What’s all the hubbub, Bub? Elon, Twitter, chaos, mayhem…
Who cares?
And why do they care so much?
Yeah, I understand the free speech issue. Of course free speech. A given. And also not hurting, actually hurting others. Of course. But let’s look a little deeper at the why of Twitter and other media platforms in general.
I haven’t ever used Twitter consistently, and I haven’t used it at all in a long time. I never really “got” it. But others did. Or thought they did.
Really, social media has been a sham, a facade and storefront operation—cover for the actual malevolent players. The mafia looks small-time in the face of these evil giants. And they weren’t us.
Like all social media/media, while the majority of us thought we were connecting with friends and content we liked, what’s really been going on all the while is a battle for the power to influence and ultimately determine narratives.
Social narratives.
Corporate narratives: Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Everything.
World view narratives.
Narratives of dependence and lies.
Centralization and power.
Appropriation.
Don’t kid yourself that galldurn, these huge corporate players are just honest folks trying to, shucks, make a buck and get ahead like the rest of us nice people by offering up some products they believe in like in the olden days. Pshaw. That time is over (but by all means—literally—let’s bring it back!). The collusion and concerted agenda is now unmistakeable.* I use the word evil because anyone trying to dismember the Earth and dismember you—from your own body, your own wisdom, your own community and your mother, Earth, is, in my opinion, categorically evil.
You and I, my friends, have been unsuspecting Patsys in a large-scale effort to create world-wide dependence.
Yep.
Maybe that’s not news. But look how it’s running the world. Look how sick we are. Look how the planet is hurting.
There is now (and has been for some time) a concerted effort in which Big Everything is spending millions and billions of dollars to get your attention and to make you believe you need them and what they want to sell you. The aim is to create a cohesive, automated, domino-like system of wealth generation for a few people who run everything. And to do that, they need a narrative. They need a pack of lies and diversions, they need a culture of divisiveness.
Why?
Because…
If we were really connected to the ourselves, to our local communities, to the Earth and to the truth, we’d know we wouldn’t need their snake oil bullshit rubbish “products”.
There are big narrative lies, and little ones. What they share in common is that they all need you to believe them and to forget who you are.
REMEDY: RE-MEMBER.
If we were connected to the truth of who we are, communing with our Mother Earth who meets all your needs in not only an optimal and sustainable but regenerative way…among others, we’d all know the following (what every indigenous culture originally understood):
Given a healthy a lifestyle including real food, fresh air, rest and exercise, the body is a naturally thriving, self-healing miracle. A miracle that is inherently not patentable, not “own”-able by some rich individual or corporation.
The Earth provides all of the medicines Big Pharma takes credit for and does it better. Much, much better, sans the long list of side effects for which you are told you need need need yet another drug they patented and can sell sell sell you.
Same for food. We don’t need the Military Industrial Food Complex that’s attempting to patent and thus “own” (guffaw!) what the Earth provides freely and naturally and render us dependent on its products (does it ever occur to us that just because a paper or even a law says it’s so that it actually isn’t?).
We can grow much of our own food and the rest we can supplement with LOCAL options: CSA boxes, farmer’s markets, food exchanges.
The body is not a machine, nor is the Earth. We are living organisms who are intimately and irreducibly connected to and part of each other. 10% of our cells are human DNA, the rest are a diverse microbiome that depends on interaction with our Earth, not with corporate products. We breathe, transmute, heal, thrive based on our degree of connection with ourselves, our communities (human and non-human) and our Earth. This is our home and we not only reside here, we are part of her. When we separate ourselves from the Earth we are sick. And boy howdy folks, are we sick.
Real food does not come in a box, isn’t irradiated, chemically treated, “refined”, “fortified”, poisoned…it grows out of the earth. We can eat it off the vine, off the plant. Given healthy soil and seeds, it nourishes us, it doesn’t make us sick with diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer or anything else.
We breathe, we exist, because of trees. They are sacred and without trees, we don’t survive. Who in their right mind would think clear-cutting the Amazon or anywhere else is a good idea? No one. Why have we allowed this? How has it escaped our attention? Lies. Diversion. We have collectively gone out of our minds.
We all, as children of the Earth, have a right to fresh air, to grow our food, to clean water that the Earth provides us. No one has a right to degrade, remove, tax, charge or pollute any of that in any way, no matter how much money they have.
But, you may ask, isn’t what I’m doing here just another narrative? No. This is the undoing of narratives, of lies, of deceptions. This is stripping away the bullshit and remembering what’s true, what’s real.
I worked as a commercial actor for over a decade. Commercials, most advertising, is a corporate grab for your attention, your perception, your beliefs and ultimately, your money. Every product hawking themselves to you is spending lots and lots of cash to twist your thinking: you need this, you are incomplete without this, you can’t get this effect anywhere else.
Lies.
