Archive for the ‘Change’ Category

Perhaps two of the most frequently posed questions about the reluctance, even failure, of German Jews to stand and fight against Hitler’s onslaught is “Why didn’t they do anything? Why didn’t they fight back?” Over the past 70+ years many theories have been postulated in response to that inquiry. Yesterday, in Great Britain, I believe we witnessed the answer.

As an evil Muslim terrorist brutally, viciously, and without conscience hacked to death and then nearly beheaded an innocent young man in broad daylight, onlookers stood by and watched. Not one man in the crowd lifted a finger or raised a voice to either stop the slaughter or even try and take down the assailant. The onlookers might just as well have been thought to be watching a passing parade.

Slavery is a slippery slope. While physical enslavement can come upon someone by a single act (such as capture or seizure of the means of defense a/k/a/ “gun control”), psychological enslavement is a more subtle and prolonged process. Most often, it is achieved by manipulation of the truth and implementation of fear through threats or physical pain. Slowly, over time and given the right conditions, even the strongest of individuals is susceptible to relinquishing autonomy of thought. Once that occurs, submission follows.

Terrorists and political elites have been using manipulation and fear to enslave us for some time now. One might argue its been occurring intermittently for as long as recorded human history. However, with the advent of modern technological advances, and simultaneous removal of all things spiritual from our lives, it has reached a dangerous tipping point. Humanity is on the verge of psychological enslavement. It will not be necessary to physically enslave us once this becomes complete.

In Great Britain, people watched because the unthinkable and inhumane is hard to process. People watched because terror is becoming a way of life. People watched because in the face of evil it isn’t uncommon to become immobilized. People didn’t do anything because they feared for their own safety. These are the same reasons given in attempts to analyze the non-action of so many Jews in Nazi Germany.

But there’s a glitch. One woman in Great Britain DID act and speak.

A mother of two, who was a passenger on a bus moving past the horrific scene, disembarked after seeing all the blood. She thought an accident had occurred. When she realized what was happening, she approached the terrorist and asked him if he had done this and what was it that he wanted. When later interviewed and asked why she took the risk, she said it was because of her faith. There were children standing by and she thought better she be harmed than one of them.

The presence of God knows no fear.

This is the 11^th hour.  This is the hour to exercise your autonomy. This is the hour to find your voice. This is the hour to demand accountability from the few who are misusing power to enslave the many. We have been cooperative and complacent for far too long. To not push back now is to irretrievably abdicate our birthrights of Freedom and Free Will.

The most important aspect of the Benghazi terror attacks has yet to surface. It’s not about why there was insufficient security given advance knowledge of the dangers, or who gave the order to stand down, or even why President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton contrived to lie about both the cause and the decisions that followed in response.

Benghazi isn’t about them. It’s about us.

Just how much deception, manipulation and disrespect will we allow ourselves to be subjected to before we become indignant, demand accountability, pursue prosecution and replace those individuals with public servants who honor integrity and truth above expediency and power?

How many brave individuals, such as those who died in Benghazi and those who now testify to the truth of what occurred there have to risk their careers, or forfeit their lives, to do what is right in the face of evil?

How many of us will continue to choose self-imposed blindness and ignorance of leaders with an endgame that culminates in our enslavement and whose means of getting there knows no ethical, moral or legal bounds?

Benghazi isn’t about them.  It’s about us.

While our minds play intellectually disingenuous games based upon particular agendas and political predispositions, our hearts know with certainty that President Obama, Hilary Clinton, Jay Carney, Susan Rice, and a supporting cast of literally thousands are liars.

Benghazi isn’t about them. It’s about us.

So long as we acquiesce to allowing ourselves to be distracted from the truth and herded like sheep into a state of manageable containment, we have far more pressing concerns than Al Qaeda. We are on the brink of voluntarily relinquishing our birthright. Like Biblical Esau, who traded his birthright for a bowl of hot soup because he was more concerned with instant gratification than the long-range consequence of his choice, we are condemning ourselves and our children to a world where deception and slavery are the norm.

