It’s last call, America. It’s do or die. Literally. Because we’re nearing the end of our mapped road, and we do need to make some collective decisions ahead of time on which route to take, as we have many choices.

Do we turn left at fear once again? Maybe hang a right at gridlock and division before we run out of pavement?

Or do we continue ahead, forging a brand new pathway to something brilliant, using only our gut and the stars to guide us?

It is time for people everywhere, especially in the United States, to step up by embracing Love, temperance, dignity and compassion as negotiating tools in order to bring a wave of workable, New World solutions forward. This will heal us all on a local, national, and global scale, especially by employing compassion.

For instance, if we have compassion for our planet, we then invent new green energies which invent jobs so that people can transfer from fossil fuel occupations and still continue to support their families.

If we have compassion for the oil companies that might struggle to go out of business once we make these changes, we purchase their materials and pipelines and recycle them into green energy usage, making them part of the green energy boom, rather than cutting them off on a consumer level.

If we have compassion for our children, above all things we will then wish to see them educated, and housed and clothed and fed, not as a budget line item, but as shaping the inner emotional security and character of the human beings who will some day care for us, as our age turns us into a social security line item. If we do not teach our children compassion, they will never know how to grant us their compassion.

If we have compassion for those who leave marks of hatred on buildings, and speak hateful words to others, we then allow them to be seen as people, which allows them to address their deep fears of being — invisible people.

To love is not to “condone”, “give a pass”, “endorse” or “forgive”. Those are intellectualized means of processing our own ego in a situation. To love is to fearlessly hold a space for the compassion necessary to bring forward a solution. 

To love is to be a heavy lifter with the persistence of gravity, whose only wish is to create opportunity, often patiently, while a solution that honors the dignity of all people, not the principle held by some people, is then co-created by the contributions of the many.

Leadership is not about accomplishing line-item tasks. That is effective administration.

True leadership is the ability to create, uphold, and continue to fuel the environment where all tasks may be accomplished while feeding the emotional needs of the complex and diverse people who are there to accomplish the task.

People are the currency for change, not money.

There is no such thing as an impossible task — only impossible people.

So let us bring those in leadership forward whose mantra is possibility.

The minute we stop putting energy into demonizing others, or demonizing the means which have progressed society, we grow. The moment we stop hissing in the rear view mirror at the bumps in the road that we have already traversed, cursing our past to become our future — we then begin to expand, and to ignite new opportunities for everyone. 

Until we accept that we are all hypocrites in one way or another, that we are all fallible in one way or another, that in one way or another we are all selfish, easily frightened, opinionated, self-righteous, brainwashed by a consumer system that doesn’t care about anything but pointing out where we fail so that we’ll buy more items to feel better — until we all truly look into the mirror and recognize that the rock upon which many of us have built our professional pious American character upon was a never a rock to begin with, but a jagged spike in a profits graph posing as a sturdy mountain —

— we will never heal.

We will never grow.

We will never truly change what needs to be changed to ensure our children a world in which innovation triumphs over the fear of loss.

Let us take the first step in healing by accepting our own hypocrisy, often justified by a laundry list of our own wounded self-importance grafted into place to over-compensate for feeling invisible, thanks to a consumer culture that deems one relevant only with enough name brands hanging off one’s body, or enough letters behind one’s name, or enough money in the bank, or enough cleavage showing.

Let us first remove the plank from our own eye to see that we are all — all of us — raging, pouting hypocrites, mostly angry at ourselves for our own repeated actions in hypocrisy, yet obsessed with pointing out the frailties in the hypocrisy of others as to learn from the human mirror right in front of us.

We rail against oil companies yet drive cars. We fight against greenhouse gasses yet drive through and pick up a burger as massive beef lots pour greenhouse gasses into the environment. We rail against those who don’t “pay their own way” while we creatively apply write-offs to our taxes, robbing the local roads we use everyday of repair money. We all want to win the lottery so we can stop working, yet rage against people who receive money, or  “entitlements”, and “don’t work”. We are on disability yet rail against those who are on welfare. We are on welfare and rail against those who make the money which funds the welfare.

