At
the Crossroads
“I
stood at a crossroads and fate came to meet me.”
Liz Green
If I’ve
heard “we are at a crossroads” once in the last year, I’ve heard it a thousand
times! Yes! We’re at a crossroads. Everyone agrees. Now which way shall we go?
The choice should be made consciously and with commitment. If it is not, then
fate will, indeed, decide for us and we will have to live with the consequences
of choices we did not make.
The
good news is, we’ve been at crossroads before, so we know the territory. The civil
war comes to mind. Often, we make what my father called “half-ass” decisions.
We make choices that seem, at face value, to respond to the problem at hand,
and then consciously and deviously, create workarounds. Example being that
after the civil war ended slavery, the south passed Jim Crowe laws to limit the
freedoms of African American people. To put it in Jungian terms, our persona
makes decisions that give the illusion of caring, and our shadow undermines
them. So, at our current crossroads, how can we have the solution without the
workaround? Is it possible?
One difference is that the
choices we make at this crossroad will affect us all equally—there will be no
winners and losers if we do not make smart choices regarding climate change and
infrastructure. If a bridge collapses, the cars on it, whether antiquated Plymouths
or bright and shiny BMWs, will experience the same fate. The cities along our
coastlines will be inundated, and the property of both rich and poor will be
destroyed. When it comes to infrastructure or climate change, we are all in the
same soup. The choices we make will demonstrate to what degree our moral
compass has been lost in quicksand.
We do
stand at a crossroads. And the choices before us have nothing to do with Republicans
and Democrats. They have everything to do with America’s capacity for
compassion, our level of greed, and whether we are able, collectively, to consider
what best serves the greatest good. In other words, less “ya-ya” about who’s to
blame for what, and more, “what can we do” to expedite change as quickly as
possible. If we fail to make good decisions here, fate will come to meet us.
And we may not like her choices.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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