Author: Neale Donald Walsch

Is there any spiritual reason for, or value in, a society’s working to reduce the gap between its highest, middle, and lowest income brackets? Can anything be said in favor of a culture that seeks to create mechanisms that militate against an “every man for himself/to the winner go the spoils” mentality?

If a particular society observes this gap to be grower larger, larger, and ever larger, is there anything to be said for doing what it takes to put a stop to that widening, and to even shrinking that chasm, so that a “good life” may be experienced by all?

What can be said of a society that creates a bigger and bigger gulf between the rich and the poor — and puts into place mechanisms and laws, choices and decisions that reinforce the notion that everything about this is alright; indeed, that this is the way it should be?

I ask these questions because the other day the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, released statistics showing that the average earning of a CEO in a major company in 2012 was $14.1 million. That’s per year, not per lifetime. The figure represents a 12.7% increase for the boss over the previous year.

Average worker salaries, meanwhile, have not increased by 12.7%. Nor even by 6%. Nor even by 2%. Nor, in fact, at all.

For most workers in the U.S., wages in 2012 remained at their 2011 levels — and that’s in the best-case scenarios. Many saw their wages actually fall, the EPI study showed.

And the salaries of their bosses are not the only compensation awarded the folks in the front office. Most also received stock options and other awards, adding more than 50% of their actual cash paycheck to their total income.

All this is happening because corporate earnings continue to soar. But the workers who make those earnings possible are not reaping their proportionate share of the benefit. The website Business Insider.com recently carried the headline:

Corporate Profits Just Hit An All-Time High,
Wages Just Hit An All-Time Low

(Read more here)

The good news is that at least a larger number of Americans are working today — however disproportionate their wage — than at any time in the past thirty years.

Oh, I’m sorry. I got that wrong. It’s exactly the opposite. The Business Insider website says it’s precisely the other way around.

It seems that American companies are hiring fewer American workers than ever before in history.

Than ever in history.

And while workers are so hungry for jobs that they’ll take sub-par wages just to keep bread on their family’s table, corporate heads are making 20 times what their employees earn, dollar for dollar. That’s right. For every dollar the average worker earns, the average CEO earns twenty.

Oh, gosh…I’m so sorry. I got that wrong, too.  That was in 1965. Gee, I was looking at the wrong page on my stat sheet. Today, in 2012, the CEO of a major company makes, on average, something along the order of 273 times more than the average worker.

What is perhaps most remarkable of all: It is not only the very rich who seem to be okay with all this. Millions of people in the middle, and even lower, income class in the U.S. also apparently think this is perfectly alright. Many staunch Conservatives, most Tea Party members, a huge percentage of Republicans, and a handful of red dog Democrats will tell  you: This is the American way. Theirs is the Land of Opportunity, and in the Land of Opportunity everyone has the same chance to “get theirs.”

But is it true? Does everyone in America have an equal opportunity? Is it true of black Americans? Female Americans? Gay Americans? I just ask. Does everyone in America have an equal opportunity to be the CEO of a major company, and earn nearly 273% more than the workers they boss?

More important, is this really the way that an enlightened society sets up its laws and economic mechanisms, and treats its members?

I am curious. Really curious. What do you think? Is there any spiritual reason for, or value in, a society’s working to reduce the gap between its highest, middle, and lowest income brackets? Can anything be said in favor of a culture that seeks to promote ideas and ideals, and maybe even create mechanisms, that militate against an “every man for himself/to the winner go the spoils” mentality?
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And so, another government and another president are removed from office in a revolution, this time (again) in Egypt. (I wonder if anyone in the U.S. sees the irony of this news first making headlines during the time that Americans were once again celebrating their own revolution — the Fourth of July weekend.)

In the book The Storm Before the Calm, published two years ago, I wrote of the human experience of revolution — and called for a new kind of revolution. Here is some of what I had to say there:

A search on Wikipedia under the word “revolutions” brings up a virtually endless catalogue of uprisings, beginning with the popular revolt in the Sumarian city of Lagash that deposed King Lugalanda and put the reformer Urukagina on the throne in 2380 B.C., ending with the revolutions that overturned governments in the Arab world in 2011.

