May You Live in Treacherous Times
I’ve given up being Zen about Donald Trump. The truth matters.
A refrain has been stuck on repeat in my head for the first week of the new US Presidency: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
These words were spoken by president John F. Kennedy (and attributed to Irish statesman Edmund Burke) in an address to the Canadian parliament in 1961. Kennedy used this quote to implore Canada to bolster contributions to the NATO alliance in the cold war nuclear era.
Today, those words are like a gong in my head, a resounding intuition that things are going to get eerily Hitler-like in the next year as Donald Trump issues executive orders with the same cavalier flair as the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: Off with their (Muslim/Black/Latino/) heads!
The executive order banning Muslims from seven nations from entry into the USA came as a shock to many who imagined Trump’s election campaign rhetoric to be simply that: hyperbolic words. But clearly the new president is keen to turn his pre-election strident xenophobic rhetoric into new (if ultimately un-constitutional) federal policy.
Let’s be clear. I am not a political pundit nor a typical activist. I write primarily about enlightenment in my popular Awakened Dreamer blog and my oeuvre is the pop-culture of good-feeling, motivational spirituality. But what most people don’t know about me is this: I spent a decade using my clairvoyant ability to see into peoples futures, and even to remote view for lost treasure and hidden geographies. This career in my 30’s happened when I was stationed as a Canadian in Washington DC, where my then-husband worked as a World Bank health economist. Though I was trained in journalism, I found my true passion in this strange side-path into the non-ordinary and my “psychic readings” career flourished by word-of-mouth.
That confession is for one reason: I could “see” as far back as last spring that Trump would win the Republican nomination, and from there, the presidency. I wrote about this concern in March of 2016, in my Awakened Dreamer post, “Less Luminous Beings, Awakening and the Dark Side of American Politics.” This was a departure from what my enlightenment focused readers expected, as was this election day post, “Is Donald Trump a High Chair Tyrant?”
What is a high chair tyrant? It’s a Jungian archetype that describes Mr. Trump eerily well: “The High Chair Tyrant needs attention. But unlike the Divine Child, the High Chair Tyrant doesn’t give anything back. He doesn’t inspire–he just demands. And even when his needs are met, the care often doesn’t meet his unreasonable expectations, so he throws a tantrum….The High Chair Tyrant is the embodiment of entitled, arrogant, narcissism. He wants attention, but he doesn’t want to lift a finger to get it. He thinks he deserves it just because
A grown man who is still ruled by the High Chair Tyrant sulks when he doesn’t get his way, fails to take responsibility for his actions, and is incapable of taking criticism. His arrogance can blind him to reality and cause him to stumble. You can see the High Chair Tyrant manifested in celebrities and politicians who believe they are so special that they are not only entitled to indulge in things like infidelity and crookery, but that they won’t get caught either.”
But back to that darn refrain that keeps looping in my mind, the one that reminds me that for evil to triumph all I need to do is NOTHING. Just sit back and meditate, pray for world peace and get my daily Zen hit by writing about the joys of enlightenment.
But the truth is my soul won’t let me do the ostrich head maneuver. It’s not nearly enough to promote spiritual growth as if enlightenment does not ultimately come with the huge curse of a holy conscience and a fully awakened heart. You see, my brand of enlightenment is not the cool dry detachment of nothing matters because it’s not real. Rather, my awakening is the hot wet terrain of everything matters because reality is what we are making together.
And this reality of a despotic president ready to replay 1933 Germany is not the reality I want to co-create here. If you don’t know what I mean by the historical replay, read Yonatan Zunger’s scary article, What “Things Going Wrong” Can Look Like.
In the meantime, I’ll be writing here regularly about more than my Zen-chill enlightenment. It’s time for this spiritual messenger to speak up.
After all, the truth matters.
