Truth From the People For a New Year

It was, in many respects, a lost conclusion to a lost decade; a year in which millions of us were forced to wave good-bye to both our physical homes and our homes in the middle class; when the proverbial wooden barrel reasserted its place in the common man’s fashion; and in which Hope and Change became War and Goldman Sachs.

Thus, our mainstream media, who continue to suck at the corporate tit, are utterly befuddled by this group of statistics:

Even though most said it was a bad year for the country, three in five Americans said their own family had a good year in 2009, while about two in five called it a bad year.

Some 72 percent of Americans said they’re optimistic about what 2010 will bring for the country. Even more, four in five, are optimistic about what the year will bring for their families.

Curiously, however, nearly two-thirds think their family finances will worsen or stay about the same next year.

The wisdom of the people does often challenge the limited intelligence of our media, which stops somewhere on the treadmill between top line revenue and overhead. Allow me to offer a few words of elucidation for our benighted friends in the ivory tower of reportage…

Of course it’s been an awful year for us, financially, materially, occupationally. As I write, I have 7 cents in the bank — no kidding (not to worry, the eagle will deliver another 40,000 cents tomorrow). Yet in human terms, it has been a fine year. This is the part that really challenges the understanding of most corporate scribes in the MSM, but also explains the statistics that so befuddle them.

If this were a paper for a graduate level psychology class, I would cite all the research studies (on both humans and other animals) that confirm that we are by Nature altruistic, caring creatures (all right here’s one). We like to help one another; we profit by helping in a way that Wall St. and its paid media cannot grasp (and the charity golf tournament is not helping behavior so much as it is mere self-indulgence, both physically and morally). Helping is programmed into us; I suspect into our very DNA. Helping is a strain of creativity, an art form, if you will. This ordinary phenomenon goes well beyond the golden rule, because there is, again, no “rule” about it: the disposition is naturally coded into our genetic makeup. It is what many of us have directly experienced amid our adversities and reversals of this past year.

Why, then, are there greed and evil and underwear bombers and megamillion bonus babies and politicians? This is a question that I’ve dealt with at length, here and in practically all of my books, so I’ll be brief: ignorance is not an absence or a deprivation, but rather an encrustation, a layering of learned fear and falsehood that obstructs or obscures the action of those natural movements and impulses that comprise our true selves. To overcome ignorance, you do not need to “get” something or attain some higher level of realization or knowledge; you simply have to get rid of what is suffocating the light of your original being, your natural personality.

In this context, I tend to focus on fear and fear-raising belief systems (as I did last week in my mildly polemical message to corporate America). If everything you’ve learned is designed to raise and perpetuate fear, then greed and violence will be your lot, your lifestyle. This is very easy to demonstrate politically: pick your issue (universal health care, regulation of investment banks, supporting unions, raising the minimum wage, ending torture, closing Gitmo, etc.) and listen carefully to the opposition in these arenas. Death panels, brown shirt government, assimilation camps, economic disaster, turrurists in the church and saints in the tavern — all the prophecies of doom spoken by the opposition on these issues are baldly and exclusively expressed in the language of fear. As for greed, fear is its primary ideological fuel, its raison d’etre. The usual bromide that supplies this greed-fuel is couched in the terms of competition: if I don’t make the grab and take the biggest slice for myself, someone else will. In other words, a violent and willful denial of the altruism that Nature programmed into us.

Which brings us back to the ordinary people who are not so steeped in that swamp of fear and denial. What do we have to fear now? We have lost our jobs, our savings, our homes, social standing, the very things that our culture had taught us were our identity, our meaning, our worth as both individuals and as citizens of the collective. Loss and trauma have a way of freezing ego; shock can open us to ourselves and toward one another.

Let’s have another look at those statistics, then: 80 per cent of the Americans polled believe 2010 will bring good things for themselves and their families, while two-thirds see no improvement in their financial standing coming next year. This is what’s confusing the reporters: if people don’t see money coming to them, how can they be optimistic? And so the poor, benighted MSM dweebs go on to ascribe these responses to the most superficial and banal causes imaginable (because that’s all they can imagine): “Americans’ traditional optimism or, perhaps, wishful thinking.”

Pathetic, ain’t it? Utterly, abysmally pitiful. This is your free press, America, your fourth estate — in such a pit of darkness and ignorance as would have made Dante tremble. Well, I know what these people in the poll are feeling, because I feel it myself. 2009 was a year of shock, of the glass cage of belief in the collective and its lies being shattered. In other words, it was a year of realization. Those of us who felt it and turned inward and toward one another for support and understanding now know what a beautiful lesson it all brought us. For we learned the way beyond fear; we learned that we can lose practically everything, we can absorb all the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and still be somehow whole, somehow supported, somehow more deeply in love with life than we were before. We are optimistic about our prospects for 2010 because we are grateful for the lessons of 2009.

The conclusion here is only seemingly ironic: I cannot, after all, teach the corporate media and the Wall St. fatcats the meaning of what we have discovered in this lost year that closes out a lost decade. It is perhaps too precious a thing to be told in words; it can only be experienced. And so I ask those puzzled journalists and their corporate masters to merely mark it all down, not to “wishful thinking,” but to a wisdom that surpasses their own experience, their own understanding. I am beyond the point of asking for understanding or support from the government, corporate America, or its media voices; but I hope that respect would not be too much to ask from them all.