We are sure we are justified, pious, upstanding, doing God’s work. We are sure that our perspective is the one that is correct. We claim authoritarianism is a bad trait unless it supports our opinion — and then it is suddenly righteousness, God’s will, a miracle.

These are the lies we tell ourselves to justify our polarization, our judgement, our pettiness, our fear of becoming something better than simply ourselves by joining with others to create a solution that we could never accomplish on our own, while trapped in our own echo chambers.

We protect our fragile consumerist need to “be number one”, be first, win, and above all things, to be seen, because our ego has grown as a bloated parasite on our soul, a black-hole born of an illusion of grandeur that can never be satiated.

We are not only hypocrites in America, but addicts, with a majority of the population addicted to the same sugar that turns diabetes and cancer into a multi-billion-dollar business. Yet we turn up our nose at those who suffer with addictions to meth, to opioids, as our addiction to sugar is socially acceptable and encouraged, especially since the artificial high in sugar makes better workers-bees in monotonous jobs that fuel the consumer monster. Have another cookie. They’ve been left in the break room.         

We are a society drunk on the drug of our own needs, wants, and insecurities, trained by a broken consumerism culture to believe that we never “have enough”, when “enough” is within, and right in front of us, if we’d just re-evaluate our reality.

We struggle to find our identity and feelings of safety in a world where helping others is viewed as weakness, and “ownership” is viewed as self-made strength and accomplishment.

And we’re terrified to grow past what we know, to try new things.  Because who are we going to become, without the letters after our names, or the numbers in our bank account, or the striving identity of the lesser-of-the-hypocrites?

After all, how will we get through a sex-less marriage without a pint of ice cream a day, or tolerate an emotionally abusive job without spending hundreds on a new pair of shoes, or get past a defeated consciousness that doesn’t believe in anything anymore without creating hatred for others in order to deaden our own suffocating ineffectiveness in bringing healthy change to our own lives?

How will we cope without our treats? Our prizes? Our rewards? Because we can’t be expected to do this life, to participate, to make things better — unless we’re rewarded.

We are all entitled, as Americans, on one level or another, no matter the income bracket, as well as hypocrites. Both are the double-edged sword of the luxury granted by opportunity.

It is important that we, as a culture, go into acceptance over this very basic fact — that we are each, in one way or another, the very monsters we are trying to defeat.

This acceptance, this accountability, this courage to reach deep and wake up, this willingness to stop the cycle of blame and illusion and false piousness put into place by an old world score-keeping society whose goal is to divide We The People, so that it may sell us a means to feel part of something bigger, with a prescription, or for only five installments of $99.99 —

— this personal recognition, ownership and forgiveness for our own monster within will grind the sugar-drug-hazed, whining, wanting, blaming machine to a halt.

This personal recognition, ownership and forgiveness for our own monster within will allow us to recognize that there is not one among us who is greater than the other, in our faults, our frailties, or our fears.

This personal recognition, ownership and forgiveness for our own monster within will remove the insatiable soul-sucking parasite of ego from the greater purpose that our soul is calling out toward:

Healing.

To heal our world, our hearts, and our minds, we must zero-out the endless cycle of finger-pointing, and huffing hopelessness. Instead, let us replace it with solution-based action. And those solutions must come from all of us.

Every perspective counts. It is only our hypocrisy that convinces us that ours is more righteous. We cannot light the darkness without treading into the dark first to understand where to lay the wiring. We must visit with the convicted child molester to understand their perspective, in order to shelter children from victimization. We must bring those who subject others to human trafficking forward to understand how it is possible to enslave another, so that we may protect those who may fall prey. Understanding perspective does not condone an action, nor relinquish the penalties brought forth by breaking laws. It simply allows the data to be gathered.

