“Coca-Coma Time”
I’m feeling a little snarkey this week. I snapped at my husband this morning. I’ve had zero patience with myself. I didn’t even feel like “blogging,” to tell you the truth. It’s been one of those weeks that you can only describe this way: “It’s been one of those weeks.” I can’t quite put my finger on any one thing. Hmmm — My hair made me a cinch for the “Kramer” look-a-like contest, if they ever hold one. I’ve felt tired all week — low energy, nothing serious. Oh, and every time I turned on the TV or radio or went online, I heard horror stories of innocent people dying and rumors of World War III.
Oh. That could be it. These are turbulent times we are living in, people. Or as my elderly ex-client Doris from Pittsburgh used to say, “Turrible, turrible.” How are you affected by all the global gnashing? Do you tune it out? Does it make you feel impotent? Resentful? Angry? Have you ever just cried for the hatred and greed that are playing out on a world-wide level? Or do you feel nothing at all?
When I heard the author and mystic Andrew Harvey speak here in Ashevile almost 2 years ago he said the reason we aren’t outraged 23 hours a day is simple: “We’re in a Coca-coma.” This is a consumer society, after all. Consumerism is the national religion. And if it does nothing else, our religion helps us to go numb just when the appropriate response for any normal human would be, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Or perhaps, “It didn’t have to be this way,” if we are one of the more forgiving, compassionate ones.
The beauty of this religion is that you don’t even have to get high and alter your consciousness to zone out. Hell, that would be redundant — we are all zoned out. All the time. If you doubt it, ask yourself, “How horrible would things have to get for how many living beings on this planet for me to break down and sob?” I don’t know about you, but I think of myself as a fairly empathetic person who gets upset if an animal is mistreated. But I can focus my eyes and ears on stories about thousands of innocent people dying in Darfur or Iraq and eat my dinner at the same time. Isn’t that denial, folks? Yeah, I know — we all need a little denial just to get us through the day. It’s one of the holy sacraments of consumerism.
But I’m beginning to suspect we’re in it up to our necks. Otherwise we would be marching and protesting and banding together to make our voices heard. We wouldn’t sit there and say, “Oh, that’s awful. Is American Idol on yet?” At least I’d like to think we wouldn’t. So what does it take to respond, if not with anger, which is useless anyway, then with compassion and with a resolve to do SOMETHING to improve the lot of humans? It seems to me that we’ve sedated ourselves so successfully for so long that we now have whole generations growing up thinking that reality TV beats the real thing. Their parents can’t really help them sort things out because they’re too tired from working overtime to make the mortgage payment and hopefully avoid losing their good credit rating. What is THAT about?
I know this — everyone I meet is too distracted almost all the time to focus on the one thing that counts — the quality of life on Earth. It’s no longer possible to act as though what happens in equatorial Africa doesn’t affect us here in the U.S. On the level of Spirit, All is One. So that even if we don’t necessarily know what’s bothering us, on the inner planes we are all suffering from the damage we are inflicting on each other as an interconnected part of the collective mind of this planet.
Sometimes we just have to turn our focus to those areas of our lives that make us feel good about who we are. I’m now finding that it no longer seems possible for me to separate the quality of my life from that of the other 6 billion souls. Maybe that’s a good thing — if you choose to see it as an indication that we all are, indeed, one.