Help me help!

I almost want someone, some dictator, to force me, by gunpoint or draft number, to go help the people in Burma. Build houses, carry water, play with the children, whatever! I feel a deep desire to help, but lack, along the “emerging wisdom culture,” any form of effective power. We have become obsessed with our freedom, and freedom and power do not mix, as you know. Or I should say that when they do mix, one emerges as victor, while the other waits in hiding for its chance to reemerge and curtail the higher degree of freedom, or power, just when the one is moments away from destroying the world. They work together in this way, but do not mix well.

And I have way too much freedom, and not enough responsibility, and if only some enlightened king could fore me to the slums to build houses…

The up-drift towards an integrated planetary culture, a world village, which we all feel and intuit within, pulls on our heart to go help. When our sisters and brothers in Burma are dying, we feel something, or at least the 20% of the population that is even aware of these global problems feels something, and that something is a universal compassion, a soft spot in us that goes beyond “us” and connects with the rest of the world’s population. This soft spot wants nothing else but to see everyone everywhere happy, healthy, and free.

But those of us connected to the planetary culture, (those of us aware of the global commons) and its economic/ecological problems, have vacationed far too long in our exalted states of freedom and security. Relishing our rights, we have lost responsibility, and might need to sacrifice some freedom for the sake of organizing power. We might want to reach down into our traditionalist past, grab a hold of some of that militarism, that membership, and exert some sort of authoritarian power onto our world. After all, if the founding fathers would not have done that, if it would have actually been a one-person/one-vote democracy, the fundamentalists wackos who made up the majority of the population would have taken control, and the constitution would never have been created. In some cases, elitism is best.