This isn’t a hypothetical. Nor is it hyperbole. This is the real danger, and now is the defining moment, each of us is facing. What will you accept?  What will you do?

Benghazi isn’t about them. It’s about us.

 

I’m watching breaking news in the Boston area and I’m wondering how many people who previously thought otherwise are now rethinking the stance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Bibi” Netanyahu was born in Israel, educated partly in the United States at the same high school I attended, wounded while serving in an elite unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, lost his brother Yoni who was later commander of the same Special Forces Unit, Sayeret Matkal (and who was killed in 1976 while commanding Operation Entebbe which successfully rescued kidnapped Americans and other European nationals). Netanyahu was the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations from 1984-1988.  In summation Bibi has been on the front lines, figuratively and literally, in both negotiation with and combating Islamic extremism.

Now, Islamic extremism has indisputably arrived in America. Two Muslim trained and radicalized Chechen young men selected what is euphemistically termed “soft targets”…what you and I call “people”…and blew them to bits. On the run, they continue to seek maximum destruction and intend to themselves die in seeking that end.

The “hard line” Prime Minister Netanyahu formed in relation to terrorism over the life of his military and political careers as a citizen of a nation perpetually in survival mode is born of experience. It’s not founded in theory, philosophy, or some idyllic utopian vision of a world joined by either Socialism or a Caliphate. When you’ve experienced enough deceit, mayhem and murder in your past, you tend to make decisions about your well-being based upon the likely occurrence of such things in your present and future, absent a change of heart by those who have pledged themselves to your extinction.

The Obama Administration is headed by a community organizer who, as President, has repeatedly insulted our friends and embraced and emboldened our enemies. Yet, the American people continue to “like” him.

As with Netanyahu, Obama’s experiences have formed, and continue to form, his ideology and stance. His experience teaches him that the West, and in particular the United States and Great Britain, have committed great sins in colonizing and oppressing peoples of other nations. His experience is that it’s time for an American mea culpa and it’s his time to structure and lead it.

We are not leaderless.

We, as a Constitutional Republic, are on the road to extinction.

We are not leaderless.

We are asleep and acting as sheep.

We are not leaderless.

We are being led down the road of extinction by this President.

We are not leaderless.

We are voluntarily blind, deaf and frighteningly dumb.

 

Hypocrite n. 1. a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion  2. a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings

President Obama says it is “unimaginable” that Congress would “defy” the will of the people on gun control.

President Obama defied the will of the people on ramming through Obamacare when 51% of the Nation opposed it.

President Obama said the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” before he knew the facts, weighing in on the arrest of Harvard scholar and African-American Henry Louis Gates Jr.

President Obama, after the facts were determined, refuses to term the Ft. Hood massacre a “terrorist act”  but instead chooses to call it “workplace violence.”

President Obama stood with then college student Sandra Fluke on providing free contraceptives to college students through student health services.

President Obama will not comment on the mass murderer Dr.Kermit Gosnell, African-American, who aborted and brutally murdered approximately 50,000 children over the past 20 years.

President Obama says we shouldn’t go to Las Vegas and be more responsible in our personal financial (and nutritional) lives.

President Obama smokes cigarettes and takes, among others, a $1,000,000 golf weekend with Tiger Woods as the deficit soars past 16,000,000,000,000.

Hypocrite n. 1. President Obama.

In case you were in a coma last year or on safari, Anthony Weiner is the former New York Congressman, sans conscience, who “sexted” young women photos of his private parts. Further, he lied to the American people claiming he had not done so and that his Twitter account was hacked. Ultimately he admitted the error of his ways, including but not limited to his lying, and resigned. In his spare time, Weiner also partook of a lie-based smear campaign against talk-radio host Glenn Beck and one of Beck’s sponsors, Goldline. But I digress.

Fast forward and Weiner has thrown his hat into the ring once again as he tests the poll numbers in a bid for the Democratic nomination to run for….wait for it…Mayor of New York, To quote Hollywood, “Only in America.”