Because in healing, all perspective matters. The victim and the victimizer both hold answers, whether individuals, corporations, politicians, or the planet. We must be brave enough to hold a space, in love, to find these answers.

We must reach deep past the bloated ego parasite to find the burning purpose in our soul, so that this purpose may be deemed “enough” on which to act — without a treat, without a prize, without a price tag.

Old timers called this action “doing the right thing”.

We must give away our distraction of hypocrisy, or in the meantime, find patience with ourselves when it rears its embedded head in our daily lives, so that we may put to rest the endless cycle of argument and judgement, in lieu of bringing forward a growth cycle of healing.

This, humanity, is our only chance or survival.

It is our only chance.

We will either rise to the occasion of self forgiveness, and the forgiveness of others, for unspeakably appalling condition of being human —

— or will will die, as a species, cackling through a sugar high and a selfie while unaware that we’re choking on the septic waste of our own hubris, ego, and entitlement.

We must find the strength to de-brand ourselves from a polarized consumer culture that sells acceptance through the perception of lack, convincing us that we need more “stuff” to be a true American — bigger opinions, bigger cars, bigger sodas, bigger divides, bigger notoriety.

Instead, we must apply positive, bold, courageous, hopeful, ingenious actions devised by the amalgamation of many perceptions, then overcoming the old-world hesitation to “try something new” by bringing forward incredible, visible results in growth.

Humans are motivated by positive results.

And most importantly — we must find the courage to trust one another with our deepest hopes, dreams, and collective ideas, with the intention of building this new world together.

Because the truth, as we officially plummet into a climate change cycle that is quickly extincting opportunities for food and clean water in far less time than projected — the truth is that we are all settlers of a brave new world, crammed together in the belly of a three-mast ship, being tossed at the mercy of a stormy sea. We are all frightened, because we are not certain if the vessel that we’ve chosen to carry us to an unknown destination will endure this storm. It is creaking, and springing leaks, and even the people who were confident about this journey are now sickened and driven to the floor by their inability to secure steady footing — because the storm is relentless. Yet we must remember, amidst the sobbing and the fear below, that our hope for a new beginning was enough to silence our fears, to get us together in the belly of a common ship, to face an uncommon task. This is why we’ve stayed, as settlers, elbow to elbow, standing ankle deep in human mess. We know that this storm cannot last forever. And that all who boarded this vessel were needed, with their individuals skills for the task ahead. Because one cannot build a new world with only one nail.

We all hold the courage to break the ground in this new world. Yet this time, the ground we are breaking is not soil, yet our souls.  It is not the construct of society, but consciousness. We are not reaching to conquer new horizons; we are restructuring to construct new heavens. We are not overthrowing an indigenous culture, but including all culture.

And for this task, we require those to fearlessly step forward who are called to a new style of leadership that places the power of love first, the ego of the individual second, and the illusion called fear that cripples human potentially — completely aside.

It is time we crawl out of the identity of the judging, condemning, entitled hypocrites, who have lost ourselves in the illusion of “better-than”, to place our arms and our hearts around our fellow humans, and celebrate our common genius.

We all have differing skill sets, differing goals, a differing world lens. Nature requires many opposites to balance the whole. The earth must have a north and south pole so that our magnetosphere will adhere to our planet in order for life to be protected from harmful solar radiation. Nature deems neither pole dominant. Nature wastes nothing, including you. You are here for a purpose. And so am I. So let us reach for this purpose with the excitement of gentle settlers in a new world, and may we draw on love as our compass.

Love is not an ideal. It’s a tool.

Love is a problem-solver that never gives up.

Love is an innovator that never gives up.

Love is a peacemaker that never gives up.

Love is a bridge-builder that never gives up.

Love is a healer that never gives up.

Love is a moderator that never gives up.

Love is a mother that never gives up.

Love is a father that never gives up.

Love never gives up protecting what it loves.

Love only gets stronger the more weight you put into it.

And so do you.