With the Fourth of July upon us, I have something to announce

Yet first, some important observations.

This past year has been a very eye-opening experience. Not only for every person on this earth, yet for me. It’s been particularly profound.

Following four years of a severe degradation in our collective social dignity (how we address one another) in this country, we were slammed with a global pandemic that further divided America across partisan and paranoid lines.

My eyes were opened to the fact that fear, condemnation, polarization, and shaming were a predominant cultural staple in America. So much so, that people in politics, people in media, people wanting to sell swag, religious people, metaphysical people, all reached for this deeply ingrained fulcrum of control through fear in the USA—

—and drove home any conspiracy, any histrionic point, any ranting TV show talking head on Fox or MSNBC or NewsMax or CNN, all for a desperate grab at the consumer spotlight for five minutes.

To make money while the world burned.

America, five years of our fear, five years of our burned-out adrenal system, is all in sacrifice to the never-ending need for more money, by politicians, political organizations, TV networks, “gurus”, those who wish to keep us off kilter as a society by bickering about minutia so we can’t see the environment being ruined, our quality of life slipping through the cracks as the cost of living in the USA skyrockets and the average American needs more than one job to even keep the lights on, and more weird horrors from a bad 1980’s SyFy movie surface and n daily headlines.

Our collective mental health has been disposable to those in the grab for cash—collateral in a war for our money.

Not in a war for our liberating patriotic allegiance. That’s simply a bumper sticker to get to our money.

Not in a war for our liberating activist heart. That’s simply a bumper sticker to get to our money.

But for our money, and our money alone, which is not blue, nor red—but green.

Green money which spends the same, in any direction.

Money that is blind to any cause but itself; money amassed by a huge machine that eats and eats and eats its people to keep its bank accounts full.

This machine is neither conservative, nor liberal.

This machine is neither American, nor Russian, nor French.

This machine holds no allegiance to a flag.

This machine is larger than the borders of any one country.

This machine is a blind, starving glutton, whose avarice has no conscience.

This machine seeks only to feed, day in and day out.

As it grows in size, it is running out of resources to consume.

Across the globe, the machine is running out of food.

When a living being begins to starve, it panics. This panic from the machine has fueled the need to create panic in the people of the world, so that people will spend money.

And the machine can once again eat.

It can eat political contributions, bullet-hoarding income, gas-hoarding income, toilet-paper-hoarding income, big screen TV income from stimulus checks—

—anything we’re willing to spend in a panic, the machine gobbles it up. The more we panic, the more the machine eats.

The bigger it gets.

The hungrier and more demanding it becomes.

The more panic it floods into the world, to grow crops of fear, and division, and money, money, money.

The machine is a Frankensteined juggernaut, stitched together from the rotting pieces of an old world that has already fallen apart, already run dry of endless resources, a monster whose eyes have long bloated shut from the toxins in the panic it consumes.

It stumbles numbly across a scorching earth, crushing without noticing multiple societies, humans, plants, land, and animals, beneath its blocky feet, as it seeks new resources to consume, to quench a bottomless hunger—

Welcome to the 21st century first world.

—for money. It’s food.

Or…was it the 18th century world?

—THE ENERGY OF OUR HISTORY—

If we go back, and read both our history books as well as the founding documents of the United States of America, this nation was never forged in the spirit of the sole purpose of social idealism, for the “rights for all”.

After all, our founders held slaves.

In fact, the sole reason we revolted in 1776, and warred against England for our independence, was not to build a society where every person had equal rights in a new nation.

The sole reason we revolted was over money, and over the right to own the guns to protect the money.

We revolted over taxes. Not the human condition.

Colonists felt they were being taxed too heavily by the crown, and were not happy with how their firearms would be confiscated by Red Coats to suppress colonist uprisings. They were also not happy with a governmental system that held no checks and balances, and would put citizens to death for no other reason than whim.

Ergo, no access to arms meant colonists couldn’t protect themselves, their money, or their land investments, from the mood and avarice of the crown.

