When will we care?

Today I went into Book Ends Café and was sharing with the young barista about the broadcast I had just heard from Democracy Now on the raids and the infringements of our rights happening around the Republican National Convention in St. Louis. His response was, “I just don’t care.” While I understand the apathy and how it happens, I am still somewhat shocked at the complete unwillingness for so many of us, myself included too often, to really stand up, get vocal, organize and fight for our rights.

Will we care when we have curfews and police on our streets brutalizing innocent people just because they feel like it and they can? That’s happening now, today, do we care yet? Would we care if it was us or someone we know personally who’s house was ransacked, camera cards erased, video camera’s taken, houses broken down and put under arrest for doing nothing but exercising our rights, according to our constitution? That too happened today, do we care yet? How close to home does it need to be?

Will we care when yet another war monger president is in office, inciting more hatred, death, revenge and mass destruction in the name of the “Proud and the free,” creating more enemies in the world for our children to have to try to make peace with? Would we get active if we had to consider, as people in other countries have had to do, putting a machine gun in the arms of our 5 year old sons, brothers, cousins, to protect our families and homes? Would that make us care?

Will we care when some of these angry people finally get thru and land on our soil and start to wreak the havoc here that our country, in the name of freedom, has there? Will we care then? Will we care when it is us who are seeing our friends, cafes and streetcorners blown up by car bombs?

When will we really care? Everyone’s so busy, few people have the energy to care. Like this young man, it was a bother for him to stay informed and he got to upset and felt like there’s no way to make it shift perhaps… I know I’ve felt that a lot.

Listening today to what is going on at the Convention, the degree of the fear mentality, the control, the police state-ness of the whole thing triggered some place deep inside of me. I felt it in a way I haven’t in some years, and the graveness of this election, and the coming months is weighing heavy on my heart, even though I live in the Boulder Bubble, and everyone’s happy and excited for Obama. Even though I know all things work in the way they are meant to, and all the spiritual hoo haa that I know to be truth, even still, the gravity of our current political reality is beyond my comprehension for sure. I have felt it for many years growing to this place, and in my own way of keeping my own sanity, I have stayed quietly reflecting, praying, and trying to counter the “powers that be” by not subscribing to the fear, the dogma or even the media’s attempts at brainwashing and manipulation. I see much possibility and not all of it is as pleasant as I’d prefer. I feel edges of civil unrest, and would not put it past the current regime to fuel that fire to distract us more, as they are doing now with the raids, and the arrests of conscious media and activists folks such as those working with Democracy Now and Food not Bombs.

My call to action is to visualize the world as we want it, but beyond that to ACT and to support those who are out there on the “front lines” of this heated political time in whatever ways we can: $, letters, food, support, prayers. I was an activist when I was in college, and I had to stop because my fire gets a little too hot, and I knew I’d end up in jail or getting shot. It takes a lot of courage, a lot of guts to get out there and really do the work that our true freedom fighters are doing there to tell us the truth and report what’s going on. I just want to honor those people, and say “THANK YOU.” You are doing what many of us are too afraid, too consumed, too apathetic or too “busy” (ha ha) to do, and I am so proud of you when I hear you on the radio, see you in the streets, stepping up for us. You are the soldiers of the people, fighting peacefully, and I pray the power of the almighty, call it whatever you like, is with you to keep you strong.