Let me just give you part of this list, just to take a quick look at how people have been responding on this planet to how they’ve been governed…

We have seen literally hundreds of uprisings and revolutions across our history, including the Fall of the Roman Empire, the First of the Wars of Scottish Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the revolution in India, the Boer Revolt, revolutions all over South America, the European Revolutions of 1848, the revolutions in modern Hungary, in Yugoslavia, in Haiti, the dissolution of the Soviet Union by 1991…

…take my word for it. This is a tiny portion of a list that goes on and on and on…and ON. We’ve been “revolting” since the beginning of our gathering together in clans and tribes and then, nations.

What is this all about, do you think?

What do you imagine has been causing all of this? Why do you think it never ends? And what do you think could make it end?

I can tell you what it’s about. And I can also tell you how to make it end, with one Final Revolution. Indeed, that’s what the Storm Before The Calm is all about. What has bee causing all of this for so long is that…

Human beings have been clear for a very long time that the way those in power have constructed life on this planet is not the way it was intended to be lived.

And so, since forever—for centuries and millennia—people on every spot on the globe have been agitating. They’ve wanted a new way of life—a new way of being human; a way that they know it was intended for them to be human.

Their agitations have continued right up to this present day. Even as this is being written, people in many places on earth are still saying No! to the way things are, and are demanding change. They’re prepared to die for it. They have been dying for it. They’re dying right now, as you’re reading this.

But we are ready now, as a global community, for that dying to stop. We’ve had it. We’re done. There’s got to be a better way. We wonder, why don’t those who seek to govern us get it? But they don’t, so now we’re seeing what I have been calling here the Overhaul of Humanity. This is a revolution that will not ask people to die, but will simply ask people to inquire. It will invite people to make inquiries of themselves and others that could change everything in such a huge way that, finally, future violent revolutions may never again be necessary.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is a cause for celebration around the world, as it strikes a tone that legally legitimizes love between all people regardless of gender, and sets a standard that other nations are now going to be hard-pressed to ignore.

The day will come when it will seem, in retrospect, amazing that it took so long for such a thing to happen in our world — yet this is not a time for criticizing the past, but for celebrating the present.

From this day forward, all Federal Government benefits available to opposite-gender married couple in the U.S. will now be offered to same-sex marrieds as well. President Barack Obama lost no time in ordering his country’s Dept. of Defense and other branches of his government to rewrite regulations to immediately reflect the court’s decision.

The Supreme Court’s additional action in striking down as “unconstitutional” a ballot initiative passed by California voters prohibiting same sex marriage also blazed across the dark sky of intolerance as a comet of hope to all those who believe that the expression of true love between any individuals, announced and demonstrated through the entering into a commitment of lifelong partnership, should never be prohibited, but encouraged in a global society ravaged by a sociology of increasing separation.

With the astonishing increase in the divorce rate among heterosexual couples over the past 20 years, the ironic joke among gays has been that all they want to do is to get into what straights want to get out of.

The High Court’s decision did nothing to change the fact that gay marriage is still illegal in 34 U.S. states, but it makes it very clear that the gender composition of a marriage should have nothing to do with the flow of important Federal benefits to spouses — and, as noted above, it sends a huge message to all states, and to people throughout the world who are watching and listening, that legal prohibitions against gay couples are simply not appropriate.

Conversations with God, of course, made it clear in its messages nearly 20 years ago that “there is no manner in which the expression of a love which is pure and true is inappropriate,” directly addressing the loud announcements that had been made by some religious leaders over the years that homosexual expressions of love are against the Will of God and will be punished by everlasting damnation.

(Such denunciations came from the same kinds of people who swore with equal vehemence not very many years earlier that inter-racial marriage also violated the Will of God…and that left-handedness was a sign of the Devil.)

The human community is at long last evolving out of its primitive notions of an intolerant, judgmental, condemning and violently punishing Deity. What is perhaps most notable about the U.S. Supreme Court’s two decisions regarding gays is that they came from a largely conservative panel of judges. This makes it difficult and more than a little inconvenient for hard-core conservative Republican politicians in America to find cover for their previously highly visible and loudly intolerant views regarding gay marriage and equal rights for gays.

For those who believe in, and still see, America as the “land of the free,” it seems that it is about time this major social adjustment was made. Love is, after all, the basis of all healing and the foundation of all caring societies. It seems remarkable that anyone could have ever argued against it. Especially those who claimed to be articulating the Will of God.

For all those who love Love, this is a happy day.

