“Ide-prison-ology”

Rearranging priorities.

It’s time to add a new word to our contemporary vernacular. The addition is a simple adjustment to the word “ideology,” that reflects where our culture has arrived—in a prison of opposition with no legal appeal for release. 

We already have similar words  that approximate this new word, such as “Mexican standoff” or “logjam.” But the essence of this new word is only glancingly similar to those words. What the new word captures, sums up our current state of irreconcilability: a state of cultural and political “my way or the highway” stagnation where nothing gets done. 

The principle of compromise appears to be lost in the ash heap of time, and this state of mind is not limited to any one country. It is a global phenomenon that results in a preoccupation with the insignificant at the expense of the significant.

There is so much confusion occurring at the same time it is nearly impossible to arrange priorities. Even if we could, wait ten minutes and the entire deck gets reshuffled and we simply cease to think of what’s important and what’s not. Instead, we have fallen back into a time when legalism was abhorred by moral giants such as Jesus and The Buddha, both of whom fought to rectify the problem by pointing out what the laws of the time needed as a substratum—the spirit of the law. 

That focus has been lost as well, thus the need to establish this new word by recognizing what ought to be obvious but is not: We have fallen prey to dogmatic, inflexible positions of opposition where nobody but the rich and powerful—who rig the system to their advantage, perhaps by design, to keep us all confused and distracted by what is happening behind the scene with what is happening in front of the scene—too much of insignificance to enable us to notice matters of ultimate importance.

The question is, why is this happening? That’s a hydra-headed challenge but maybe it is simply a matter of too much comfort by the few at the cost of the many. Money and power are two factors not easily shared. Possessiveness is a stickler and the more a person has the more they seem to want. Maybe what we all need to do (and I’d suggest we begin from the top and work our way down) is go and live in places that aren’t so comfortable, where concern for your life is the common coin. There is nothing quite so transforming as your own experience of suffering. When you are starving, a single slice of bread becomes a feast and the ideology of the whole loaf or none at all descends into la-la-land, right where it belongs.

We have become imprisoned into camps of opposing ideas and values with no escape. It is long past time for us to realize such behavior is shooting everyone in the foot. Life always seems to follow the path we noticed in the Marines: Bad stuff flows downstream, never upstream. The tide needs to turn, and soon.