54. We are Building Bridges or We are Building Walls.
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54. There are only 2 Choices:
Welcome to American Fascism 2.0: The Totalitarian Redux.
What do we do?
When I get scared, I remind myself of what is. There are only 2 choices - we are choosing fear or we are choosing love.
It's that simple.
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54. We are Building Bridges or We are Building Walls
Transcript
Lezley (00:00):
To have someone terrorizing us and telling us what to do. Okay, wait. Calm down. Hi folks. Welcome to the Beloved Presence Podcast. I'm Lezley Davidson. You're a High Priestess of Holy Sh!t, your ABBA of the Unshushable. That's all. Let's talk about choice. It helps me when I get stressed out or overwhelmed or try and make things too complicated to remember that there's only two choices in everything. There's only two choices that we're making. If you've heard of the witch wolf, do you feed story? It's the same thing. You're either feeding loving inclusion or you're feeding separation fear. That's it. Those are the only two choices. We're either building bridges or we're building walls. That's it. Those are the only two choices we get. So what are you choosing? What am I choosing? I'm not always choosing bridges, got to be honest, not always doing that.
Lezley (01:17):
So George Lackoff has this model of society. It's called the strict Father Model hierarchy, and I return to it again and again whenever I'm grappling with this apparent rise in fascism. I first learned about it when Trump was inaugurated the first time, and here we are again. Here we are again. So the strict father model hierarchy is a really great illustration about how we fall into authoritarianism and how easy it is and how attractive it can be. Authoritarian oppression starts, it has its roots in our childhood and it's why we can be so attracted to it because if we lived with authoritarian parents, it's a very familiar feeling. One of the main divergences between whether you're an authoritarian aligned kind of person or whether you're more you don't, you don't support totalitarian regimes is the difference between whether you think that this world is unsafe or whether it is a world of safety and nurturance.
Lezley (02:31):
Those that tend towards fascism believe fundamentally believe that the world is not a safe place and you have to fight to protect what's yours. You have to compete for every little scrap. This fear is so total that any level of violence and oppression is acceptable for you to feel like you are protecting yours. You're keeping us safe from them. And here's a little hint. There's no them. There's no them. There's only us. There's only ever been us. Them is made up. Them is made up based on a bunch of made up categories of fragmentation. It doesn't exist. It's not real. So that is the first wall. This world is safe and we'll meet you with warm welcome or this world is a flaming hellish nightmare and you have to fight to survive. So safety versus fear, cooperation versus competition. Community versus the lone wolf. Victim versus power, which binary you choose which side of the binary you choose will fabricate your reality and it will determine how you interact with whatever group you perceive you're interacting with.
Lezley (03:52):
Either it's the in-group who are like you or some outsider group that is different and can be treated different than you'd treat your own. Fundamentally flawed. And the collective choice in how we perceive the world creates our reality. We live in a shared reality where what we believe literally creates how this world is the nature of reality. You're going to behave very differently. I'm going to behave very differently if I perceive you as safe and welcome versus unsafe and unwelcome. So there's no objective world. We're choosing at all times how we're perceiving it, and our perception creates our reality based on how we act. I don't fear evil. I don't think evil exists. It's a word that we've made up. It's a word for the belief in separation, which isn't a thing that is real. It's separation sickness. Evil is separation sickness. It's a belief that we are small and alone and separate and unsupported and unloved and unlovable.
Lezley (05:11):
That's sad because there's nothing in creation that exists, that isn't wanted and warmly welcomed. Existence is based in loving inclusion. Nothing exists here that wasn't wanted. And I mean on the big spiritual scale, not your shitty neighbor, there's nothing that exists in creation that isn't at source. Fundamentally part of the whole, everything that is part of the whole is worthy and valuable. These are the different ways that we see the world.
Ogitchitibakonigaywin.I don't know if I'm saying this correctly. It's the great binding law that's Ogitchitibakonigaywin. It's the great binding law which says that all things are within the Great Spirit, that all things are connected through spirit, that the Great Mystery holds us all together, that we are all a part of this Great Mystery and everything within the Great Spirit is valuable and needed and wanted exactly as they are. So I don't fear evil.