Really, we revolted because we wanted to keep our money, and our guns. That appears to be the driving modality behind “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — not “uplift all”. Not “let’s give a chance equally to all people” (as that chance was reserved for European-descent, predominantly white, or “white passing”, colonists).

All of those beautiful and inspiring ideals of an “equal chance for all people” came later, as our Democratic Republic continued to evolve, and France gave us a gorgeous statue, on which is carved, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.”

This was a passionate message shared by France, written by American poet Emma Lazarus, coming from a country that watched its own Revolution over classist economic division destroy its people. So it probably felt good to believe that somewhere, on the then-more-primitive earth, a country was being founded in the consciousness and spirit of equality, for all.

Again, it’s important to point out that this message on our Stature of Liberty was a French interpretation of some great marketing done by early American statesman who sought funds from France to fund our war against England. (The United States later left France high and dry when they asked us for funding, for their war. Because the white guys over here didn’t want to part with their money. Again, reference our founding documents.)

American propaganda has a long history.

Culturally, back then, “all men are created equal” automatically meant, without even giving it a second thought—“caucasian males”. Not women. Not people of color. Not the indigenous people who existed for thousands of years on this North American continent prior to western colonization. Just men. Who, as not even a conscious thought was given, meant men of Caucasian, European descent.

Culturally in America, for those of us who wish to build an equal society for all people, we tend to reference this motto on the Statue of Liberty when framing up the character of the United States:

Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.

In many of our minds, that means, “Let us build something magnificent, together.”

Yet Social Liberty for All was not really what our founders had in mind. Not because they consciously did not want all human beings to have freedom. It’s because social liberty was not even in existence in the European world.

Remember, our founders came from the conquest model of Europe.

They honestly believed that with their Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights, that they were granting the new (white male European descent) citizens of the new USA, and the property they owned—land, wives, children and slaves—a whole new operating system in governance.

And guess what? For where the brutal and primitive old world was at, for the time, the new United States of America was a marvel of governance.

It caught the whole world’s attention.

For the time, for the global consciousness of the day, in a primitive world that crushed out cultures and subjugated everyone who wasn’t powerful enough to protect themselves, in a world where genocide was committed in the name of One Holy God, from the perspective of a world where monarchies reigned for thousands of years and picked their teeth with the bones of their people—

—the United States of America was a marvel; a wild, weird experiment, something many European nations thought would fail.

But it didn’t fail. It was set up to evolve. (Or more lately, de-evolve, into its original state of guns-and-money-kept-predominantly-by-white-people. Yet I digress.)

It’s an historical observation that the 18th century idea of a “United States citizen”, and the avarice of manifest destiny, was a culturally assumed position by the Caucasian male European colonists—the founders of the USA.

Social justice was not only not in our founder’s sociological awareness of the day, it was nowhere in the entire European world’s consciousness.

This is not an excuse for racism, for slavery, for sexism and subjugation and victimization. Again, it’s an historical observation. History without context is nothing but lost lessons. And lessons are a metric for our progress, or our failings.

Our founder’s big feat was breaking from a world system of ancient classist tyranny, to create a new form of governance, with the very limited, if no, social awareness of the day, hoping the money-and-guns-and-not-being-hanged-for-nothing part would stick.

Praying this system they created would be continually developed by those who came after them. In ways they could not comprehend. They knew they changed the modern world. And they knew they didn’t have all the answers.

They hoped the spirit of their change would survive, and be expanded upon.

They knew from the get-go that theirs was only a minuscule first step. It needed to grow.

They hoped their experiment would live long enough to do so.

—WHERE WE’RE AT—-

So many in modern America feel as though a decent quality of life in America—basic access to food, shelter, and clean water—is over.

They may not be incorrect.

We have been psychologically disempowered, as an American society, by big money that buys courts, locks away those who are inconvenient, buys land rights, burns up land that won’t be bought, that buys, buys, buys, erases, rewrites laws with money, buys legislators with money, and buys privilege some more.

