Dystopian Paradox

This blog is about hope for my kids’ and grandkids’ future. As to the title Dystopian Paradox, there is a line in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer that reads “Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace.”

That statement is paradoxical and yet it is a universal truth. I want the coming generations to acquire the true grit it will take to make it through the challenges they will face. But I don’t want them to endure lifetimes of dystopian circumstances.

As for me, my name is Ridge Dickey. When I put this blog up a month ago, I used the pseudonym Doug Duck on this blog. I use the name Doug at fast food joints. Giving them my real first name results in looks of bewilderment. My frat brothers tagged me with the Duck moniker, a reference to Daffy Duck. They call me Daff for short. After reading some of the stuff on this blog, you may understand why they came up with nickname. But my sister and niece and others have allowed me to use their names, so I’m no longer hiding behind a pseudonym.

But again, this blog isn’t primarily about me. My main agenda in publishing this blog is concern for my kids and grandkids and your kids and grandkids. I want them to have a future that provides them with opportunities to fulfill their potentials.

We are now confronted by a perfect storm of dynamic forces that challenge the continued existence of the world as we know it. The dark force of fear-based politics, which has always been with us, now has global warming as its ally. Together they pose the greatest threat yet to civilization.

This blog is about politics. Both god and politics are global terms. Ask five people what either of these terms means, and most likely you’ll get five different answers.

For purposes of the blog, politics will mean the acquisition of power and its use to improve the prospects of those under the power holder’s influence, or its abuse which results in the destruction of those prospects.

A challenge for each one of us is to fulfill our potential and therefor our personal political power, and to use that power to improve the prospects for the future. There are many corollaries to this challenge. They include:

We lose our personal power when we abdicate it in favor of demagogues and their institutions.

We lose our personal power when we do not support others and institutions worthy of our support.

We lose our power when we chose to go it alone and fail to form strategic relationships.

We gain personal power when we find a constructive way to challenge demagoguery

We gain personal power when we support others and institutions worthy of our support.

We gain personal power when we sacrifice personal gain in favor of the greater good.

To sum it up, each of us is a political animal. To deny it is to shirk a responsibility that we have to ourselves and to the betterment of the world at large. For us to deny our political power is to grant the forces of darkness the opportunity to prevail. The forces of darkness are parasitic, which left unchecked result in the destruction of us all including the parasite.

We can also view ourselves as existing in a spiritual realm. I find it useful to think of this realm composed of two opposing spirituals forces, one of love and the other fear. These terms also describe two of our emotions. But our emotions are transient- they come and go, whereas the spiritual realm in the classic sense transcends time and space.

I try to picture myself as being a part of or connected to the spiritual state of love. I still experience fear. A lot of it. And I’m certainly not always loving. But if I let fear become my spiritual state, then anger, hate, greed, revenge and despair will crowd out the light within me.

The symbol of the yin-yang, a circle occupied by two congruent paisley-shaped elements (one white surrounding a small black circle, and the other its opposite- black with a small white circle inside), to me is a visual representation of the spiritual states of love and fear. In the best of us the light predomintates, but if we are not vigilant, that darkness inside will grow. And in the rest of us, somewhere inside exists the light but rendered ineffectual by overwhelming darkness.

Politics operates in the spiritual realm. Our challenge is to make use of our political power in the spiritual realm of love. The first step is to acknowledge this power. The second step is onto an up-elevator that never ends, a lifelong process of learning brought to focus by strategic thinking.The alternative, which is to sell our souls for self gain or to deny our political power, is a trip on a down-elevator with the next dark age its destination.

While this stuff gets a little high-minded, this blog will attempt some humor from time to time. Nothing beats a good laugh.