But this isn’t about Anthony Weiner. He’s just the reference point. It’s about you and me.

Whether you are religious and believe that we define ourselves by exercising our Free Will and making choices between good and evil, consider yourself part of the metaphysical movement and believe that we create our reality with our intentional thoughts, or are an atheist who thinks you’re bound by a personally defined moral code, choosing to put a despicable, lying, sex addict back into public office would be a pretty damning indication of just how unconscious and lacking in ethics the people of New York are.

Currently, Weiner is running a tight second in the polls. However, New York is merely the microcosm. The rest of the country can take no pleasure in casting the first stone. Step back just a tad and look at the last two Presidential elections. First, we elected a man with no experience. Then, when he did nothing in his entire term to either warrant praise or benefit the nation, we re-elected him rather than a man with proven successes and impeccable character…and look where we are.

Like it or not, we define ourselves by our choices and to a great extent, create the world we live in by those same choices. If you and I are unhappy with the present state of that world, then we better wake-up, take personal responsibility for our choices and stop kidding ourselves that it all happens by chance or outside of our control

If the Democrat Party runs Anthony Weiner as its Mayoral candidate, and New Yorkers elect Anthony Weiner as their Mayor, then they are either irreversibly ignorant or irretrievably unconscious. In either case, they will be damned by their choice.

Make no mistake. We always get to choose and by so doing, define ourselves.

A house of horrors abortion clinic in Philadelphia.  A fourth grade teacher in Florida having students print that they would “give up some of [their] constitutional rights in order to be safe or more secure.” A New York high school teacher who assigned his class to “argue Jews are evil” while blaming them for the problems of Nazi Germany.

I am less troubled by who we have become than by the question, “Why don’t we care who we’ve become?” Have these collective offenses to the Divine in each of us been reduced, at best, to passing stories on the nightly news? Why do we not care about education that is agenda based, deceitful and perverse? Why are we so apathetic or hardened to the systematic slaughter of the unborn that we allow it to continue in the name of a woman’s right to choose?

I am a woman and I chose. When my ex-husband and I could not have a child we chose to go to China and adopt our daughter. She is a beauty both inside and out.  In light of the gruesome story out of Philadelphia, I look at her and am pained by the thought that she, too, could have been brutally “terminated” but for the courage of her birth mother, the existence of an orphanage and her own sheer will to survive.  What right do we have, we who are the beneficiaries of the gift of life, to take it from the innocence of others?  Why do we think we can escape the inevitable slippery slope of turning a blind eye to the total disregard and devaluation of human life?  If you know your Purim story and Mordechai’s admonition to Queen Esther, then you know the wisdom teaching that if you try and deny your responsibility towards saving humanity, you too will perish.

As for the stories out of Florida and New York, they are “the canaries in the gold mine” of education.  We are, through “Common Core” and our indifference to the personal responsibility for educating our children, abandoning and enslaving this and future generations to the distortions and perversions of evil. So as the power players bombard us with news and arguments in favor of gun control, they are simultaneously and systematically seeking to selectively control the population and mold minds through abortion and curriculum, respectively.

What they seek to accomplish can only be attained by our accompanying indifference and cooperation. What we think will not happen here is based upon the false premise that it can never happen here because it has never happened here.

The premise is false on two counts.

First, at the end of the Civil War, the nation embarked upon Reconstruction and by way of Black Codes, prohibited  gun ownership from freedmen, slaves and African-Americans.  The result? A flourishing Ku Klux Klan.  We have, in our own history, sought to control birth, education and self-defense of an entire people. It was a shameful time, a blight upon the National saga, with repercussions still felt today.  Secondly, an enlightened and civilized society, Europe of the early twentieth century, was the breeding ground for Adolph Hitler.

Evil can and will exist anywhere humanity allows it to germinate and grow through indifference and cooperation. The good news is that each of us has total control over how indifferent or cooperative we choose to be. Pick your cause. This is the time to be heard. This is the time to stand. Find the indignation within and, with focused intention, speak truth to power. This is your moment.