Against this wall of endless, deep money, what is an average American to do?

This is the mentality that those who hope to keep Americans “in line” are hoping that average Americans will drown within.

After all, people who believes they are conquered—are conquered. Right?

Yet where does all this mysterious money come from? That same money that supposedly “oppresses” us all?

It comes from us.

We feed the same monster that eats us.

We do so under the name of free enterprise.

We do so because we’ve been trained for generations in America to give away our money to get something: peace of mind, economic “safety”, more beautiful bodies, cars, homes.

We have been trained for generations that provision is outside of us, happiness is outside of us. And all of that which does not originate from us—can be bought.

We have replaced God with online shopping. Through that buying, we’re better people, says the old world.

We’ve even pounded into generations of people in America that “working oneself to the bone” is noble, admirable.

In the same way that pharaohs told slaves that if they died in the service of a building a temple for the king, they would go to a peaceful afterlife—American corporations tell their employees that if they answer business emails and texts all hours of the night, they are model, good and just employees, who just may get a raise.

It’s a brainwashed form of servitude.

And those who are unable to break free from a system to which they are forced to work within then seek validation for their efforts, their gifts, and their lives.

They may die unhappy. Yet the system patted them on the head, at least once. That has to matter, right?

Our job in modern America is to re-format this system.

Not through insurrection, nor through rushing a Capitol. Not through anarchy or unrest. Not through destroying property or taking up arms against one another. Not through war, the outmoded ego tool of an old, dead world.

Yet through carrying on the economic Revolution, accidentally started by a tiny virus.

Covid-19 swept the globe and pulled an emergency break on the stumbling, ravenous juggernaut Franken-monster.

The money stopped. Work stopped. People stopped.

We looked around. We saw we had spouses and children that we haven’t truly “seen”, for years.

And we realized: we’ve all gone crazy, one 90 hour week at a time; one more car and one more house and one more super-expensive college payment at a time.

We realized, in America, that we were caught in a lose-lose cycle of economic backsliding. Paycheck-to-paycheck households failed when the hamster-wheel-world stopped.

Debt hung heavy.

Mortgages pushed out a year and accumulated interest, so some will not own their home until they are 89.

Many will now not be able to retire, ever.

Many would never even be able to afford a home. Even then, the property taxes would continue, as we rent the land indefinitely from the U.S. government.

We observed, without the desperate energy of the hamster wheel blinding us, an endless money bleed in our lives. All while we noticed, for the first time, that our son or daughter’s eyes had slightly changed color since they were eight years old.

How old were they now? Sixteen?

We looked our quality of life in the changed eyes, in America—and realized that the same long-time American propaganda that sold the French on making us a statue, by the guys who needed their money—still works on us, by the guys that need our money.

The myth of “The American Dream”, an old world modality based on subjugation, enslavement to a system, and racial preference, was alive and well.

And it had warped our perception of being alive. Because we let it do so; a frog boiled by increasing the temperature of the water a quarter of a degree, every five years.

Many received financial assistance from the government through the pandemic. We therefore learned, though Covid-19, that having money was not the enemy, as we working class folks had been told. We learned that those who have the money were not the enemy, as we working class folks have been told.

We learned that our spending habits were the enemy.

We learned that WE have been the problem, all along.

That we have been feeding the same juggernaut Franken-monster we fear, the same one that we rage against, that we blame for our lack of quality of life in the USA.

We learned that we are our own most terrifying lesson; that we are each a limb on a monstrous, reaching beast, driven by avarice, spending, spending, spending; an endless ravenous cycle.

As most will do when looking their worst fear in the mirror—we’ve dropped the mirror and run the other way, the monster cracking behind us on the pavement.

Those in newspaper journalism are calling this running away, “The Great Resignation”.

Like no other time in American history, people are quitting their old world jobs. We are retiring from grueling work cycles that have convinced us that giving away our mental health is somehow a noble sacrifice.

