses: by satisfying people’s inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus docile. The start of the all-consuming ‘Self’ which is come to dominate the world today!

Armed with this knowledge, American Corporations learned how to package and present anything they could make a ‘buck’ on to the American people…war was dressed in patriotic speeches and love of country becoming the ultimate commodity for those who would benefit.

Education is a ‘pillar post’ to humanities foundation: And, if you take the time to educate and do research you will see how we came to our nation’s crisis; you will find yourself motivated to get out of the ‘muck’ and this crisis. You may also find yourself wanting to ‘shoot the messengers’ who present the facts of how we got here. Go beyond that notion. Go deeper. Their solutions may not be what you can take hold of, but their solutions will give you ideas to build on. You will discover solutions you can hold on to.  Solutions to our bleak reality do not exist in continuing the model we’ve created…it is NOT working for the majority of us! We need a new kind of ‘Paradigm’. I believe, whenever given the opportunity and mechanism to do so, people are good, kind and supportive. There are new ‘paradigms’ to build on. New ‘opportunities and mechanisms’ to be apart of…we simply must not give up our pioneering spirit.

I’ve worked hard for some piece of the American Dream for almost 70 years. I’ve come up with a tiny bit…and I could probably stop with what I have. However, my ‘pioneering spirit’ and my nature to be ‘good, kind and supportive’ will not let me be content. I have a vision that humans can be all that is good in the world. Through my ‘looking glass’ I’ve found some ‘new paradigms’.  If you are visionary enough and can learn to trust a little more you will seek out these ‘new paradigms’ and change our History! Here is one such paradigm! There many out there with real answers and solutions. One, in particular, has caught my attention…Kate Raworth. Her Doughnut Economy: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist can be pushed into the light!

Happy Visionary Trails!