Effects of Isolation

Effects of Isolation

I was mentioning to my wife the other day about how the biggest red flag of how our society has degraded is how we all drive. Each day I see more and more people running stop signs, running red lights recklessly and turn arrows as well. There are several areas around town where, in a double turn lane, people will try to merge lanes as soon as they turn in an attempt to avoid a) missing the light or b) to avoid the long line of people waiting in the correct lane. I see residential areas where no one drives the 25mph speed limit we all know is in place in residential areas. I’ve had people become irate and drive aggressively when I do the speed limit. I feel it’s a big problem and a sign of a larger one.

We all know the rules, or we should if we hold a license to drive. Not many are following the rules. Some are outright breaking them; others are bending them because others are breaking them. It’s like all we need is an excuse to act worse. For me, that excuse was turning our cars into isolation chambers. We isolated ourselves from the “noises of the road” which seemed like a good idea at the time yet it seems we were too weak to still reach out to our fellow human beings. It set the dynamics of us vs. them. How did we miss that? I feel because it was the 80’s, the me generation. I feel we can see clearly the problems with this.

We can’t set every other vehicle on the road as an opponent and expect cooperation and community to spring from it. How can we be surprised at the results of the dynamic we, as a society, set in place? We decided that the individual was more important than the community they lived in. Since that time many of the policies set in place at that time have proven faulty. Remember “trickle down”?

So the time is now to break out of this, to consciously decide to come together. We have a beautiful country, a beautiful community if only we could stop to see it. If only we could put our greed on the back burner for a moment and see what we are all entitled to, what we could all have if only we could share and not hoard. I feel we swung the pendulum too far too fast. We’ve swung from letting the government do it’s own thing, from telling corporations have the right to “vote” back to the “99%” taking back the power. That won’t work folks, it won’t work. Just as we didn’t want “them” stripping our possessions from us, “they” don’t want us taking all their wealth and “redistributing” it. They won’t recognize that they gained it through oppression and we won’t recognize that we wouldn’t want to be treated the way we’re treating them.

Man, it’s time! It’s time to stop the petty bullshit and get it together already. We are in the twenty first century for god’s sake! It’s time to get it together. It’s time to drop where the problem sprung from; greed, and instead choose generosity. It’s time to be gentle with each other. It’s time I was part of the beautiful and diverse society I saw each morning on Sesame Street; the one where we all got along; where differences were chances to learn about each other, not to be shunned.

It is time to be the change…. That means be it without looking back, without waiting for everyone else to, without being weak and becoming greedy just because someone else is.

It’s time to love, to build together, to come together and respect each other.