Can We Unite in the Name of Freedom?
Why our individuality can either help or hinder the cause
No one wants to believe that our personal freedoms are at stake.
I feel confident most of us believe that we have a right to freedom as a just cause, but are we recognizing the way our need for individuality is hindering this cause?
I write extensively about individuality. I write about the need for personal freedom. I write as though my life depends on me having the right to be me as well as you having the right to be you. That’s good. Isn’t it? But what happens when we end the dialogue at you and me? We fail to recognize that you and I make up the us.
The you and I are taking up space in this world as individuals with needs and wants. My needs and wants are not yours. Your needs and wants are not theirs. And the more we distinguish that there is a you and a me, the less focused we become on the Collective.
It is inevitable, as we seek to obtain rights and individuality, that we spend all of our effort on ourselves, our beliefs, or our pod, the group of individuals that think as we do. And the way we grab at this need is eroding the Collective, for the more we seek attention for our personal, or group cause, the less concerned we are about another. And the less concerned we are for another the less in-tune we become with the rights and needs of the Collective.
There are ways to organize ourselves to think about others, those who do not think and believe as we do, but we’re too caught up in the fight for personal freedom (a long time coming, by the way, considering our souls have been kept in check by individuals with more power than us) to stop long enough to acknowledge the Collective.
The Collective, to me, is the entirety of all who live and breathe (including plants and minerals) on this planet. We could go so far as to say the Collective extends beyond this earthly life to the soul. It is the multiplicity of All That Is. You and I are a fraction of All That Is, yet we have been historically lost to our individuality on a planet that has for so long dismissed the individual.
In our quest to know ourselves we are losing touch with them.
In our quest to demand our individual rights we are losing touch with them.
In our quest to contain and quantify what is right and what is wrong we are losing touch with them.
When is it going to stop? This need to be needed, to be heard, to be the individual? When we recognize our loss.
For so long the individual fractions of All That Is have been lost to the voice of power. Now it is on us to fight for this lost voice. And so we will. But as we fight for the lost voice, please recognize that your lost voice and his lost voice and her lost voice and their lost voices have equal pain.
We are all in some kind of pain, having been lost for centuries to the voice of power. Yes, step up and fight, but fight with one thing in mind…we are all troubled. No one is any more troubled than another because we all experience loss. We all grieve. Perhaps we can say that one grief is more powerful than another, or more damaging, or more wrong. Put them all into a bucket and label them “GRIEF.” Grief is.
Can we fight for personal freedoms for the Collective rather than continue to fight to deconstruct a union? Without a union, we won’t have enough resources for all of the individual groups demanding attention for their just cause. It’s going to take a bit of balancing for the individual, and the group, to come together to fight for the betterment of a union. Without it, we’re going to be in even more need as we all fight to be heard.
Let’s fight for the union. At the end of the day, we are stronger as a union than divided as the individual. But it is on us to balance this. It is on us to recognize the hole we’re creating for The United States. Keep digging in and we lose it all.
By repairing your need to be heard, your individual self will thrive to help repair a union coming apart at the seams. By healing your loss you can, in turn, help others. We can rebuild this collective desire for freedom, together, as we build a stronger platform for the healing of our past.
We all experience grief. We all experience loss. We all experience need. We all experience want. Together, we can all experience greater opportunities for ourselves when we know we’re not alone.