Lezley (06:27):
I fear ignorance and cowardice, my own and others. I do fear that. And cowardice is the opposite of courage. Courage is leading from heart. Cowardice is hiding, staying silent, not sharing the truth that you hold in your heart for fear of ridicule or punishment or any kind of negative response. That's the cowardice that I fear. It's the courage of speaking truth to power in every day. The cowardice is avoiding every day in all the small ways that we can stand for greater truths, greater truths of equity and love and inclusion, all the ways that we can not build bridges and instead create walls. We have the opportunity every day to stand for truth that are bigger than ourselves in small myriad interactions. The small myriad interactions of every day are way more powerful than necessarily institutional policy. Corporate policy system policy on the ground to the feet, on the ground in the marketplace is where we make the fabric of reality.
Lezley (07:41):
It's where we interact and experience what it means to be alive with one another. It's where the power is. That's where we build bridges so often seems easier to just give in and give up and agree and go along and say yeah, and be apathetic and say, that's just the way it is and nothing will ever change and yada, yada, yada. It's just always been this way and I'll always will be this way. Capitalism, supremacy, corporations, classism, yada, yada, yada. But it's that kind of cowardice that opens the door for fascism. As our systems crumble, many will choose fear and fascism because it seems like the obvious right choice. Many will choose fear and fascism because those around them are too cowardly to stand for a different choice. We'll choose fear and fascism when we're too afraid to build bridges and feel like walls are the only option.
Lezley (08:41):
I work in retail and every day I have the opportunity to build bridges or build walls, and I fail at it every day. Every day. I am not as warm or as welcome or as nonjudgmental or accepting as I could be. That's why I fear cowardice and ignorance. I know how easy it is. It takes a lot of effort to build a bridge. It takes a lot of effort and emotional resources to stand in non-judgment while someone shares just the ugliness of their beliefs. But that's what the call is, that's what it's for. Defenselessness and defenselessness seems insane when we feel threatened, but it's literally the only response If we want to build bridges and not walls and we want to avoid walls that lead to war, defending ourselves turns someone else into an other, an other that is unsafe and we need to be defended against to defend ourselves, turns someone else into an other, an enemy that attacks and then we feel like we need to build walls to keep ourselves safe.
Lezley (09:59):
But walls, isolate and walls separate us into good and evil and right and wrong and just and corrupt. And I'm not talking about boundaries. Boundaries are not defence. Boundaries are our own parameters of our own actions. Boundaries are the guidelines of our acceptance and not the control of other people. Have boundaries, build bridges. If you are afraid, becoming a violent oppressor will not make you less afraid. In a world of violent oppressors, there will always be someone who is more violent. There will always be someone who is a bigger oppressor. In a world of violent oppressors, there will always be more and greater violence and eventually all oppressors become oppressed. There's no guarantee of physical safety here. Tough, tough words. Sorry, not sorry. There's no guarantee of physical safety for anyone ever. Everyone is not physically safe here. There's no physical safety here. If safety means that you stay as you are forever, that's just not real.
Lezley (11:19):
Here we are all going to get sick and die and there's nothing here, but change. The world of form is nothing but change. It's nothing but the in-breath and out-breath of living and expiring. It sounds awful, but it's true. I mean, I think we need to talk about this a lot more. Just the fact that everything dies and decays things get sick and get broken and destroyed. That is just a fact of life here. That's just what happens. And if that is your barometer for safety, you'll never be safe here. There is no safety here. Not in that way, not in a physical safety. It just doesn't exist. Everything will change here. We'll all get sick and die. Mountains will fall into the sea. Walls are not going to keep you alive forever. Walls are not going to keep you from getting sick and dying.
Lezley (12:23):
Why build walls to prevent the inevitable? It's inevitable. What we need is a change in relationship to safety. You ultimately have no control over your physical safety. Even with all your best efforts, you can get sick and die. Even people who don't give a shit and don't do anything can live until they're 101 and then they still die, their bodies still die. What you do have control over is your spiritual, mental, and emotional well-being. Peace is within your control. Peace is yours in trust. You can trust that you are loved and worthy. You can trust that you are loved by all of creation even if they don't know it yet. There's a sense of peace and safety in returning to belonging to land, and belonging is kin and not the perception of a dead land of resources that we defend and fight over for using and exploiting Who could possibly feel safe In a world where land and bodies are objects for other people to exploit and use, Ooh, that's awful.
