Contributing Writer
Waking Times

I’ve had people ask me why I think a revolution or evolution of human consciousness would happen now. Why are we so special? People have been predicting “big things” throughout time and most of them don’t turn out to be true.

I think the answer to that has a lot of parts to it, but the main reasons are computers, the internet, cell phones (and other wireless devices) and precession.

What cell phones and the internet mean is that you have direct access to everyone else’s information, and everyone else has direct access to your information. There is no mediator, no middle man. The information does not have to be filtered before it gets to you. It does not have to be deemed “appropriate” by society or laws or norms or traditions. It is just out there for you to grab.

Now, this obviously means there’s a lot of stupid crap out there. There are a lot of hoaxes and a lot of disinformation and people just screwing around. There’s horribly graphic awful stuff that I probably can’t even imagine how bad it is (who could forget “Two Girls One Cup,” which I never had to forget because I never watched it thank god). But let’s be clear – people acting badly means people acted badly and we should figure out why they act that way. It does not mean we should censor or block the internet.

What the internet means is that a random inventor or poet or musician can directly communicate to all of us. He or she can put their ideas out there and if they are deemed worthy, we will tell others to look at them and see what this person has done, or see their talent. Sometimes really awesome things come out of this, like Justin Bieber.

I’m totally kidding.

What the internet also means is that we can now see the various police actions that are going on at Occupy. We can hear people’s stories that worked at Bank of America and were expressly told to deny people that needed special help with loans and got fired b/c they didn’t follow orders. We can read about the story in some little town where some company pumped a local river with toxic chemicals. We can listen to the stories of people like Jodi Fendton who was told her only treatment for stage III brain cancer was chemo or radiation. She found out about Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski who is treating cancer with non toxic antineoplastons and curing people and she went to him and she is cured. (Her story and other clips from the movie Cancer is Serious Business can be found here. Full movie can be found here) We can hear about all these disparate stories, and it’s only a matter of time before the evidence mounting against free market capitalism (and really the whole monetary system) will be too overwhelming to ignore. The only question is how long we will wait until we make a change. Will we see the impending disaster before it’s really cataclysmic, or will we be like the German people at the end of WWII who up until the moment they stepped into the concentrations camps the Allied troops forced them to tour (also known as denazification) had been denying they lived near slaughterhouses?

What the internet has showed us is that our social system IS NOT WORKING for the majority of the people on this planet. Two-fucking-thirds of the people in the world live on $2/day. Something is horribly, horrifyingly wrong. If two-thirds of your family was living on $2/day how would you feel?

Maybe though, it’s just too far removed from you. Maybe you feel like this really has nothing to do with your every day life. And maybe it’s doesn’t. Yet. But there are a lot of economists out there saying we are basically screwed. If you think about it, we are an oil obsessed world, are we not? Oil is in everything. The following is excerpted from the transcript of Zeitgeist: Moving Forward:

• “The world is now using 6 barrels of oil for every barrel it finds. Five years ago it was using 4 barrels of oil for every barrel it finds. A year from now it is going to be using 8 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil it finds…..And the governments are trying to stimulate consumerism to restore past prosperity in the hope that they can restore the past. They’re printing yet more money lacking any collateral at all. So, if the economy improves and recovers and the famous growth comes back, it will only be short-lived because within a short period of time, counted in months rather than years, it will hit the supply barrier again; there will be another price shock and a deeper recession. So I think we go into a series of vicious circles. You have the economic growth going up -price spike- everything shuts down. That’s where we are now. (This movie was released in January 2011) Then it starts to come up again but what we have now is this area where there’s no more ability to produce cheap energy. We’re at the peak- we’re on the down slope of oil production. No way you’re going to get any more out of the ground any faster which means that things shut down, the price of oil drops which it did in early 2009 but then as you have a “recovery” the price of oil starts to come back. It’s recently been hovering at about $80 a barrel (it’s $100 now) and what we see is that at even at $80 a barrel now, with the financial and economic collapse, people are having a hard time affording that. World oil production right now is about 86 million barrels a day. Over 10 years, you’re looking at roughly 14 million barrels a day having to be replaced. There’s nothing around which can come even within 1% of meeting that sort of demand.

So if you think the global crises doesn’t effect your life, just wait.

Our social system is trying to be a blanket, but we are receiving more and more knowledge each day that the blanket doesn’t cover every body. You can push and pull and force it, but it’s just not possible. You pull here, the Republicans feel taxed to death, you pull there and the Democrats feel there’s not enough to fund social programs, you tug there and there’s no money to hire people, you yank here and there’s not enough funds for scientific research. Inflation happens and people always want more and we can’t just keep making money. Because then when one day all of us may want to get our money out, look at that! There won’t be any! (Great explanation of how money is debt here). Can’t you see it isn’t working? How many times have you uttered the phrase “the system is broken?” How many times have you wondered if we could fix it?

Maybe you say, “Well everything was going just fine up until ______. We need to get back to that time! The good ole days!” Fill in whatever event you like here. Most might say globalization. But the fact is we are now a globalized, connected society and we need to start living like one. We must find a new blanket to cover us all.