IT’S HAPPENED AGAIN: REVOLUTION
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.
