From God's Lips to Your Ears

"We couldn't just wait for help," Joyma said.

Laissez-faire capitalism isn't a strategy.  Leaving the fate of the people to "market forces" is about as rational as relying on natural selection as a long-term plan to combat disease, poverty and crime.

Toronto is facing a crisis due to a Mayor who is incapable of performing his duties yet unwilling to step down.  Rob Ford's legacy will be black mark on the city he unquestionably loves, in his own way.  Unable to get that "higher power" to do what is right, people are turning to the Province of Ontario as the next tier of power to step in and do something.

Somewhere out there, people are either praying to the highest power to look after the people (or their people, depending) or to hurry up with the whole Judgement Day thing so that the world can be cleansed and put to right.

In Canada, we have a polarized political war between the Political Right, which is providing increasingly blind support to leaders who quash dissent and hoard power and information (all in the name of individual freedoms) and the Political Left, casting stones at public institutions while demanding that those institutions do more to provide for society's have nots.

Where there is call for action, it comes in the form of reaction - standing against, tearing down, kicking the bums out.  What comes next is apparently someone else's problem (as Egypt can attest to). 

Allowing our structural problems to get so tangled and rotten that a cleansing brushfire is inevitable is unconscionable.  Burning the platform down ourselves is irrational.  Yet these are the two paths we are following.

We don't know where we're going.  We don't know who's leading.  We're lost.

It's been six days and we're all still waiting.  Waiting for someone to come.  But what if they don't?  We have to stop waiting.  We need to start figuring things out.

We need to figure out how we're going to survive here.  

Last week most of us were strangers, but we're all here now.  And God knows how long we're going to be here.  

But if we can't live together, we're gonna die alone.

When Gandhi said "be the change you wish to see in the world," that's what he meant.  The higher power we seek divine intervention from isn't out there, nor will it magically appear down the road.  It doesn't need to.  Each one of us is part of that greater whole, a system that can accomplish miracles when it pulls together - we just can't see it.

None of us is stronger than all of us.  We need only become conscious of this.

But you don't need to take it from me.