We wish instead to be with family and friends. To simplify life. To downsize. To sell off our extra cars and cavernous homes, so that the property rent (taxes) to the government is lessened. So that we no longer have to work to live, yet can live, to then enjoy our work and our purpose in the world.

Is this trend giving way to a generation of ne’er-do-well-20-somethings in tie-dyed shirts, high on legalized weed, collecting unemployment, playing video games in their parents’ basement, leaching money from government programs, and training to be in Antifa?

Or, is this trend giving way to three-piece-suit billionaires who are drinking $1000 a bottle champagne, smashing apart unions, forcing slave labor into long hours while creating dark money funding for voter suppression, closing abortion clinics, and funding The Proud Boys?

Ah, that’s what those who rely on our endless spending of our money would have us believe.

More baseless us-against-them American mythical propaganda from the money-monster, to make us rage against one another, and to blame others for the lack of cash in our bank accounts; a place to park our envy created by the monster inside of each one of us.

As most propaganda goes, the myth of the “unemployment leaches breaking the economy”, for instance, is simply untrue. (Just look at the Pentagon spreadsheet. There’s our money.)

You see, most who are quitting their jobs are in the 30-60 year old range, and are long-time corporate professionals, whose careers may span multiple decades.

We realized we’ve been duped. And we’ve had enough of participating with the problem.

This group is re-employing themselves by growing hydroponic vegetables, by starting local recycling businesses, by building their own off-grid earth ship homes out of recycled materials, some relocating to countries like Portugal, Belize and Costa Rica which are far more economically livable for a young family. Or, retiring people moving to other countries who are unable to set aside enough money because of the juggernaut Franken-monster in America, eating away their savings one cost-of-living hike at a time.

The same country that was founded on the principle of economic freedom, the USA, has become the home of economic enslavement, as the monster has simply become too big to feed.

There are many beautiful things about the United States. Social freedoms, for one. Are we throwing acid on women for showing their faces? No. Are we imprisoning people for having a differing political ideal? Well, not yet. Did a Caucasian police officer get convicted for wrongly murdering a black American? Finally. Can same-sex couples get married? Absolutely.

Though there is always more room to grow, we’ve come a long way in this nation over the past 400 years. Thanks to countless sacrifices and hard work of many, we are far more socially humane than many other countries in the world.

We have 400 years of history in our rear view mirror, and we’re making social progress, but many citizens working two full-time jobs can’t afford to live here?

It’s time to reign in the monster. It’s time to make changes.

—WHAT CAN WE DO?—-

Our job in modern America is to expand past the limitations of our history, and to continue to invent, create, and devise systems of society, or equal commerce, and of BALANCE, that set a new precedent.

This requires bravery, as just with our founders—there is no precedent for what is needed at this time.

We must create it.

That’s the evolved potential of the USA.

Not to feed the need of the founders, who wanted to keep the money. That need had its day. They risked everything for an experiment. It’s our challenge to continue experimenting.

To expand past the juggernaut Franken-monster that we have created, stitched together for thousands of years, created in the shadow of a primitive old world that crushed and subjugated and victimized and killed and marginalized and consumed, consumed, consumed, brought across the pond from the old world Europe in tiny boats called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—

—now picking its teeth in the new world with the bones of its subjects.

This juggernaut Franken-monster is the new monarchy. The new glass ceiling. Not just for the USA, but for all the “first world”.

This monster is seen as God, in the eyes of those who worship it.

This monster eats the environment.

It’s important to remember, USA, that we’ve had 400 years to figure out what works, and what doesn’t work, over here.

We have the privilege of history, and the privilege of a supposedly flexible governance system, comparatively speaking.

“Equal rights for all” was never in the front of our founder’s minds. Not culturally, not historically in a world that subjugated others for money, for sport—not at all. (Thomas Jefferson was a Virginia plantation owner. My guess is that he wasn’t prepared to start paying the help.)

