My blog entry from May 2008. How appropriate this seems today, as we face an ever, more turbulent world:

May 5, 2008

My friend the history teacher lent me the Texas Teachers Edition of the world history curriculum taught at his high school as a way to prepare me for my trip to Romania and Hungary. Forget that it’s 998 pages, weighs more than my car and makes my ADHD all goofy with so much information on a single page. The tome just sitting in my lap vibrates with the history of the entire world from the beginning of civilization at 4 billion years BC right up through Homeland Security.

I turned to Chapter 31, “Years of Crisis 1919-1939.” Under the heading “Age of Uncertainty” was a picture of Einstein along with a sidebar about Freud. The caption under Al was about how his genius was partly due to his tenacity to stick with a problem until he solved it. Freud was credited with the idea that much of human behavior is beyond reason.

I was after the answer to a question: what happened that so many people could propagate Nazi Germany and what would one do if those circumstances arose again in current culture? What if, like Hitler and the Nazis, through the use of legal pathways a party rose to power so set on destruction and domination that it might arrange its own terrorist attack to kick off martial law? What did the ordinary citizens of Germany do during these so-called “Years of Crisis” as they watched Hitler march the Nazis on a blazing trail of human destruction?

Hitler pushed Einstein off his pacifist stance. Though he was using his rock star status to promote world peace, Einstein the pacifist did not know a way to face Hitler. And who can blame him?

What Einstein did know was that Hitler could not have done it alone. It required a mass effort on the individual parts of the Third Reich. The hearts of so many men and women had lost their moral compass. Is this his lament “It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man?” How does one get to the root of that kind of degeneration?

In these turbulent days, it’s sometimes difficult to believe any one of us can make a difference. What kind of impact can one human have against the terrorists, errant governments, and systems of culture that strive to keep citizens dull witted and unaware of the lies and nefarious dealings of subversive fundamentalists? Because according to the history book, this kind of behavior has gone on since humans first emerged from the apes.

It seems to me it can only begin within each individual, committed to looking at one’s own life to see where we might be driven by fear to inadvertently fall into lockstep with the voice of authority outside ourselves. It is our duty and responsibility to find our inner moral compass, align to compassion and learn how to measure our actions against it. We must quit lying to ourselves and refuse to propagate the “US vs THEM” mentality.

I believe Conflict Revolution® is the formula to denature our evil spirits, one person at a time, starting with self. And who else but Einstein would find a way from beyond the grave to create a simple formula to align our actions to compassion? Who else could come up with a scientific definition of love? Talk about sticking with a problem until it’s solved!

The beginning of the 20th century was indeed a time of great change and uncertainty. Einstein had brought forth E=MC2, which threw everything science had known into a new paradigm. Freud was dealing out concepts of the unconscious that had never been considered, putting psychology into new realms of thinking. Europe was spiritually, emotionally, and economically depressed and uncertain. People were disillusioned and hopeless. Their answer was to follow the leader, who eventually led them into ruin. People believed the lies, overlooking their own instincts.

Let’s not blindly follow some leader in times of insecurity. Let’s use those times to really examine our motives, our decisions, and ourselves and see where we can become the change. Where are you lying to yourself?

We have so much more power than we can even imagine. Let’s use it to create peace within. According to my imagined Einstein, when we do that we help reprogram the gravitational waves that manifest the Earth.

What’s it going to hurt to self-scrutinize? Knowledge is power, after all. So what will it take to get you to stand up and become the change?