The dehumanization of what is happening now

What Trump/Vance/Maga are doing … what Netenyahu and all who support him are doing … what Putin, his oligarchs, and his war are doing … what Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, PetroChina, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, ConocoPhillips, Sinopec, bp, Marathon Petroleum, and their dirty energy mafia are doing … it degrades humanity.

And somehow, we go about our daily tasks … because what can we do?

Gradually, we feel our own humanity degraded by either knowing what is happening and not feeling able to do anything … or by avoiding knowing what is happening.

I long for the day when all of them … presidents, oligarchs, weapons dealers, oil companies, and their puppets … are toppled from power and a new wave of justice, creativity, kindness, and wisdom replaces their decadence, corruption, and idiocracy.

But where will that wave of justice, creativity, kindness, and wisdom come from, if all of us have been dragged down into complacency and its moral deterioration with the perpetrators? What if the tactics of authoritarianism domesticate us, train us for preemptive, complacent obedience? (For more on these tactics, see: https://brianmclaren.net/store/)

In this agonizing time, we must do all we can to preserve and rebuild our own humanity. For some of us, “all we can” means running for political office. For some of us, it means supporting good and humanizing organizations with our money and energy and time. For some of us, it means using our citizenship and voice to vote and call and boycott and buycott and protest and post and like and subscribe and unsubscribe.

For some, it means making music and poetry and art that helps us stay human … that invites us to feel and not turn away … to face and not pretend.

For me, it has meant working on a novel that I hope you will find helps you stay human. It’s called The Last Voyage and is available everywhere now (including audio): https://brianmclaren.net/the-last-voyage-my-new-sci-fi-novel/

Here are a three pieces of music that have been helping me uphold my humanity lately.

First, a song by my saongwriter daughter, Jodi McLaren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khbjUv6ZI-I&list=OLAK5uy_k_tJROlEqLF4Nlj9A7IoOO5yH0Z06_46w

A song by Khalid Abdalla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ag8pIeTgvk

And another by Jodi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvnpPw1XWvk

And I need to add one more, just discovered: https://youtu.be/qxMF6KlXqdQ?si=AYlAoR08iLB1d3L1

I hope you’ll join me in sharing (everywhere you can) music and art and podcasts and organizations that are helping you stay human in a time our global civilization is self-dehumanizing in a hundred ways.