In Memorium: Moore, OK

As I watched the pictures of the devastation at Moore, OK, and thought of what my brothers and sisters were enduring there my heart broke open and I almost cried. I felt anger too, because this need not have been so fierce, that what happened in Moore, OK, was something we did and are still doing to ourselves, something that we can stop doing, but won’t. How sad!

Yes tornados and hurricanes will come, but their intensity and frequency, the destructiveness and duration we’ve seen in recent years are very likely the result of global climate change. Yet like so many other things – poverty, child and spouse abuse, drone strikes and joblessness – we deny responsibility for what is happening. Perhaps you and I as individuals are not directly responsible, but collectively we are.

Churchill said people get the government they deserve. How sad and how true! Lately what is being done and left undone in our name as Americans makes me ashamed. We do indeed seem to have the best government money can buy. Not so much at the local level, but at the state and federal levels that’s shamefully obvious. Yet we allow it. What goes on is a reflection of our beliefs. It is done unto us as we believe.

The challenge is to help one another release the beliefs and kinds of thinking that have created our present situation. We don’t want to cling to the old rugged cross, we don’t want to do more of the same - blaming, fearing and hating one another. All that’s of the ego. We’ve got to let that kind of feeling, thinking and behaving go. We’ve got to, or it will only get worse! The handwriting’s on the wall, will we heed it?

The enemy’s not out there in the form of the Chinese or al-Qaida, it’s in here, inside us. We have met the enemy and they is us, Pogo said 40 years ago. We don’t need more tanks and aircraft carriers to defend us, we need education, creativity and innovation. Global climate change can be managed. Lives and property can be saved. The billions we spend on defense can, if we have the insight, inner faith, vision and courage, be re-programmed to solve our real challenges, to defend us from what we really need to be defended against – poverty, child and spouse abuse, drone strikes and joblessness, blaming, fearing and hating one another.

The destruction of Moore, OK, can be an opportunity, not for the martyrs who died and suffered there for their and our ‘sins’, but for the rest of us. Let’s do what we can to have fewer Moores, Sandy Hooks and Katrinas. There’s lot’s we can do. Let’s stop doing what we always do - thinking, feeling and behaving with the ego’s pride and hubris, thinking we can build a sand castle that will hold back the tide. Instead, let’s do what we really haven’t given a chance, go within seek the Kingdom first – its compassion, inclusion, love and creativity and go from there. After all, if we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got – Moore 1999, Moore 2013 and Moore…?