This site isn't about me, it is about us, and our
collective search for balance.
We are the center in the above image, where ideas and
organizations overlap.
This website has gone through a few revisions, but it has existed primarily as a blog for my writings. Now it is a launchpad for my first run for public office. My writings have explored a lot of areas. When I was a kid (17-20ish) I would write about the world condition in my bedroom. I stopped eventually, as I knew I was missing something. Nevertheless, it would be accurate to say that I have been constantly searching for the answer as to why the world is so screwed up. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was me!!!
I purchased the domain behappyandfree.com early in 2001 when the the lyrics of a song (Day After Day, The Show Must Go On, by Alan Parsons) struck me as the spiritual hope to which we all aspire. I developed the logo (smiley face on an American flag) after I wrote an essay "From Slavery to Utopia: A call for a Constitutional Convention" in 2003. The five stars represent five changes. You can see the roots of my thinking in that essay, but my views have evolved more since then. For a while writing was "thinking on paper," whereas today I am primarily struggling to explain myself. Things are not nearly as bad as people think, and much worse than they realize, simulataneously. It is all easily fixed if we have the courage to make some changes.
"Happy" is self-driven. Nobody can make somebody happy, they carry that power within themselves. I have always been a happy person. "Free," however, is a social condition. We make each other free by creating an environment of trust and peace and equality. We make ourselves slaves through mistrust, war and inequality. The opposite of "be happy and free" is to "be unhappy and enslaved." Yeech! Who wants to be that? Yet, that is historically the condition that man finds himself, even in America.
There are two types of chains. There are the chains that hold us, and the chains that we hold on to. Moses freed the slaves, and Jesus freed the slave-masters, but there are still plenty of both in the modern world. The intellectual chains are much harder to break. It is our own fear, anger and mistrust of others that is at the root of our collective slavery. We are regularly indoctrinated to be afraid, proud and greedy, rather than to be trusting, humble and sharing. A nation slips into fascism through the banality of fear. Since 9/11 we have become prisoners in our own country, but the problem of who will watch the watchers still remains. Fear easily defeats any system.
But even moving beyond those issues, it struck me that there was still something else, something more mechanical, at play. People regularly love one while hating another, even fascists and slave-owners. Fear is always a reaction to something. What is that something? Every society has the same struggles, so it has to be as common as having ten fingers. To be happy and free is to be both content and liberated from fear, but what is the root of fear?
It turns out that wisdom thousands of years old is still wisdom, and lies thousands of years old are still lies. All our problems are based on the fact that we have made numbers more important than people, when we should make people more important than numbers. Simple, eh? The thing we are most enslaved by is money, or more specifically, how we handle money (taxes, profits and interest.) We are slaves to the math, rather than its master.
For people to suffer because of numbers is stupid. I find the image below unacceptable. I do not want to live in a world where this kind of thing occurs. I do not want our children to grow up in a world where this occurs, either. It should not be explained away as "normal" or "God's will" or the marketplace. These children are experiencing the cause and effect of their elders' choices. Humans created this problem, humans can solve it.
When we create a society that favors the strong, then eventually everybody will be miserable. If we create a society that helps the weak, then everybody will be safe. (We are all weak at the beginning and end of our lives.)
The reporter who took this picture could only know those details if after taking the picture he stopped and acted like a human rather than like an employee. That is something we all need to do. We need to stop doing our "job" and choose to claim our humanity, instead.
There has to be a reason why war and poverty occur. Every effect has a cause. Money is man-made, therefore poverty must have a mathematical explanation. (The Interest Mechanism)
While natural disasters will perpetually provide a challenge, it is only money that makes men poor and helpless. We cannot serve two masters.
