Were it not for the very real and serious consequences wrought by a political system that values victory over compassion, politics in the Untied States as it is currently constituted would amount to not much more than bad theater. What I find much more interesting is how the corporate media in America spins, misinforms, and propagandizes the concerns of the people in order to create a false sense of hopelessness, helplessness and artificial consensus; what Noam Chomsky calls manufacturing consent. 

Just today (10.22.08) an Associated Press poll asserted that the Presidential election is too close to call; this makes no sense to me. This is the same John McCain who roughly 90% of the time voted in agreement with the historically unpopular President Bush, who is currently riding his prop pony and shrinking approval ratings into a dust bowl-like sunset, whistling past an international war crimes tribunal. Logically John McCain and his political agenda should be similarly unpopular.

To my mind there is likely an ongoing attempt by the super rich base of the Republican party to once again subvert the will of the people and to steal yet another Presidential election.

Here is how I think it may be transpiring:

The bought-and-paid-for, subservient corporate media is softening the ground by persistently reporting that the election is a back-and-forth virtual draw; meanwhile likely Democratic voters in swing states are being surreptitiously prohibited from voting using similar if not identical voter caging methods that were so effective in the Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 elections.

Should John McCain be announced the winner, very possibly after court intervention, the corporate media will once again claim that the race had been close all along, thus providing the super-rich, Republican, Christian fundamentalists plausible deniability and the keys to what is left of the kingdom. This corruption of democracy and free will has worked out quite well for those gluttonous, fear-mongering, narrow-minded people benefited by the status quo but not quite so well for the rest of us

However, (and if you have visited this website even once you had to know there would be a however), all hope is not lost.

Our government is not broken, the method of selecting who governs is broken and the fix is simple in theory and inexpensive in practice; campaign finance reform is a must. Publicly funded elections would to a great extent take the super-rich and corporations out of the picture and make the candidates more responsible to the people. Give free radio and TV time to all candidates (not just the Democrats and Republicans), and shorten the election cycle to six months. If we can’t be convinced to vote for any candidate in that time there should be a “none of the above” option like the ones used in Nevada and some European countries. Finally, for the purposes of increasing voter turnout, make Election Day a national holiday.

I believe these five simple changes would shift the balance of power away from the few and redistribute it to the many, making our elected officials more accountable to the people they are hired to represent.

One last thing – vote on November 4^th – if for no other reason than to honor those who have given and continue to give their lives for the privilege.

Science, specifically quantum mechanics, has pretty well illustrated that at the subatomic level - protons, neutrons and electrons - that there is no difference between you and me and any other matter that exists in the universe - rocks, trees, birds, bees. There’s no difference.

Technology, through the internet and cellular technologies - you don’t even need a computer any more. Ideas can be everywhere at the same time. The same idea can be everywhere at the same time. It is very possible to have a common, shared awareness.

Religion has consistently come from one of two camps. There is an Eastern, organic universe where God is everything. There’s a Western, mechanical universe where God made everything and God is everywhere. However you choose to approach religion, they all say pretty much the same thing - God is everywhere, or God is everything. Everywhere includes you and me. There are seemingly apparent physical differences. That is easily explained to me when I consider the union of opposites, which suggests that nothing exists in the absence of its total opposite. Without a front, there can be no back. Without an up there can be no down. You are a different assemblage of protons, neutrons and electrons, but we’re all the same energy.

When those people who have put their faith in science and religion and technology come to the realization that their particular filters suggest that everything is everything, we’re all one, that we are all an infinity-plus number of facets expressing the same essence - that shift will lead people to treat others with compassion and empathy and patience and tolerance. And I believe that that is inevitable.

When I’ve told this story in the past, there are people who get it right off the bat. And then there are people who look around the world and see the horror and the degradation and the slavery and the genocide, and they wonder that if we are coming to a head where we are beginning to recognize that we’re all one, then why is this going on? That’s answered when you look at nature.

Look at animals. Animals who are wounded, injured, dying - they are the most dangerous. I see another one of the dominant dogmas of our time - the scarcity model - that suggests there’s not enough of everything to go around so I need my share of what there is - and I probably need to take a little bit of yours too because there’s not enough to go around - that scarcity model is dying. And the fear and desperation that exists in the world right now is the dying gasp of the scarcity model.

When enough people come to the realization that anything I do to you ultimately affects me, actually affects my life, my world - there is no separation. You and I are the same. We just have forgotten.

One of my heroes is Buckminster Fuller, and in future podcasts there will be a lot of his information presented. He recognized in the early ‘70s that the technology existed for every man, woman and child to have fresh drinking water, to have comfortable, safe, affordable housing. For 35 years, the technology has existed for every man, woman and child to have peace and security. You can’t think about things like peace if you’re hungry. Basic needs need to be met first. You need to have housing, you need to have fresh water, you need to have food before you can ever think about higher functioning things like art or even peace.

For the first 25 years of my life I believed what was being fed to me through the different avenues of media. I was 18 years old, and Reagan was president, and I was sure that he was going to blow up Russia and then assured mutual destruction. And so for the first 25 years I lived with that, but I realized that that wasn’t working for me. So I started to seek out alternative information - more hopeful, optimistic information. And some of the people who have influenced my way of thinking for the past 20 years have been Buckminster Fuller and Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and Bob Marley and Terence McKenna - John Lennon and Michael Benner and the Dalai Lama and countless others.

Well this initial episode was meant as basically an overview, a thumbnail sketch - something to whet your appetite. What I hope to do is provide people with tools that they can use to foment change - healthy change in their lives. These are not new tools. These tools have been around forever. This is ancient wisdom. I feel confident enough to put my name on a couple of these exercises, but in general, this stuff has been around forever. Come at people from a bunch of different angles. Right now this information is coming from a bunch of different places. What the Bleep Do We Know? is a movie that talks about what we’re going to be talking about. The Secret is another movie that talks about what we are going to be talking about. Some of the criticisms of those movies are that they are basically just, “Think yourself into health and happiness.” And you can’t underestimate the power of positive thinking, but there has to be more to it than that. You can’t just lie on your couch and think, “I’m going to get a job today. I’m going to get a job today.” You actually have to get out and go look for work. You can’t lay on your couch and think, “I’m going to be healthier today, I’m going to be healthier today.” That helps, but there are specific things that you can do to take those thoughts and turn them into actions, and the actions are going to determine whether you are healthier or not. Your thoughts are the seeds that create the fruit of your reality.

So many of our thoughts, so many of our seeds, are poisonous. If you have healthy seeds, you’re going to have healthy fruit. So what I hope to accomplish with these podcasts is to give people the tools to take their poisonous seeds and transform them into healthy seeds, and then take those seeds and tend those seeds to fruition. My goal is to produce at least one of these podcasts per month. In the future I plan to address issues such as self-image psychology, stress and anger management, healthy relationship building, change management. My dream is that people who listen to these podcasts will utilize this information to affect positive change in their lives, thereby affecting positive change in the lives of the people that they know and love. I invite you to join us. There are many more of us than we are being led to believe.

Episode 2 of these podcasts will be entitled, “Low Self-Esteem Is the Root of All Evil.” Look for it September 1^st at optimismisaskill.com.

host: jim mclelland - music: anna huff - transcription: colleen mclelland - engineering: dave huff