There is only One of Us. In no more concise a fashion can this be stated than it was by Rabbi Hillel, the 1^st century Jewish sage and scholar who said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”

Have the presence of mind to ask yourself “When?”  Then have the courage of heart to hear the response. “Now.”

Suicide crosses all economic and sociological boundaries. No one is immune by nature of their family ties nor is anyone to blame.  In fact, suicide knows no boundaries. This painful fact is most recently evidenced by the suicide death of Matthew Warren, the youngest son of Pastor Rick Warren, mega-church founder and author of the best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Life.”

It seems almost a cruel irony that a man who inspired so many to find purpose and meaning in their own lives must now tragically face an inability to gift that same purpose to his own child. This tragedy is not a failing on the part of Pastor Warren. It is the sad but very real outcome of an individual’s inability to find hope and meaning in the midst of suffering.

I know. I tried to commit suicide at age 24 and have spent decades since building a rich, full and meaningful life. However, since that fateful day, I have periodically been challenged with those same thoughts that caused me to choose attempted suicide all those years ago.

The difference in how I have since dealt with those thoughts is by learning to override them through an understanding that the only constant is change. Therefore, no matter how bleak the present moment may seem, I know that I can trust in the fact that it will pass and change will come.  I also developed an ever-growing sense of self-worth by facing, and overcoming,  life challenges…starting small and working my way up to ever-increasing accomplishments.

I have read that Matthew Warren was described as “an incredibly kind, gentle and compassionate young man whose sweet spirit was encouragement and comfort to many.” How I empathize.

We live in a fast-paced, often-times alienated-from-one-another world due to technological advancements and misplaced values. The more sensitive, caring and perceptive one is of the pain of others, the more challenging it can be to exist under such circumstances. It seems the most gifted, the most artistic, the most remarkable individuals in human history have suffered the greatest emotional turmoil. Perhaps this is the price of truly understanding and feeling our connectedness to one another. I do not yet have this answer.

What I do know is that hope and trust in the ability to survive and prosper are tied to experiences of competency. The more often an individual is able to experience autonomy combined with accomplishment the more likely they are to be able to emotionally and intellectually weather the storms of clouded thinking that see suffering as permanent and suicide as an option.

To schedule Carole Gold to speak to your group, organization or school on attempted suicide and effective ways to overcome negative thinking click here.

Is there anyone out there who is still unconscious enough to believe anything our politicians say or do?  I suppose the incredulous answer is “Yes” because they’re still “saying  and doing” and, as in the President’s staged statement made just moments ago concerning the pending fiscal cliff… they’re still allowing themselves to be used as useful idiots positioned for the camera behind the President with smiles on their faces. Amazing. Truly!

These corrupt, disingenuous and self-serving public servants have just been given a pay raise by our President to be paid for with your tax dollars while they vacationed for Christmas at their respective homes (in the President’s case Hawaii) while we were left twisting in the wind over the potential price of milk and our tax burdens for 2013 and beyond. Then, they did us a favor and returned from holiday to perhaps cut a totally inadequate and piecemeal deal at the 11^th hour when they should have, and could have, worked this out months ago.

This is but the latest example of why you have to disengage from “The Game.”

The purpose of The Game is to keep you twisting in the wind and therefore, frightened. Frightened people are infinitely more manageable and easily manipulated (read: “enslaved”) than are independent, internally directed, personally responsible people. Hence, why they perpetuate all the uncertainty and fear.

I love board games but I don’t play chess. The reason I don’t play is because no matter how many times it’s been explained to me, I don’t get it. Besides, there are a multitude of other games to play with rules I do understand. Now, maybe it’s not the best analogy. After all, the rules of chess don’t change mid-game as do the rules of elite power brokers. Power brokers, and those sycophants who hang by their sides, play by rules and change them at will while the rest of us are forever playing catch up.

But where the analogy is GREAT is that we don’t have to play this game. We can get off this board and choose another game.

The one I like is “The Game of Oneness.”

