“… all of us have grown used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an immutable fact, and thereby actually helped keep it going. None of us are only its victims; we are all also responsible for it.
“It would be very unwise to think of the sad heritage of the last 40 years only as something foreign, something inherited from a distant relative. On the contrary, we must accept this heritage as something we have inflicted on ourselves. If we accept it in such a way, we shall come to understand it is up to all of us to do something about it.”
—Excerpt from Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel’s 1990 New Year’s Day address (as Czechoslovakia emerged from the USSR)
Following the implications of Reflection, the entire world situation is a manifestation of each of our inner selves, but the degree of closeness or distance we have from any given situation indicates how much a part of us that situation is.
While we are all connected by Reflection, there are some realities which are close to us and some which are far away. My reality includes my own divorce. For those around me my divorce is also part of their reality and reflects their inner selves, but not to the same degree. For some of my close friends, the failure of my marriage brings to the surface their own fears of difficulty in their marriages. They have remained married, so the reality of my divorce is not as extreme for them as it was for me, but my divorce is still as much a part of their reality as mine.
These ideas extend to the entire world. The issue of freedom in Eastern Europe is a Reflection of all our inner selves, but more so for those people in Eastern Europe.
When we read about famine in other parts of the World, it makes us reflect on our own fear that there will not be enough to eat.
Natural Disasters
In 1978, the Boston area was hit with blizzard on top of blizzard. It rated us the status of a national disaster. The reserves were called in to help clear the streets. Hundreds of vehicles were stuck and abandoned on the major highways. People were forbidden to drive. The state simply shut down for a week.
I don’t know what the news coverage of the blizzard looked like from the rest of the country, but I imagine it had a lot to do with the tragedy of it all, but talk to anyone that was in it and you get a different story.
It forced us all to relax. We couldn’t go anywhere. We had to spend time with our families and neighbors. There were no pressures. We couldn’t go to work. We couldn’t go to school. We couldn’t go to any of the other types of commitments we had. All we could do was hang around the neighborhood.
The weather turned beautiful, with crisp clear winter days, wonderful to be out in, and tons of snow. It was better than any real vacation, which so often has all the pressures of non-vacation time. This was forced relaxation for all of us and was a time fondly remembered by at least everyone I know who lived through it.
It certainly seems to have reflected an inner need in all of us.
Living in Boston, I didn’t have the contact with the San Francisco earthquake that I had with the Boston blizzard, but I wondered about the quake, and got hints from one person who was there.
That person in San Francisco was a public relations person working with a company I was analyzing. All our communication, by phone, was purely professional.
Shortly after the quake, I was talking to her about arranging a meeting with the company she was representing, but she wanted to talk about the quake. The conversation turned real as we dropped the professional topics.
She complained about her roof tiles and the mess and the traffic, all in a tone of aggravation at the disruptions. Not being able to help myself, I asked her if there was a good side as well. Her whole tone changed, and as the agitated edge softened, she sounded more relaxed and said, yes, it was wonderful. People had stopped being focused on hustling to get where they were going, and instead were reaching out to help each other. In her words, the quake really “shook them up”—both literally and figuratively.
At least for this one woman, the quake caused a crack in the day-to-day hustle of life revealing the humanity of those around her. What other stories are there from San Francisco like that one?
That earthquake, did in fact, have a direct benefit for me. Remember the lucrative seminars I was going to teach and the visions of plane crashes they gave me? I had committed to do the seminars but didn’t want to do them.
The company sponsoring the seminars had scheduled its biggest money-making show in San Francisco for the week following the quake. They had already laid out the expenses for the show and took a large financial loss when nobody could come. This loss, coupled with other factors, made it difficult for them to adequately promote the seminar series I was to give—so they canceled it.
Wars
Most analysis of why there are wars misses the most important point. They fill a deep need.
The war stories of the veterans of WWII are a striking illustration of this. They revel in accounts of the war. Comics and movies glorified the exploits of our soldiers. As a child growing up in the 1950’s there was certainly lip service paid to the horrors of war, but the overall impression was WWII was a glorious adventure in which good triumphed over evil.
It was a powerful catalyst for change, replacing the depression of the 1930s with the boom economy of the 1950s.
An interesting look at the British perspective of World War II is shown in the movie Hope & Glory. It shows the positive effects of the war on the English. The war brought a time of change, and a liberation from the stifling English pre-war society. The movie is told through the eyes of children, growing and maturing as England itself was. If this is an accurate portrayal of much of England during the war, then it gives a glimpse of one need the war filled for some of the English.
I’ve read that the ancient Celtic tribes used to war every spring. They did it in part for fun. They were careful not to wipe each other out, otherwise there would be no war the following spring.
Look at the invasion of Grenada. Shortly thereafter there was a rush of young men trying to get into the armed forces.
And now, in 1990, with a major portion of our economy dependent on our war machine, the enemy of the day, the USSR, has decided not to play anymore. We need a justification for our military might and Sadaam Hussein suddenly enters the picture.
We haven’t always needed the glory of defeating bad guys. The America of the 1960s was filled with self doubt and the emerging image of the ugly American. That America needed to learn the other side; that America had Viet Nam.