When people ask me if I think we have evolved, I am reticent to answer that question. These United States have only been incorporated for a few hundred years. We’ve rarranged the narrative, all of us, literally in our history books, so that we see ourselves as hero and victor, creator of freedom, savior on many levels. I’m not writing about politics, but sharing some thoughts on the emotional and spiritual epigenetics behind it. The Constitution says that all men are created equal. At the time it was written, all men weren’t. In fact, all men, women and children weren’t. Since the dawn of time, humans have lived in survival mode. Survival of the fittest physically, emotionally and spiritually. That trickles down to race, gender, socioeconomics, and culture narratives. Us versus them is a paradigm instilled within us at the moment we separated from self, from our true identity, in order to meet the needs of the familial and cultural identities we were born with, and eventually the identitites that we create in order to feel safe. Our pirmal instinct is to have our basic needs met. Those needs are different for everyone and are defined by many factors. There is an entitement consciousness that has arisen out of our basic need to survive because some how, less than equates to unworthiness and inferiority. These same emotional and spiritual issues that humanity has been struggling with for thousands of years I believe we still struggle with today. Only there is more of a need to feel safe, and more “things” to fight over to bring about that sense of safety. In our competition for safety, powerlessness becomes a tool we use against each other and understanding of another person’s safety becomes less important than your own. Understandable. We still don’t know a better way to shift things without some sort of cataclysmic response or reaction.
The word freedom truly is defined by our epigenetic threads. The boss who allowed for the child laborer to work fourteen hours instead of fifteen. The women who were instituitionalized insted of murdered when husbands no longer had interest. The people of color who had separate restrooms or who were only lashed a few times instead of a few hundred times. Women who were finally allowed into medical school or given the right to vote. Somewhere along the line, some epigenetic thread was a part of that decision making process and influenced how we feel about the world today, about those living in our communities and in our families. Those decisions helped to influence how each and every one of us defines our right to live in a “free” society.
I don’t see a “free” society. For me, free means we value each other as human beings, while having the right to disagree. It means we take responsbility for our powerlessness and stop giving our power over the ways in which we do to those in authority who make decisions for us. It means we don’t project our unworthiness to individuals whose way of life doesn’t make us feel safe so that our life is more entitled to exist than someone else’s. I don’t know how long it will take us to stop telling others how their lives should be lived so that we can feel safe. And we could manifest this with the appropriate boundaries that move fluidly with the times we are in.
Us verus Them. I don’t see this paradigm ending soon. But if we want to change it, just begin by changing just one thing inside yourself, especially when it comes to someone you disagree with.