Look, the problem is simple. The honey bees are dying. Look, the cause is obvious. It’s us. Honey bees had no problem living and multiplying until we came along. Even then they had little problem until we decided to fill the air and cover every flower and foliage in sight with pesticides and poisons.

The honey bees are dying all over the world, and we are killing them. And if we don’t turn this thing around, that is going to kill us. Many of us. Because, you see, humans depend on the Earth’s ecosystem to survive (whether you believe it or not) — and the Earth’s ecosystem is going to be irrevocably damaged if the bee population drops at the rate that it is now dropping.

Why? Because honey bees are responsible for nearly 80 per cent of all pollination across our planet. So what? So this: More than two-thirds of the world’s top 100 food crops are pollinated by bees. So what? So this: those bee-pollinated crops supply almost 90 per cent of humanity’s nutrition.

Okay, here come the naysayers. Nonsense! You eco-panickers are all the same! Everyone knows that grains are primarily pollinated by the wind.

Yes, that is true. Everyone knows that. But vegetables, fruits, and nuts — arguably the healthiest, best food — are pollinated by bees, writer Rex Weyler tells us at the website Nation of Change. You do not want to miss the article, which contains a great deal of important information.

“The bee collapse is a challenge to human enterprise on the scale of global warming, ocean acidification and nuclear war,” Weyler says. And he’s right. There is a way to stop the collapse, he says. There is something that humanity can still do. But we all have to give a darn. We all have to care.

I hope you care enough to read the article at Nation of Change. You’ll find it here.

It is time for the world to wake up. Most of the people on our planet think that humans have nothing to do with conditions on the Earth.

The inability to see, recognize, or acknowledge our own role in the producing of our own experience is the first mark of a still-maturing species — and the first obstacle in humanity’s path as the few who do see the connection try and try in vain to change the course of our species’ future.

Some time ago a humorist remarked that if we are not careful, we will wind up exactly where we are headed. And it was the late cartoonist Walt Kelly’s wildly popular character Pogo who gave us this observation: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Sadly, this is true. Human beings in largest number refuse — abjectly refuse — to see the link between their beliefs, their behaviors, and the worst of their collective outcomes.

The messages in the Conversations with God books have made it very clear that many of the unhappy exterior circumstances and conditions of daily life have been collaboratively created over a period of many years by the entire community of beings populating this planet — yet those beings refuse to take responsibility for their collective choices, actions, and decisions, preferring to believe that they have nothing whatsoever to do with any prevailing condition or circumstance.

The easy availability of guns with rapid-fire high capacity magazines has nothing to do with the increasing number of mass killings in the U.S.

The conducting of underground nuclear tests has nothing to do with the increase in earthquakes and tidal waves across the planet.

The degradation of our atmosphere by human-made pollutants has nothing to do with global warming. In fact, there actually isn’t any “global warming.” That’s all the raving of wild-eyed environmentalists. (And the World Bank, which just issued an urgent call to the entire planet to take immediate and decisive action on climate change or face multi-millions in poverty very soon.)

Our actions, let it be known, have nothing to do with our experience. Do not make us ‘wrong’ about anything. Bad stuff is happening, yes, but human beings and their choices have nothing to do with it.

Yet Conversations with God points out that unless and until we accept responsibility for the occurrences and events of our lives, we render ourselves utterly incapable of doing anything about them.

Case in point: a study released this week reveals that the increasing incidence of children born with autism is directly connected to the increasing pollution of our air.

A report from Bloomberg News says that researchers from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that pregnant women exposed to high levels of diesel particulates or mercury were twice as likely to have an autistic child compared with peers in low-pollution areas.

In other words, chemicals in air pollution, inhaled by pregnant women, produce abnormal babies. And those chemicals are being put into the air by human beings.

Put more directly, we are specifically responsible for producing many of our own abnormally challenged offspring.

“No, we’re not! No, we’re not!” the scoffers will now no doubt come out to loudly declare. “We have nothing to do with it! The study is wrong! It’s those pointy-headed Eastern liberal scientists, again. Besides, we have to put those chemicals — which don’t hurt anyone — into the air! We’re talking about jobs here. We need to live the way we’ve been living! And only one of every fifty children is born with autism anyway. What’s the problem?”

In our next post: The problem with bees. Oh, yes, we also have nothing to do with that. And further…there really is no problem. Those liberals are making that one up, too.