Happy New Year

Thoughts on the New Year

This morning, I was listening to music that has always brought emotional memories to me from moments in time. These moments represented highs and lows, experiences, feelings, and memories. Time, experience and the resulting growth changes us, changes our perspective and therefore our perception, this morning that happened to me and I wept.

Once in awhile we have a moment of clarity, sometimes called epiphany, sometimes enlightenment, and many other names, a moment when you see connections and gain understanding. This morning, I was listening to a song I heard on the first video jukebox I had ever seen. It was in the arcade at Pier 39 in San Francisco in 1984, the song was Church of the Poison Mind by Culture Club, and it was a revelation… the moment, the video, the song, the environment, where I was in life, all of it, and it made a lasting impact on me. That and several other songs of the time, none of them masterpieces, or are even that good, they were just part of the panorama of my discovery of the time.

This morning, I hear the song and saw the experience with a perspective I had never had before, I continued with the Wang Chung hits Dance Hall Days, which I found disturbing, and Everybody Have Fun Tonight, which was so full of utter manure with a good musical hook that I sat back and took a deep breath. I thought about the music of just a few years prior and saw the path from meaning to coopting so clearly. The music of the late 60’s and even to the mid 70’s was so powerful that it was changing the world, then, not so slowly, we moved to the hooky crap of the late 70’s and 80’s.

What does this have to do with New Years 2024?

The same coopting of any meaningful human movement has also been coopted the same way, the path is clear, the tools obvious once you have the shift in perspective. It becomes clear that a system, very like an AI, is at work that drives us and keeps in thrall to our toxic culture, unable to change it because the tools available to change it are still the tools of the machine.

Why am I writing this?

I am writing this because along with the clarity, I saw a way to reprogram the system. Understand that this system, this framework, is something we need to live together, but the one we have is slowly killing us. We need to reprogram it to support our humanity… We, all of us need to do this together, nobody, no elected official, will be our hero and “save” us. Here is the good news, all we need to do is make friends, build relationships, and learn to work together. Doing this will reprogram the system and, over time, make everything more equitable and human.

This all said, my New Years Resolution is to keep reaching out and connecting, teaching and planning ways to make it easier for us to do this, please join me, and the Resilient Community Movement in this for us all!

Start by joining us at Stone Soup

Thoughts on the 2024 New Year and a Resolution... ~Mark Boatwright-Frost