I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

She Will Be Loved- the song I awoke to in my head this morning. Is this a good sign? God I hope so.

Now onto my topic, and the continued fleshing out of a theme I feel reverberating around here amongst a few of us. The more I read champy, jimschweizer, scaryfairy, and jamesn, the more I think there is some kind of consensus, at least among 3-5 of us that I am actively reading, that there is an aching shallowness in our society that needs some fixing.

There needs to be compensation, and a way to make a living for doing work of meaning. An economy of meaning? I'd like that. It's no fun doing what you don't like for 40+ hours a week so you can pay the rent and buy the groceries. Seems like life could be a bit better than that, doesn't it? Why does it have to be charities that do the work of meaning? Why can't companies be formed, or more of them, that tackle that and make it into a viable business model?

There also needs to be some way to make society less machinistic and more inclusive. When I see the homeless guy on my porch, or I see (become?) the single mom who could drop off the grid because she can barely make it and no one knows of her existence, and the elderly people who can't live on their social security and who have no access at this point to health insurance other than medicare,...

....well it seems to me that this just isn't terribly compassionate. If you're a non-producer, hey, you just drop off the grid and become a burden to the rest of us producers.

In earlier societies, they would put the elderly, the weak, the widowed, and the infirm on a cart and take them out in the forest to die of exposure, and reduce the burden on the rest of the group.

Are we so advanced, really, since then? Don't let technological advances fool you into thinking we have made it so far ahead. In our humanity, we are woefully behind the 8-ball here.

We are paying farmers not to produce while other peoples starve to death in the world.

Our engineers, some of them, are taking major cracks at fuel alternatives and producing astonishing results, including using recycled fryer grease as a diesel. But we'd rather invade Iraq and kill their children so we can continue to choke up the air and drive big SUVs to carry our goods around in.

We buy products with enormous amounts of packaging, and we "throw it away" when we're done. But did you know there's really no place to throw anything away? It all get shoved into the earth and covered over loosely, where it rots and festers. This is fine, until they run out of places to shove garbage into the earth, and start dumping it next to you.

Still like big packaging?

We decided in the last election that really, what we want, is for our government to pretty much turn over the running of the country to businesses. And, that might be a good thing, really.

If business had ethics in this country.

But I think we have all been taught rather differently on that score.

Maybe you can look at all that and say you don't give a damn.

But it just seems to me like we could make this a better place than it is.

Now, that would require that we stop thinking solely about our individual selves for a moment, and wake up to the fact that we are part of a collective. All of us. Despite the appearances of separation, we are more together than you might think. To test this, just see how we all behave in crisis. That's when people band together because the illusion of separation dissolves in a split instant when faced with imminent crisis. There is no hope but to pull together.

We'd also have to stick our collective necks out a little to make a change.

But there seem to be too many voices, just on Mindsay alone, that are saying, "I long for it to be different somehow. I see what is, and I don't like it. I don't think it's right any longer."

Thanks for waking up! It's a little scary when you have awakened because, well, frankly, you're just not going to be able to fix your anxiety now with a trip to WalMart or McDonald's. But you can at least start living consciously.

And that's what it will take - waking up and living consciously.

If you are awake,  talk to others who are awake, and wake others up who are still asleep. Everybody is holding some piece of the puzzle here. Let's find out how they fit together and change this world so badly in need of it.

Cheers!