We Need To Turn Down The Volume

The world is facing some serious issues these days. The global economy is teetering on collapse lead by countries like Greece and Ireland. Governments are too often populated by self-serving and cynical politicians and their backroom strategists and there is significant corruption, if not of law, certainly of morality in the financial securities industry.

We’re facing environmental issues, natural disasters that devastate whole countries and their populations, have unbelievable poverty levels in countries where poverty shouldn’t exist and have priced health care out of reach for many who don’t have insurance or who aren’t fortunate enough to live in a country with universal access to health care services.

Government debt is spiralling out of control and totalitarian regimes are erupting in violence dragging democracies into the fray at huge financial expense and cost in human lives.

At some point, the world held a meeting which I must have missed because it seems that it was overwhelmingly decided that the best way to deal with these, and other, issues was to yell at each other.

Too few are listening to anyone any more, they're too busy yelling at everyone with whom they disagree.

Republicans are yelling at Democrats and when there are no democrats around, they yell at each other. Democrats are yelling at Republicans despite the fact that both Republicans and Democrats are Americans and both want a stronger, more stable and prosperous country. Republicans accuse the president of being everything from an Islamic terrorist to a communist. Democrats accuse Republican contenders for the presidency of being weak, stupid and dishonest.

In Canada, Liberals attack Conservatives while the Conservatives rush to return the favour and the NDP attacks everybody.

Socialists attack capitalists, accusing them of raping the global village while capitalists attack socialists as unemployed freeloaders.

Fundamentalist Christians attack Muslims, atheists attack and mock Christians and radical Islam attacks everybody. It’s all based on anger and a sense of moral superiority in countries where the right to believe or not to believe is enshrined in our different declarations of rights.

For their part, protest movements like Occupy, Arab Spring and the extreme environmentalist movement have decided that the best way to bring about positive change is to disrupt society in as negative a manner as possible. Many have decided that the best way to fight injustice is to break the law through vandalism  and inciting riots.

In Canada, where I live, there has always been an arrogant sense of moral superiority that our country and our politics did not have the same kind of negative attack strategies of countries like the United States. That moral superiority is long gone, if it ever actually existed. Everyday citizens have become what they most attack and are as strident and as bellicose as any campaign ad on either the left or the right.

Social media is awash in anger and accusation. Pick a cause and you will find people screaming at each other without any effort at all. It used to be that when you ran a search on Google for something, you inevitably were overwhelmed by porn sites in the results. Now it’s sites that attack everyone with whom they don’t agree.

When I think of how much Gandhi, who never spoke in anger and who always treated his enemy with respect, accomplished, I marvel at how little we have learned. Our anger has accomplished nothing except to generate even more of it and it is becoming a battle of one upmanship as we strive to win the point rather than resolve the issue together.

As Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind", and we are increasingly blinding ourselves to anything except our own opinions.

The global debt crisis continues to threaten all of our economies, the environment is still something to which most governments merely pay lip service and politics is even more cynical than ever before, mostly because our anger divides us and politicians know how to use that division to their advantage at election time.

I don’t have many great solutions for the problems we’re all facing but I know this much. Nothing is going to get fixed by tomorrow at 2:00 pm and yelling at each other isn’t going to make it happen any sooner. It never has in the past and it certainly won’t in the future. If we have any hope at all of starting to turn this world around, it will have to come through consensus and that can only happen if we start listening to each other.

There was a time when it was the issues we discussed and debated, now it’s personal.

We have invested our self-concept in our opinions and too often attack the issue by personally attacking those who don’t agree with us. Quite frankly that isn’t getting us anywhere and it doesn’t hold much promise for the future. It takes time, effort and patience to understand and find solutions. It just isn’t going to happen if making our point is more important than making a united effort to start fixing things.

We have some difficult days barrelling down on us like a truck out of control. If all we’re going to do about it is yell at each other, that truck is going to run us down and then it won’t matter if you’re on the left or the right, Christian or atheist, Occupier or Wall Street banker. We’ll all finally be equal but we won’t like the equality our yelling, instead of uniting together, brought us.

It doesn't start by waiting for others to stop yelling; it starts with each of us turning down our own volume.

 © 2011 Maggie's Bear

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