Technology, change, and responsibility

You know how it is when you wake up one morning and wonder where you’ve been? It seems to me that something peculiar happened to mid January. Starting about at Martin Luther King day and going on to Obama’s state of the union, and including Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt. What the heck happened? It just gave me the feeling like you can turn around and suddenly the world has changed while you weren’t looking.

Technology and change. It’s unfair to bind the Middle Eastern revolts to technology alone, or to lump Obama’s speech, (with so much given over to the new technological world) in there with it, but this theme jumped out at me after having been more sequestered than usual.

I did watch the State of the Union with all that language of “winning” feeling not like Obama but like Obama catering to the America public. There’s that desire to be winners again. To be better than the competition, more pioneering, more innovative, more affluent. To not let the status of our leadership and our image in the world wane.

President Obama’s words meant more to me when he acknowledged that so many of us feel as if we’ve woken up in a new world, and that there’s cause. There’s been this technological revolution. Things are different now. (I’d add, here, that the difference is not only due to technology! The technology that connects the world, is, as my friend Mary pointed out to me many years ago, only possible because it’s happening within us. Our possibilities and dreams become the world’s possibility and dreams.)

And so you’ve got the youthful protestors organizing via Twitter and Facebook.

Egypt’s youth claim a generation gap. They see those governing as only acting to preserve themselves. They claim no allegiance to anything but change. They realize they have to do it themselves.

In a corresponding news article, one official noted that there is no longer the hope in America that there once was – the hope in America as an outside rescue operation.

Could this be a good thing?

This is kind of my conclusion after feeling as if I’m coming out of a cocoon in which in some way the same thing’s been happening within me. I’ve been focused on some things that are important to me with the feeling of “It’s up to me” And I’ve been more diligent about watching where I rush in to rescue those who need to do for themselves.

The feeling of the whole world being caught in a similar time of change is keen…as if we’re beginning to get a new notion of where we are and how to proceed.

It’s harder in one minute with news of protests turning violent and police and civilians being killed, easier in the next with hopeful signs of military sympathies lying with the protestors. As one analyst said, the beginning of a revolt can be exciting and romantic, but it doesn’t last. It gets harder and more violent.

I suppose that’s the thing about revolt. There has to be such a sustained inner desire and hope for change that you don’t give up.

It all reminded me of a quote from A Course of Love (10.17)”

Nothing happens by accident and the observation of this will help to put the responsibility of your life back into your hands, where it belongs. You are not helpless, nor are you at the whim of forces beyond your control. The only force beyond your control is your own mind.