May 02 2009

Dawn

Human history has been a long bloody march to get to precisely this moment. This moment where we not so much choose the future, but reject that past.

Life, on every level is about one thing, choice. The choices we make as individuals, the choice we make as societies and the choice we make as a human race.

We are at a moment of choice right now. And we are, by and large, making the right ones. Or I should say, they are making the right ones. They being the young people of today. They are choosing tolerance, peace and what amounts to love, on the societal level. They are choosing to leave the bloody history of the past behind and are embracing the paradigms set forth by Christ and the hippies and rejecting the paradigm of hate and fear.

They are not doing this, which is a good thing, out of the spiiritual information of Christ or the starry eyed idealism of the hippies but for a much more solid and lasting reason.

It works.

It is the most practical approach. Peace and love are pragmatic. They are cheaper than fear and hate. They are less complicated. They are easier. And they work.

As we watch the republicans wallow around in their mud trying to find a way to get people to join them in the fifth of hate, they are getting no takers. Not because people have stopped having the capacity for hate or that they are not affected by fear, but because the young people of today are coming to realize that other than emotional satisfaction, it has nothing to offer.

Hate doesn’t put food on the table or clothe your children. Taking something away from another doesn’t make you significantly better off, because it just forces them to try to take it back from you, and who needs the headache.

It is better to try to make sure that we share our resources. It is better to have a little less, if that means you don’t have to fear and defend against someone trying to take it from you.

The bankers tried to take wealth from the homeowners, and now they have to fear them. You get more and better information from being “kind” and reasonable towards your captured enemies than by torturing them. “Letting” gay people marry is much less trouble than repressing them. Talking to your enemies is cheaper than trying to destroy them. You don’t want anyone to mess with your choices, so why the hell should you mess with theirs, just because you don’t agree with them.

Living in fear is not as much fun as living in ‘love.’ Or at least tolerance.

It is quicker, easier, and cheaper to shrug your shoulders and tolerate our human differences than to spend the time and effort to control others. Or kill them.

We are at the dawn of the Progressive Era not because the ideology of it is somehow philosophically superior to Conservative ideology. We are at the dawn of the Progressive Era because it works better and is easier.

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  1. Photobucket

    But because it provides light and heat, too

    • Edger on May 3, 2009 at 00:40
    • #

    Valenzuela, 12/08/04

    Everywhere one looks the enemies of progress can be seen, homophobic, xenophobic, progressophobic and evolophobic, all unenlightened and ignorant, trapped by the chains of hereditary conditioning and the brainwashing of fundamentalist extremism. Because of their tremendous shortcomings, they fear anything different than them, anything that symbolizes change and progress. The fear is obvious in their desperation, reeking out their pores. They want nothing more than to return America to what it can never be, to times that never existed.

    For America was always a nation of change, of progress, of evolution. What the enemies of progress fail to see is that America has from its inception been a nation of evolution, its society and culture progressing according to its environment and ever-changing face. America has succeeded because of progressive thought, because it always sought to move ahead, not regress back. The Founding Fathers could never envisage what was to come, much like we cannot see what the future holds, yet the greatness of this nation is that progress has guided us in time, through dark days and cold nights, leading its glowing candle of light to the vivacity of today, with incredible diversity, talent and potential.

    This, the enemies of progress fail to understand, and is why they will fail, just as they always do, to rein in the unstoppable freight train named progress.

    …

    Over and over again, since the dawn of human existence, progress and backwardness have fought in open hostility, battling for human civilization. Every time, progress has been victorious. Indeed, we would not be living present day society without a triumphant progress raising its proud and colorful flag in victory. Its conquest over the forces of regression and primitiveness is a constant over time, and no matter how dire the world might look, no matter the power of malevolent leadership, no matter how enormous the odds might appear, progress always finds a way. Always. It is a given in life, as constant as rain and sun, and it always reappears to guide human existence past murky waters of times past and into new horizons, using the energy and thoughts of young generations, as well as the experience of those past and aged, to fuse together a more progressive, freer, liberal way of living.

  3. The Zulu word Shosholoza means go forward or make way for the next man, and is also reminiscent of the sound made by the steam train (stimela) described in the song.

    This is quite nice… SHOSHOLOZA BY LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO:

    But I actually like this version (The Drakensberg Boys Choir) a whole lot more, this makes me smile-cry, especially when they start the whistling toward the end:

  4. Life, on every level is about one thing, choice.

    Free will thinking is always going to trump being trained to think in a manner dictated by an authority, it is much more survival oriented.  

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