Not On My Watch – Video

Plato may be right. All democracies will fail. But I don’t think now’s the time.

When looked at from a distance, we can see the arc of almost anything. Civilizations, movements, ideas. The beginning and the end become visible, like a landscape from altitude. But the closer we get, the more the timeline shifts and blurs. The ending moves around. Why would that be? Maybe because philosophies and people don’t always work hand in hand.

Ideas are clean. People are not.

I have been around long enough to have stood in a few crowds, carried a few convictions, and watched more than one cause rise and fade. Through all of it, every march, every movement, every upheaval, there has always been a placard somewhere in the crowd that read some version of the same thing: Power to the people.

==============================================

That truth is this. The closest thing to actual power most of us will ever hold is a vote and a voice. That’s it. That’s the whole arsenal. It isn’t much, until enough people pick it up at the same time.

But neither of those things work if we stop using them. And they stop working in a different way when we use them without thinking. When we vote the way we’re told to vote, believe what we’re told to believe, and accept what we’re told to accept.

==========================================================

The question is whether you’re willing to stop accepting the illusion in place of the real thing, and what you’re prepared to do about it.

That’s always been the question. It just hasn’t always been this urgent.