Lezley (13:47):
That whole perspective is just awful. And if you have the perspective, you're absolutely, you can never feel safe. You can never trust. Never trust. It's a nightmare of misunderstanding the nature of reality. It's a twisted deranged reality where only walls could make you feel safe When having is the source of safety, there can never be enough. There's never enough for you. There's never enough for others. And the need to feel safe is so overwhelming that all actions are acceptable, that anything is preferable to the fear of not being safe. People do awful things in response to fear and having things will never replace The safety of love and trust. having things will never replace love or the safety. That trusting and wholeness can bring. bridges, build support, and many different roads for many different ways of being supported and many different ways of having for all because we don't all need to have in the same way.
Lezley (14:59):
Having as the only way of being safe will guarantee that eventually we will lose everything. Victims by their nature feel powerless. Victims do not believe in their own worth or their own agency or their own value. Victims do not trust or believe in other people. Victims do not trust or believe in themselves. Victims believe that the locus of power exists outside of them in how other people behave. And as long as a victim believes they have no power, they will remain a victim. Victims try and control people in situations through manipulation and coercion. If a victim felt strong enough and safe enough to voice for their own needs, they would feel agency and power of sovereignty and no longer be a victim. And fear of standing for ourselves makes victims of us all. Anyone who has been harmed is a victim, but it is enticing to stay in that morally self-righteous arena of victimhood.
Lezley (16:07):
The phase of the victim is a necessary stage of healing. As a victim, we must fully process how we have been harmed by people in situations. We must fully process the harm done to us and that we are innocent and that we do not deserve what happened to us. Then when we are ready, we can move on from processing victimhood into the phase of agency and responsibility after harm we choose, we are ultimately responsible for what we make. The harm mean about ourselves and the world. We're never at fault for the harm done to us, but we do decide if the harm we experienced means we build walls or we build bridges. If we stay in a place of belief that we are morally righteous as victims and that we have been harmed and we deserve to be paid back for our experience that we are owed for our experience will remain in a state of victimhood, powerless, victimhood, no one can tell you what your life means to you or tell you how to make your experiences meaningful or build the moments of your life into fabric of love and worth and warm welcome.
Lezley (17:34):
That's your choice. That's all you. It's always yours alone. There is no center of your life outside of you. You're the maker of meaning. You're the chooser of belief in your own life completely. You decide if you have power and agency, you decide if you're a victim. You decide what the events of your life mean to you. You decide if you build walls or you build bridges. And the only way forward is one where everyone wins. The current systems are failing. Don't look away. Don't fall for the emperors naked ass. Yes. Don't accept hypernormalization.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
I'm sorry, but could someone please tell me what's going on? What is happening? Hi, welcome to the Hypernormalization Club. I'm so sorry that you're here. So Hypernormalization was a term that was coined by a professor of anthropology named Alexi Yurchak, who wrote a book back in 2006 called Everything was Forever until it was No More The Last Soviet Generation. And basically he was describing the paradox of life in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and the 1980s where he says, everyone knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo. So politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretence of a functioning society. Now, this term was also picked up and used by Adam Curtis, who is a filmmaker. He created a documentary called Hypernormalization in 2016 where he argued that the economic crises in the 1970s and the West, basically governments, finance experts and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex real world.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
This is from Wikipedia and instead established a simpler fake world for the benefit of multinational corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. You can actually see the entire documentary on YouTube, but what you are feeling is hypernormalization. What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren't working, that structures are crumbling, that society is going through these massive shifts, and yet the institutions and the people that are in power just are ignoring it and are pretending like everything is going to go on the way that it has. And we all know that that's not true. So you are feeling the discomfort between what you know to be true and how you're seeing people react to it. And so your vibes are not off. Your instincts are not off. There's a term for it. It's called hypernormalization. You're welcome.
Lezley (20:08):
And it's wild. It's absolutely happening. Everything's burning, it's all fucking burning, and it's just business as usual. Go to work, make the money. Let's cancel TikTok because freedom, sovereignty agency got to control the people. Now is a great and fertile possibility to plant something nurturing in the cracks of the systems. We don't have to clinging to the decrepit, decaying hull of this ship as it sinks. You are a beautiful, radiant, magical being and you have all of the infinity of spirit and land behind you. How can we possibly fail? And this too takes courage. This is sharing the message of our hearts, following the message of our hearts. It's why cowardice to me is so scary for my own path. I hope that I always have courage to speak from my heart. Cowardice is not following our heart and I have not done that a lot of my life and that scares me.