After all, let’s remember, our founders revolted to keep all of their money.

It likely wasn’t that the founders of the USA were “consciously bad people”, as much as they were heavily socially ignorant people, a product of their day, in a heavily primitive and socially ignorant world, whose sole goal in its global avarice and naïveté was to expand, and to consume, and to grow, at everyone else’s expense.

And as absolutely incomprehensible as it is to we in modern society in the United States, who have had the privilege of nearly 400 years of wars and argument and education and growth and reflection on what doesn’t work in world history, as well as our own—our founders were operating 100% in the hubris of their day, which was to subjugate, annihilate, and dominate.

Back then, that was the civilized thing to do.

This modality of blind brutality blows modern society’s mind, and breaks our evolved hearts.

As it should.

We have the privilege of 400 years of American history, and through the sacrifice and blood of those who have died before us, we have inherited valuable lessons.

Why do I point all of this out?

Because we appear to have forgotten not only our actual United States history, yet the context in which the history occurred.

Context matters, because it points out how far we’ve come, overall, in our global consciousness.

This is deeply important.

Without being conscious, we cannot be aware of the callous horrors of our past missteps, or the intense power of our ability to forge a much more compassionate, educated, “justice for all” future, based upon our growth, and our common strengths.

Sure, we still have much work to do, in the consciousness department. That’s a human condition across the globe.

Yet for some odd reason, in spite of our great backslides, hypocrisy, and overblown marketing, the USA continues to grab the worlds attention; likely, because even in the frailties of our governmental system, we are still the best long-running experiment in potential “freedom” that’s out there.

Even though the juggernaut Franken-monster that’s eating the planet continues to be fed here, on our soil, the most.

And that, my friends?

That monster? That bloated, ravenous thing?

Containing that monster is our current evolutionary quest, as a nation.

It’s the revolution that is at our doorstep, America.

Just as our founders revolted to “keep their money” at the old world expense of human rights, indigenous rights, women’s rights—our modern revolution is to Keep Our Humanity.

At NO ONE’S expense, yet EVERYONE’S benefit.

We must starve this Franken-monster that’s been growing in our neck of the first wealthy world, that rode across the pond hundreds of years ago, to run free across a continent where coal and oil and land were seen as “plenty”. (In spite of the beautiful people who were living there before us, whom our founders dismissed as “savages” living “out there somewhere”.)

Through our vast missteps and missed opportunities, we have taken advantage of many leaps forward. We are still a magical place, our mingling energies, here in America. We are finding our magic in stepping away from the old modality of world domination and cultural oppression, as well as modern job-enslavement, and instead, employing ourselves in ways that edify us, and our environment.

We are reconnecting with community. With our humanity.

We must step away from the illusion of political “sides”. (Remember, that’s all us-against-them propaganda developed by the Franken-monster to cover its own money-avarice-trail.)

Being a “voice of reason” has been replaced with “a loud voice”. We must re-learn the difference.

It is important to note our successes in the USA. Otherwise, the sacrifices of the Martin Luther King Jrs, and the Harvey Milks, and the Gandhi’s, even the Jesus’—go without a place to root and grow.

This Fourth of July, as we observe our Independence as a nation, it’s is time we not only view the negative with the positive— yet it is time to make a commitment to build forward.

It’s time we acknowledge the social and economic limitations of the privileged old world, and move away from them. Just as our founders had done their very best, with what limited knowledge that they had, to inspire that movement within all of us

We are not bound and cursed by our history; we are educated by it. We curse ourselves with failure if we are too frightened, too lazy, or too entitled to grow.

The pledge of allegiance is something that many school children are familiar with. What many are not taught is that the pledge of allegiance came about in the 1950’s, as a response to what the US government perceived as an indoctrination of Russian children by the Russian Government. Basically, the USA wanted to show Russia that our kids, too, swore their allegiance to us.

It was a tit-for-tat political game. A big show.

