WAKE UP!

Here's the question: Are we going to wake up from the current political nightmare before the November election, or are we going to continue our communal sleep-walk into it?

Why are so many of us choosing to go to sleep on opioids? On other drugs? On alcohol? On work? Anything to keep us distracted, comatose.

At what point do we all decide to rouse ourselves from sleep? At what point will we stop allowing the media to sedate us with their game of entertainment, their game of political "equivalence" for the sake of drama, for the ratings? At what point will those on "the right" wake up and see that their emperor is as naked as the day he was born--and none too attractive a spectacle, at that?

I watch the morning news and feel sick to the pit of my stomach. So should I not watch the morning news? I know there are many who have given up on it. They boast about it. They say, proudly, "I don't watch the news any more!" But of what benefit is it to play the ostrich and hide one's head in the sand? Simply pretend that none of this is happening?

Could it all be nothing more than an illusion? Or... if I stand on a star a billion light years hence and gaze back down at Earth, the meaninglessness of the activities of we pathetically self-important human beings becomes readily apparent.

Down here on the Earth's surface, though, which is where I stand, the farce continues to play out. Or is it tragedy? Or is there no difference between the two?

Should I follow the Panglossian advice, and cultivate my garden? But where's the rain coming from, here in California, to germinate it? To stimulate its growth?

It's easy to despair, then, given everything that's going on around us. It's much harder to do the only thing that makes the slightest sense: to resist the temptation to simply wrap the mind in cotton wool and go to sleep.

It's much harder to wake up. To stay awake. To do whatever I can to wake up those around me, and help them stay awake.

As I see it, it is only wide-eyed wakefulness that can bring us to our senses; that can save us from ourselves. Which is why I think it so important to keep meditating: to keep the mind alert, to remind myself every morning without fail that this is high time to wake up.