Lezley (21:17):
So now is the time of the seventh fire. Now is the choice. This is the time of the seventh fire. Now is the choice. And like the prophecy said, what we are doing is turning back, turning back to reclaim and recover what was left behind, what we lost, what we've been cut, cut off from healing our roots, healing our cutoff, healing our disconnection from Anam and Ancestors, healing our connection to Indigenous land, healing our connection to Indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices. We are returning to belong to land. We return to belonging to all as kin and loving what is. healing our disconnect from land and spirit and we cannot fail, but we can fail. If we choose walls, we can fail. If we react to the fear of change and transition by turtling into ourselves and disconnecting and being hidden and isolating. We can fail if we fail to support one another and anchor this new way of being.
Lezley (22:34):
Anchoring this return, anchoring this recovery of our reconnection to all that is and all the ways of knowing. We're anchoring a new way of being onto the planet. We need the normalization of hope and belief in the bridges we are building in this new way of seeing, in these new ways of knowing and these new ways of being. We need reminders of hope and belief that we're in this together and that no one is free until everyone is free. So this is a great book that I've been reading that's been really, really helpful. It is the pocket Guide to Facing Down a Civil War. It's free. The link is in the description. Please download it and read it. One of the main takeaways is that we win through building bridges. We win through relationship and action of everyday people in everyday situations. Not big battles, not big policy changes or decisions made from up high.
Lezley (23:43):
We avoid civil war. We avoid violence and oppression by how we treat each other day to day in conflict affected communities. The people on the ground are the most important part. Personal and direct interactions are the most meaningful and create the most lasting change. We don't change the structures of society through policy and laws. We shift our experience of reality through changing hearts, focusing on local efforts, focusing on relationships across divides of belief and creatively resisting violence is the way that we transition this change into something of value for everyone. This is how we plant abundance in the cracks of failing systems. Build bridges, not walls in all areas of our life. Victory without an enemy is a message that I've been receiving for 30 years. There's only fear versus safety. Not right and wrong. There's only fear versus safety. Not good and evil. And you can call safety love.
Lezley (24:53):
We can't logic someone out of their fear. Doesn't matter how well reasoned or objective your argument is or how many good facts you have to back it up. Fear is not logical. It isn't objective and it isn't nuanced. Fear is subjective and overpowering and total, and the only response to fear is love, compassion, and the insistence that you too are warmly welcomed here. You too are loved and wanted and needed even in your fear. And the only possible response to fear is love and safe space. Don't hurt yourself when you forget, you will forget. Don't crucify yourself, when you offer attack to fear, when you offer attack in response to fear. You will offer attack. Don't fall into despair, when you can't find love or compassion, you will find them again and all that you're asked to do is to try again. We're going to fuck this up guaranteed.
Lezley (26:00):
We're not always going to get it right every time, but if we keep trying, we'll get it right more often than we get it wrong. I used to think that people were actively purposely choosing to do shitty things. I used to think, that's not good enough. It's not good enough. You can do better. No one's choosing to be harmful. Literally no one is even the worst. They aren't. They're not choosing no one is. Everyone is literally making the best choices that they can based on the worldview that they have. I don't agree with their worldview, but evil is just a word that we've made up to describe belief in separation. Evil is a word that we use to describe not seeing loving wholeness here. Some people don't know that yet. They've never experienced it. They don't know what it is and how are they going to learn of love and wholeness if they receive attack?
Lezley (27:02):
How are they going to learn of love and wholeness if they receive attack and we prove to them that they're separate and alone? That's why the offer of love and warm welcome and safe space is so important in times of fear because it's the only thing that will combat the belief in separation. Everyone is doing the best they can until they heal and learn and can do better. Not everyone was given the tools to emotionally process and to heal and learn. And no one does better with shame and attack. No one, no one does better through shame and threat, and every single person thinks they're doing the right thing. Every single person. Anything can be the right thing when there are exceptions to love and wholeness, when there are no exceptions to love and wholeness, the right thing is very clear and anything else seems like an awful unthinkable choice. But until in our heart there are no exceptions to love and wholeness, these other options are a possibility and we will think that we're doing the right thing.
Lezley (28:15):
We're being asked to hold space for connecting to more than just the current small, fractured view of the world that we hold, this small fractured view that has been the foundation that all of this society has been built on. We're being asked to hold the view and the energy of what is we're being asked to build bridges because you're a fucking miracle. You bring magic and re-enchantment and healing wholeness to a sad, scared world. You are literally changing the world by seeing everyone included in love and warm welcome. You're the solution the world's been waiting for. We all are. Everyone. Every Being. No exceptions. No exceptions. Okay, love you. Bye.