Alex Jones hosts a nationally syndicated news/talk show based in Austin, Texas. You may already be familiar with him. From time-to-time I’ve listened to his highly-amped commentary. Needless to say, while we may agree on a range of issues, our styles are very different.
The video linked below was produced July 26, 2012. By the title, RED ALERT: AMERICA UNDER SIEGE – THE ROUNDUP BEGINS, you get an idea where he’s going. He takes umbrage with what appeared at the time, to be an agreement that Sec. of State Hillary Clinton was about to sign. The U.N Arms Trade Treaty would have meant restrictions on domestic gun ownership. The deal didn’t go down, which wasn’t apparent to Mr. Jones at the time.
I watched this 49 minute tirade. I let several days pass before responding via another video. Several more days have passed before I’m now presenting it here. While it wasn’t exactly “much ado about nothing,” it was, in my opinion, far more reaction than was necessary, or wise.
However, reactionism of this kind is typical these days.
It’s amusing to read the copy in the description of Jones’ show from his web site:
Jones avoids the bogus political labels of “left and right” and instead focuses on what really matters — what’s right and wrong.
In spite of the claimed avoidance, the statement translates into Jones is doing what everyone else is doing; i.e., giving his opinion. No more, no less. Believing his opinion is “right” (better) and others are “wrong” (worse) is exactly what people on the “left” and “right” are doing. In the process they remain ideologically polarized and divided, which contributes to things staying just as they are.
I appreciate Mr. Jones’ passion, but for the tens of thousands who listen or watch him, I offered another perspective.
We are well-practiced in the art of reacting, unaware that there’s no such thing. There is only creating. What we think of as a “response”, is actually new stimulus.
We are creating our reality, both present and future moments, by the views that we hold dear, and the actions that come from them. Whether by love, or by fear, we are always creating. This is an understanding that has escaped our education system. It is absent from science, and missing in most religious traditions, which tend to focus on, and promote devotion to an animating force or “authority” believed to be outside of one’s self.
Self-understanding is not cultivated or even encouraged. Self-reliance is unknown. We’re steeped in matters of conflict, vulnerability, risk, and limitation, where past ways are glorified amid a chaotic present.
Our willingness to be “governed,” has also been cultivated, as has our willingness to accept early inoculations to stave off diseases we’ve been led to believe will be inevitable if we don’t. In the process we’ve seen a gradual transfer of responsibility and consciousness from the individual to external, impersonal, “proxy” entities. Like frogs in a pot suddenly realizing that the water’s hot, we’ve made corporations and the governmental state, our masters, buying their promises to take care of, or protect us, as though we can’t take care of or protect ourselves.
In a country that boasts a rich history of innovation born in the garage or napkins over dinner, young people are conditioned to set their sights on getting jobs, not on creating them, on being consumers, not producers; to listen to the authorities even if they don’t listen to you.
We don’t know what we don’t know about ourselves. This is why we’re where we are now. As such, we don’t know the true missing link; that is, the power of stabilized imagination, which is the actual instrument of transformative creation that will change everything when we apply it individually and consciously, with the ultimate stabilizer, love.
