What the heck are we toasting?

At 12:19 two lives in my community changed forever.  One 17-year-old dead and another 17-year-old under house arrest, charged with intoxicated homicide while driving.

Intoxicated.  Tested an hour after the crash and still three times the legal limit.  Allegedly, her step-father gave her the alcohol.  Allegedly, the young man’s grandmother, with whom he lived, was at a club, and his parents lost in their own addictions.

Men in many countries not considered good businessmen if they don’t go out and drink in the evening.

The apartment across from me installed their wine refrigerator weeks before they moved their furniture in when I lived in Denmark.

The examples of how alcohol has become a pillar of many cultures are boundless.

How can this happen?  What are we doing to ourselves?

All around the “civilized” world, it is considered not just acceptable, but encouraged; and if one does not drink, you are suspect.

CWG says that nothing is wrong, only not working, and it is up to us to decide if it is working for us.  God says that one day we will simply choose to not abuse our bodies with drink, drugs and food that doesn’t belong in our bodies.  God also says that if we destroy the world as we know it, the world will still go on…just in a different way.

The 17-year-olds’ worlds have been destroyed and will now have to go on in a very different way.  Life after life is being destroyed because of alcohol, but why?

How many beer/alcohol commercials are there during sporting events?  Do watchers not see that this is in direct conflict with the healthy bodies they expect the athletes to maintain?  Why are they surprised and outraged when an athlete gets into a fight in a bar and shoots someone?  Why are they surprised when they take performance-enhancing drugs?  Are they really worse than the legal drug of alcohol?  As CWG says, helping someone who is on their deathbed die with dignity and releasing them from pain is illegal…but killing yourself (and possibly taking others with you) slowly, because it is legal, is perfectly acceptable.  Huh?

I believe CWG is correct, once again, in saying it is because we do not know who we are, or are not taught it is okay to be who we really are.  I believe it is because we are afraid of our greatness.  If we didn’t medicate and actually faced the world as it is, what might change?  Do you think that we would like what we see?  Do you think that we might choose not to destroy our bodies, and our minds, and possibly our world?

If we took back our greatness…if we saw ourselves as individuations of the Divine…do you think we might see that we have become part of a collective Stockholm Syndrome?  Will we see we have fallen in love with the very thing that enslaves us?

What do you think, beyond words, might be done to change this, to influence the collective, by us as individuals?  I will throw out the first ideas…

Change the channel.

Or don’t drink…it is a choice, not an addiction, for the biggest majority of us.

Or write your television station requesting such ads be removed…it worked to remove tobacco ads from TV in the United States.

There are so many things I can think of that could begin to change this way of being in this world…tell me what ideas you can think of…

Tell me what you are already doing and how you are already demonstrating your greatness!  Maybe others will follow if they know they are not alone.

(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.)