Our frame of mind must improve
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Editor,
The day before Veterans Day, the Australian “Sydney Morning Herald” printed a lead article entitled: “Ramping Up Militarization Against China, US to Rotate Marines at Australian Base.”
The first paragraph is all I need relate here: “Barack Obama is to announce that the US will begin rotating Marines through an Australian base in Darwin in a permanent new military presence, intensifying the alliance in a sign of heightened concern about China.”
If we read the article with our collective present frame of mind, it just makes all the sense in the world that this is the right thing to do. It can even be argued that doing this will avoid war, not start one.
My point in this letter has to do with just that: “our collective present frame of mind.” This, to me, is the entire, the basic and foundational problem we face as humans on planet Earth as we live out lives — lives that are too often filled with desperate hopes for something better. We are slipping and sliding backwards dangerously fast, my friends. All the evidence, local to global, supports this fact.
In my religious upbringing and training, which is Christian-based, I was taught that Jesus was one of the many wonderful “way-showers” and great spiritual teachers whom we could follow. I have, over the years, been an active and interested student of Jesus’ teachings. There is not one thing in the above article to which I refer, or for that matter much of anything our Washington crowd says or does, which follows Jesus’ teachings.
For gosh’ sake, what or whom do we follow when developing our frame of mind? Our attitudes? Our beliefs? Entire religions have formed around spiritual teachers like Jesus. Why don’t we follow them? Why do we so easily give into greed, fear, anger, attack and divisive ways?
The way I see it, our motivations need to change dramatically. Unless we do work toward changing our collective frame of mind, our species will be eliminated by two things simultaneously: (1) How we use our own technological advancements, and (2) Ignoring the environmental signals telling us to change our ways.
We are following leaders of destructive thinking. We need to change and follow teachers of constructive thinking.
Bob McClellan
Polson