It has many dimensions but the rules are constant no matter which one you’re in:

1. Be personally responsible. 2. Have unfaltering integrity. 3. Think for yourself. 4. Buy only what you like regardless of what is marketed. 5. Back off technology. 6. Exhibit compassion for yourself and others. 7. Spend time in Nature and realign with its rhythms. 8. Cultivate joy in your heart and spread it outward. 9. Do no harm.

When you get to the end of that board, having played by the rules, the win is so much more than dying with the most toys.

The win is Eternal Life.

I understand why Jesus smashed the tables in the Temple courtyard. I could smash a few myself. There simply comes a time when enough is enough. When every rational and civil attempt to right the wrongs has failed.

The fiscal cliff is looming, Obamacare is about to change our lives (not for the better), and 20 children who had no means of defense are dead. Meanwhile…

- Members of Congress have gone home for Christmas. Really?

- The President and his family are vacationing in Hawaii. Really?

- We’re told we’re in an economic recovery and should believe the numbers… not our personal experience. Really?

- Congress has a better healthcare plan that the rest of us. Really?

- Sasha and Malia have guards with guns to protect them at school. Really?

- The children of many Congressman and Senators go to private schools with enhanced security. Really?

- In 2000, then President Bill Clinton requested $60 million in federal funding for a program called “COPS in Schools” that does exactly what the NRA has now proposed and which the media is currently mocking. Really?

There is such a thing as righteous anger. Righteousness, as I define it, is the “rightful use of energy.” When energy is properly utilized and directed so that both the intent and the outcome are in alignment with eliminating that which is diseased and corrupted, then such use is necessary.  As our “leaders” vacation and provide themselves with exceptions, exemptions, protections and perks unavailable to the rest of society, I am reminded of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

At the moment I have but one prayer:  “Please, God, show me the way to the tables.”

I don’t know why he did it. No one does. It was a tragic and senseless act by a troubled soul.  I wept as did the Nation and as we each try to find some fact, some new information that could perhaps bring something resembling meaning to the chaos I am certain of one thing.

Hatred and further polarization are inappropriate and destructive responses. Whether media personalities or politicians… family members, friends or co-workers…“coming at each other” over gun control is to wildly miss the point. Only a world that has lost its moral and value-based compass could have strayed as far from Truth and harmony as we have strayed.

It’s about so much more than guns. That is precisely what we will try to avoid. We will try and tie it all up in a political package aimed at curbing assault weapons rather than accepting personal responsibility for how we have abdicated doing what is right when confronted with the opportunity to do what is expedient.

We have shunned putting forth the time to be parents to instead turn the children over to be influenced by technology. We have avoided living lives that establish standards that would then give us the right to demand the same of our elected leaders. We have failed to provide decent facilities and care for the mentally ill. We have determined the success of our personal lives by our incomes rather than our degree of inner peace, and that of the Nation by its Moody’s credit rating rather than its citizens proliferation of compassion. We have neglected to revere life in all its forms thus destroying at will that which is inconvenient or burdensome. We have lost the patience to allow our lives to unfold in harmony with natural rhythms and, by so doing, misplaced conscience as we took what we wanted when we wanted it without regard for consequence. We belittle and mock our own inner connection to the Divine while falling prostrate at the feet of material false idols.

There is no President, no legislation, and no committee to see about all the ways in which we have erred and rebelliously refused to self-correct. For in the end, this is what it has come down to. Self-correction. For if we do not use this moment, this tragedy, this waste of human life to stop the hatred, name calling and polarization… to awaken to our Oneness… then it will be too late to Self-correct.

We will have moved beyond any remedy conceivable by our limited capacities and inflated egos to turn the tide of self-destruction. If that should happen, the correction will come from a place outside of our understanding and may God have mercy on us.

Awaken now. Stop the separation now. Take responsibility now. Feel your humanity now. There is only One of Us.

What I do to you I do to myself. What I think of you I think of myself. What I wish for you I bring upon myself.

This is law and it is incontrovertible.