“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” ~Mother Teresa

Dear readers,

It’s been a while since my health… and well, my sanity allowed me to post. In the time between then and now, so much has happened. Our world always seems to be ablaze, yet for the lucky few of us, we are able to snuggle on our couches to read a few lines of this blog post or scroll through our news feeds to watch the world burn, consumed by our own hopelessness. All of us are affected. Afflicted by the greed of a few.

War is a rich man’s game that we pay into with the innocent blood of our lineage. Trading ourselves and our children for what… Profit? But none of it ours. Succumbed to our colonial mindset, we fight amongst each other as if it is our neighbors that are the problem… and yes, I’ll admit some of us are, but most? Most just want comfort, stability… love, but we have been trained to be hateful from the moment we took our first breath. I am a firm believer that most of those same people loathe the system that has exploited our misery to keep us from the treasures that could be afforded to us just by simply being human, but they have no idea how to climb out of the graves dug for them.

So I beg of you, readers, to ask yourself, why? Why do we keep paying into a system that doesn’t even serve us?

Systems we feed green and crimson to, that then turn and grind themselves into our soil, destroying all that it touches. Like King Midas’s touch of gold and rot always leading to death. Capitalism was meant to be our hero. Lady Liberty clothed in $100 bills pulling the worker “up by his bootstraps” into the land of freedom. The only problem? The worker was never meant to win. We were always cogs in the machine, only meant to keep it running. So who saves us?

Is it the decaying god we have held onto for hundreds of years, begging for him to care… or maybe it’s the puppeteer pulling the strings hidden from sight behind a piece of cloth that has a small sign above displaying “do not look at the man behind the curtain.” Let’s be honest, the answer is neither (or in the very least, not in this case). In truth, only we can save ourselves. But the only way to do that is to hold on to each other. Community has always been scary to those who try to exploit us because it requires collectivism and cooperation.

Let’s be clear: collectivism isn’t some foreign threat, in the same way socialism is not a collection of scary stories in our history books sent to cave in our society by eating it from the inside. The propagated agendas of our government tell us that “it’s never worked” or “it takes advantage of the working class.” Yet they forget to tell us that they collapsed entire functioning governments to dust just by gambling with our fear, all to cushion the lining of their pockets because community cooperation is not profitable. Maybe that’s our fault… teaching each other it’s all about how many zeros we can fill our bank accounts with, all for the sake of patriotism. It’s littered in our history. Guatemala, Chile… and if we want to get real personal, bringing it close to home, the Black Panthers. All of those people practicing democratic socialism and it was WORKING. Don’t believe me? Read about it yourself it is good for the soul and the mind.

It’s all a choice… we don’t have to live like this. Patriotism can always be and should be a choice of better. We don’t have to think ill of our neighbors or worse… trade them in for compensation against our soul. We can choose to uplift our youth instead of competing with them, seeing their value beyond ourselves, and most of all, we can choose love over profit. Our land, water, and air don’t have to be staked with a for sale sign. The seeds in our earth can be truly soaked in freedom. We can choose each other. Human being to human being.

Signed with love always,

Shay