Thank you Ruth

Do you ever just find yourself sitting in the silence, not realizing that you’ve zoned out and are lost in thought for an undefined amount of space and time...sometimes not even aware of the world around you, seemingly adrift in some mental abyss...I’ve been there a lot lately. In reflection, I can almost hear a soundtrack of melancholy playing like the overture carried on the wind during an epic battle scene where bullets are zipping along your peripheral view, debris being thrown onto your path and the camera pans out to show the mangled remnants of those who came before you but were unsuccessful in their campaign. For a moment your actions still, everything stops and the only sound that remains is the blood pumping in and out of your heart and a shuttered breath...the whoosh deafening inside you. 

I think the country is standing on a very dangerous precipice, much like standing in the middle of a battlefield where the initial rush and anticipation of action has us suddenly...with one foot on a landmine, only realizing too late once your brain registers the ‘click.’ Or like so many times before we have all been warned about frozen lakes, that while they look solid, many times we do not clearly see what our eyes have refused to comprehend until the moment there is the soft ‘ping’ and ‘crackle’ of a break in the seam. 

What we do not understand or frankly fail to see is that it is our own actions that have placed us in this moment, this spot, this plain of existence. We question reality, and mentally trace back our steps and actions as though that act alone could save us now. We rack our brains trying to play out the what if’s and what about’s in a desperate attempt to beg the universe for a redo, and then slightly curse it for not answering those prayers. We have moment after moment to define who we are, what our message will be and yet we remain reactive to situations as though that very moment has snuck up on us. Very rarely should we be caught off guard by something, after all we’ve had hundreds of years learn, process and grow.

But we don’t.

History is littered with the discarded remains of lives lost, lessons supposedly learned and broken promises that were utterned with the best of intent to ‘never forget’ or ‘do better.’ We talk about change like it’s a new idea, the grand solution to an age old problem or an idea whose time has finally come. But it’s always been here, knocking on the door because the bell is broken, sometimes a tiny ‘rasp’ and other times a harsh ‘pounding’ yet we wonder every day what happened? How did it get so bad? Where did we go wrong? 

The thing about history though, it’s not really in the past, because it keeps coming round and round and round. Disaster after disaster, disease after disease, war after war...the lesson never fully learned. So here we are again, standing in the middle of this battlefield or standing in the middle of that frozen lake...fear racing through our veins like venom. 

Fight or flight? Panic or process? 

In these defining moments our character shines. Our instincts kick in and we do what must be done. Sometimes that means accepting our fate, after all it is our choices that led us here. Sometimes that means taking decisive action regardless of the consequence and sometimes that means waking up…

This is a call.

This is a call for action.

This is a call to wake the fuck up.

We can do more.

We can be more.

We can do this....but you have to wake up.

Please stop dreaming. 

Please end the nightmare.

Please. Get. Up.