Imagine the United States, if the mantra (pledge) by our school children was not something to serve the propagandist purposes of an insecure government, yet something that edifies those making the pledge.

Something that went more like this:

“I pledge to be the best person I can be, every day.

I pledge to be kind instead of cruel.

I pledge to work very hard, and then give myself permission to rest, once I’ve achieved my goal.

I pledge not to compare myself with others, and to encourage other people, especially when they are sad.

I pledge to be grateful for the hard work of everyone who came before me, to make my life a little easier today.

I pledge to believe in the hearts of my fellow humans, and to give everyone the positive benefit of the doubt.

I pledge to be brave enough to be part of every solution.

And I pledge to be the best person, the best American, and the best world citizen I can be, for myself and for others.”

—-MY ANNOUNCEMENT—

My announcement is that I take this pledge, and so much more.

And I hope that you do, as well.

In taking this pledge, you won’t be seeing me blaming “the other side”, when it’s actually the juggernaut Franken-monster causing the problems.

I need to take responsibility for my bit of the monster.

I hope that you will, too.

I’ll still be holding individuals to account, with dignity, for their individual decisions, and I expect others to do so, when it comes to me.

Let us move away from lumping one another into the illusion of the mysterious “political party” (a now-new-realm-religion) which has also become a common costume of the juggernaut Franken-monster.

Sometimes it appears as a conservative. Sometimes, a liberal.

Yet it’s always the monster.

The world is too small for teams, when trying to survive. Team America must evolve past solely accumulating wealth, and holding wealth, to begin valuing humanity. We must ban together with team world, in order to bring our best science and minds and hearts forward to endure what’s to come in our climate crisis, in our water and food shortage, and in our understanding of how to give away feeding the monster—to simply LIVE, peacefully.

After the introspection of the last five years, I see the monster for exactly what it is. And I can’t go back to believing the myths, the excuses, the finger-pointing, the propaganda, the political sides—any of it.

Why? Because we must pick up where the founders let their pens dry.

We are the minds and the hearts and the hands of the future, that they knew would come along someday, to add to the historic annals of the great American Experiment.

We ARE that future that the founders knew they could not envision, whose voices and innovation and way of creating together, was, in part, the very reason they did what they did.

The founders wanted to keep their money.

We must move past our addiction to money, to keep our humanity.

That’s how we evolve the USA. That’s how we continue to free our country. This is how the whole world evolves. This is how we continue to free the whole world.

Lessen our debt to the best of our ability. Don’t add more. Sell off or donate our extra things that bog us down. Make our economic footprint smaller. Push off the yoke of overburdened financial obligation.

Liberate ourselves. Lighten ourselves. Starve the monster.

Give our actual hidden gifts a chance to surface in the world, past what we thought our “work function” in the machine should be.

Let go of old modalities of “earning money” if it makes us miserable. Money is simply an energy; an exchange for our energy put forward . As long as we are putting good purpose into world, and working for something larger than ourselves, there are plenty of opportunities, “jobs”, to bring money and provision to us.

Commune with God / Higher Consciousness / Nature, especially if you are afraid to make this shift in your purpose.

LISTEN.

All the answers we need, how to be brave through this revolutionary transition back to what truly matters, how to break away from the dysfunctional cycles of the dead, old world—are within us.

God / Universe / Knowledge is within you.

We have so much spiritual support, that we can’t even identify or understand, because generations living under the heel of the monster have convinced us that we have nothing without the monster. (That’s a lie.)

This connection within us, to God / Knowledge / Universe, is bigger—far bigger—than the juggernaut Franken-monster.

Give It a chance to be heard.

Give It the space to be heard.

We can work hard, and not be owned by work. We can show up, and be productive, for reasons bigger than ourselves.

Please, on this July Fourth, join me, join all the rest of us, in a new revolution. One of true independence. One of true freedom.

Join us all in removing our own piece of the juggernaut Franken-monster, that eats the world.

You may just be the missing “peace”.