For many, especially the ones on a so-called spiritual path, resistance is a word with negative connotations attached to it.
In 1967 Martin Luther King Jr delivered a speech at riverside church in New York City. I do recommend downloading this speech from the net and listening to it. Although spoken forty-four years ago, it seems that little has changed in the world since then. Perhaps a few of the names and places had though nothing else.
The main theme in this speech was that “a time comes when silence is betrayal”.
Now, no one can accuse Mr king for not being a spiritual man. Yet a moment came in his life when he recognised, that to just stay focused on a so called spiritual path, without undertaking action in the world, means; betraying the circle of life.
So how can any of us remain silent, while the flag carriers of material barbarism continue to pillage the earth!
What are we doing when they keep on waging wars in the names of freedom, when we know that they are fighting wars for profit.
What are we doing when the spectrum of thought and action in our lives is daily narrowed to a tinier bandwidth.
Are we saying anything, are we doing anything? Or are we doing what we do best – which is nothing.
Are we cultivating a responsibility to life, society and the earth, or have we lost our ability to respond with right action.
I called this post ‘redefining resistance’ because whatever we have done up to now, the little that we did do, just hasn’t worked.
In recent times we marched against a war and the war still happened.
We have blockaded the logging of forests and forests worldwide are still being cut. Forest that hold the balance of life within their life-giving spectrum.
We have protested the WTO and G8 etc., and they are becoming more and powerful by the day.
In fact we are ruled now by corporations rather than by governments.
I hope that we are all aware, that governments worldwide are enacting laws to prevent us from growing medicinal herbs in our gardens, this on the behest of the giant pharmaceutical companies.
And the list goes on.
So something in our resistance hasn’t worked, or perhaps we have been scared or unwilling to stage some real resistance.
At these very weeks the Arab world is rising,; sick of the dictatorships and dynasties that have ruled it for decades. The west seems to support the uprising (offcourse, if there is a uprising in Saudi Arabia, no one will support it – oil my friend).
How about we carry the momentum into our own countries; the so-called beacons of democracy and watch how our governments react when we demand that they hand back the reins of power to the people.
It’s time we stopped the world around us, and told our leaders that we don’t want and will not be ruled by the corporate masters anymore.
That we don’t want to be bred and programed to be human consumers - we want to be human beings.
That we want our human rights back! One of them is the right to choose how we want to live our lives.
That we are sick of being told lies, that GMO food is good for us, that poisoners medicine is good for us, that fluoride in water is good for us, that a share market barbarian economy is good for us.
We need to reclaim the streets, as our brethren are starting to do in some countries.
We need to bring their world to a halt and tell them know of the world we want.
We need to stop cooperating with their system, a way that is exploiting all of us and we need to do it NOW.
We used to go and march for two hours and go home. Now we may have to take the streets for months and only go home when we see the change that all of desire to see.
A world that is fair. A world that is based on principals of sharing, rather than values of greed.
A world where we care for each other, and no one is left behind.
A world with no giant corporations – a world with endless cooperation.
Another world is possible, we can and we will.