The Spirit of Independence
by
Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
Are you celebrating the memory of the great moment in human history which was our nation’s Independence Day? Conscious celebration powerfully reconnects us directly to the original energy of independence itself. Yet this very reconnecting immediately brings into stark relief the actual situation we are in here and now: the near-wholesale loss of all meaningful freedom in daily life. What kind of Independence Day is this?
The tide is flowing strongly against that energy which is the genuine spirit of independence. Whatever it is we might wish to do to assert our uniquely creative spirits, it will most likely be immediately obstructed. The high and wide stone walls of the Nameless Interconnected Directorate are closing in, and closing down the dangerous spirit of independence. We may celebrate the idea of freedom, but the grim truth is that our freedom is now an almost meaningless abstraction, reduced to a celebration of beautiful words in history books and high dreams of past glory. We are a nation of the quietly enslaved now, invisibly chained to the Shadow Power which is devouring our energy, our money, our hearts, our minds, and our souls. Where is our independence today? What are we celebrating?
Independence means the practical opportunity to earn a living through our own intelligent activity, rather than as a nameless numbered biped in a multinational corporate Ubershark. Independence means the opportunity to educate our children according to the compelling natural voice of our own conscience, rather than that of current nightmarish popular opinion. Independence means to be able to actually choose and vote for our elected officials, rather than be forced to accept the present criminal syndicate of wholly-owned corporate puppet-people. Independence means the opportunity to eat and drink substances untampered with by hidden venomous corporate byproducts and oughtright toxic waste. Independence means the freedom to live without being spied on through invisible means, by invisible groups, for invisible purposes. Independence means informed consent of a concerned and enlightened citizenry, rather than secret government experiments perpetrated on an unknowing and deliberately weakened populace.
Independence means the opportunity to innocently think our own thoughts and feel our own feelings, rather than be silently subject to subliminal electromagnetic and chemical psychological entrainment. Independence means the opportunity to seek health, as we understand the meaning of this for ourselves, rather than be coerced and kidnapped outright into the lunatic corporate pharmaceutical-medical straight-jacket. Independence means to be allowed to exist in all our multifarious multileveled multicolored individualities, rather than being forced deeper and deeper into the mindless, heartless, bottomless pit of uniformity. Independence is not a historical right. It is not an abstraction, or a concept. It is either what we are free to try, free to live in here and now, or it is nothing at all. The spirit of independence is not the memory of that spirit.
How free are we to live outside a system which vehemently and effectively opposes the very nature of independence? Are we free to live out our dreams of creating beautiful and useful objects, arts, inventions, and new ways of living? Are we free to pursue the very best that is within us? That would be the practical result of a truely free society, composed of independent individuals. Most of us are not free to do anything except earn a half-a-living, as best we can, within the strict confines of the dark Shadow. The other half of our living we are forced to pay directly into the gaping maw which digests it in order to further enslave us. Of course we are all still perfectly free to starve, out of sight under a bush, in the dust. Elsewhere, any genuine independence is very hard to come by. We have left, as a nation, only negative freedoms and negative independence. We seem outwardly to make choices, to move about, to be actually living. Our chains are now invisible, and this is the worst condition of all. We are still free to imagine we are free.
Have we then, as a nation, irrevocably traded the spirit of freedom for the noxious intoxicating vapors of spurious security? Have we forever renounced the use of our minds, in exchange for the puny inanities of puerile entertainments? Have we now bartered the very souls of our children for the right to work sixty hours a week, to make more money, to pay more taxes, to buy ever more shamefully pointless stuff? Have we exchanged the friendly confidences of our own souls, for the right to ignore the death of the spirit of independence? These are questions we cannot answer, except for ourselves. If we are willing, we can envision all those lives, throughout history, who gave themselves unselfishly in order that the spirit of independence might live on. Can we feel the weight of those endless countless individual sacrifices, and have the courage to measure this against what we have done with the gift of their lives? Painfully conscious of all that was, and is, yet devoid of sentimentality, can we allow our hearts to fully accept this realization? Can we let our minds range tenderly backward over the innumerable lives and deaths spent for this, the last vestige of freedom?
We can pray that we may have the spiritual fortitude to bear knowing what has become of our freedom in our own nation. Because surely our only response to these facts must be to move heaven and earth to rekindle this spiritual fire of independence within ourselves. And then, to rededicate this flame, which can exist only within a willing human being, to the future of this country. For all our tears and regrets are sterile if we do not act to regain our lost freedom. We are united with the past we revere soley through the use we make of the rest of our existence here. Only by our personal willingness to feed that fire with the fuel of our own comfortable lives, will we ever again in all honesty be able to celebrate a living Independence Day.
“But when a long train of abuses and usupations, pursuing inevitably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies in Congress, July 4, 1776
Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
July 4 2000