As an example, I remember doing commercials for V-8 Splash. This is a drink that’s marketed as healthy, while it isn’t. I would never have touched that product in real life, but here I was, my face made-up and arranged into a winning smile, part of the machine of disconnection and deception. I didn’t really realize it then like I do now. But oh girl do I get it now. Every product seeks to offer an experience. From the packaging to the font on the label, to the people in the ads who taunt, “Don’t you want to look like me? Don’t you want to feel like I feel? Don’t you want this life?” There’s zero truth in it. The people are actors who likely have never used the product and are literally paid to look good, while the packaging and messaging is all aimed at selling you a lie. Think about it. V-8 is a packaged (i.e., not fresh), pesticided, heat treated tomato-based drink with a bunch of added shit that degrades your health. How about eat a tomato? How about juice a tomato? Can you imagine the difference to your body??
Mother Earth does it better. But only always.
But they have to sell you all the lies, the narratives, the stories: You need this, if you buy this this means this about you, about your life. Here’s what we’re promising you that we won’t deliver on. Can’t deliver on because it’s all a lie. As soon as your money is on the counter they’re snickering all the way to the bank thinking they bought into it! They actually bought it!
I haven’t owned a TV in decades and would never again. But at the gym I sometimes see ads—they’re always ridiculous. I saw one the other day for a heart valve. A heart valve! Are you kidding me? “Ask your doctor about…” Give me a break! There are so many things wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start. Look at those actors pretending to be happy healthy golfers, in shape, sharp, having the time of their lives. Not people needing new heart valves, that’s for sure. But there they are, chipper and attractive, just chatting about heart valve replacements. And do you think the general public understands enough from their not-even-a-little-bit of medical training about which heart valve replacement to choose if they need one? Are they comparing products in an educated way? OMG. Who isn’t seeing this laughable ridiculosity?? And a little secret they don’t want you to know: you generally won’t ever even need a heart valve replacement if you take care of your heart by eating well, by eating real actual food—not food-like products. By exercising, by sleeping. By having your bare feet on the ground. Simple as that. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.
My point is that media, especially social media, is merely a bullhorn for corporate lies, pretending to be something else. You don’t need this stuff.
They can’t have you remembering that though.
So that’s where I come in, to remind you. To remind you that you are a sovereign, self-healing expression of Life. That you are a miracle in every way. That real food is something very different and much simpler than you’re being told and sold—it’s provided naturally by the Earth—plants actually evolved with humans. We exist because of plants, not because some pie-in-the-face doof poisoned it, killed it, added a bunch of trash to it and put it in a box on the grocery store shelf. Food doesn’t come from the grocery store. It comes from the ground. Plants respond to our thoughts, our feelings, our intentions. It’s all there, in the science, for over a hundred years.** Corporate farming erases. It erases the sovereignty of our Selves, of our bodies, of the plant, other species, of the Earth.
Corporate interests in general erase us, and in our place, constructs cardboard consumers—non-diverse consumers with non-diverse desires. I’m here to remind us all that biodiversity, that diversity is a good thing. Is a healthy thing. Whether we’re talking about life on the planet, farming, gender, ethnicity…whatever. I’m here to remind us that there’s a teeming, thriving world we live in, starting with the ground under our feet. That we are interdependent and need each other. That there are people living next door and people who bring their love in the form of fruits and vegetables to farmers markets every week. People who make art and clothing and sell it in little stores down the street. People right near you who are literally dying for connection.
I’m here to remind us that we and other species have a right to our sustenance from the Earth and to protect our Home. That what sustains us are not “resources” for owning, patenting, allocation and sale, but the regenerative, living, breathing Earth to whom we belong.
That, my friends, is what’s True.
RE-MEMER. Self-connection. Community. LOCAL action. Decentralize. Grass roots. Nature. True Nature.
Choose community and communion over convenience. Convenience is just a weapon they lure you away from the truth with.
Take off your shoes and stand on the Earth. Chat with a neighbor. Grow a thing. Go to a farmer’s market. Donate to and purchase at a thrift store. Turn away from the narrative machines, social media or otherwise, that sell you need need need and empty promises to fulfill those empty needs. That try to make you think you’re alone. You’re not alone. You don’t need them.
They are the ones who need you. Without your attention, without your perception and your dollars, Poof! They cease to exist.
Good riddance.
True needs are love, connection, shelter, real food, real gratitude, moving our bodies, communion with ourselves, our communities and with Mother Earth.
Wake up, look around. Notice the truth, notice the real, what’s here, now. See the trees and plants and the earth that grounds, nourishes and sustains us. Look down at your hands—miracles. See the faces around you, the held-out hands. Nurture actual networks. If you feel to use Twitter or whatever else, sure, use it for good. Use it as a grass-roots collective tool. Use it to inspire, to awaken. Use it to bring it, in its current iteration, down. Create something new. This current collusive, corporate, media BS is nothing but a house of cards. It’s time for one of those good strong winds of change, and all it takes is a turn of the head. I have a dream that the gale force winds, the hurricane of collective heads turning, will simply blow it all away.
*If this is news to you, I suggest starting with Dr. Vandana Shiva’s brilliant and fascinating book, Oneness vs. the 1%, to get a little bit of background.
** If you haven’t read The Secret Life of Plants by Thompkins and Bird, it will blow your plant-powered (the only kind there is) mind open.