Does it feel good to you?
Do you think you are being protected by the Patriot Act? Are you okay with what the tradeoffs are for “security” and “peace of mind”? How about banking reform? Are you okay with ordinary people having every nickel and dime in their possession questioned, and not the uber weathly?
The reason I ask this is because I am buying a house, and I am being treated like a terrorist. The bank will simply not accept that I am transferring our money, from our retirement account, into our checking account…and then transferring our money from one checking account to another because we had homes in two different states. These are not huge amounts of money, people, and it is money that we have been drawing from the account since 2003 when my husband retired, and from the sale of a house we have been in for 10 years…and sold for less than we paid for it, thanks to the current economic state of this world.
Oh, and how can it possibly be their business just why we decided to move from Texas to Wisconsin? Do we need permission and passports to move between the states now? Isn’t this a free country?
The answer to the last query is…apparently not, even though I am a 61 year old woman who has never once been late on a house payment. My husband made a very good living, no doubt about that, but we certainly do not belong in the multi-millionaire plus club. Yet we are being treated like terrorists, and deadbeats. It’s hard to tell which is the most offensive.
Even many, if not most, of the “deadbeats” that the banking system says it is working to weed out, didn’t likely set out to cheat. Many are like a young couple I know who bought a lovely home, with the mortgage company that made so much news not so long ago. They were told about the escalating interest rate, to be sure, but also had it hinted that the rate wouldn’t ever go up more than a percentage point at a time. The failing economy hit, his pay took a hit, and the first thing the young couple did was call that mortgage company and ask to be refinanced, on the same principal amount, at a little bit lower, set, rate. Then they begged for relief every month for another year. The answer was always no…so they ended up having to short sell, and ruin their credit. They then had the “deadbeat” label. How many others were given that label unfairly?
To whose advantage is all of this? Are we really more secure, or are we more secured?
Are we really less fearful because of our “security”? Do we look at someone with brown skin and dark hair and think, you must be safe because Homeland Security wouldn’t let you walk our streets if you weren’t, or are many of us more suspicious?
Are we creating what we don’t really desire, because we are sending so much energy to it?? Are our wars on drugs and on terrorists, and so many other things just creating more things to “war” against?
Maybe we just need to crawl into our little holes and forget the rest of the world? Well, yes, kind of! We really do, I believe, need to find our own quiet place. We really do need to turn off the outside world and listen to ourselves think…and if what we are thinking is chaotic and angry and sad, we need to realize that the person we have become is not who we really are.
“Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.”
If we have not taken the time, as individuals, to find what Peace really is, then how can we, as a species, ever know it?
We are now treating each other as terrorists and deadbeats. We are, more often than not, seeing the bad in each other, not the Divine. Why? Does it feel good to you?
Okay then, once we crawl into our holes, and come out whole (awful pun, I know!), what next? Well, the Be-Do-Have paradigm says that once we decide to Be something, the opportunity to Do that something will appear, so that we might Have that something…we sure are being given a lot of opportunities to Be Peace, aren’t we? But we are not Doing Peace, as a collective, so…we don’t Have Peace.
Perhaps you are the person who runs for your local Water Board, and eventually becomes the…the what? congressman? senator? President? the mother who shows her children how to Be the leaders of tomorrow? the person who is known for always listening to children? …or are we all going to be content to complain and observe and treat one another as terrorists and deadbeats, and allow the people WE elected to perpetuate this separateness in our name?
Is Peace beginning with you? I promise you, if it is, I won’t look at you and see a naive dreamer…I will see me, and I will see what I believe the world can Be.
(Therese Wilson is a published poet, and is the administrator of, and Spiritual Helper at, the global website at www.cwghelpingoutreach.com She may be contacted at: Therese@TheGlobalConversation.com.)
