Imbalance

When I was in my early twenties, I was a reporter for a local newspaper on the Jersey Shore. I covered a town run by a Republican town council. They made a very unpopular decision to allow the sale of land in an area many residents thought should be protected from development. It was for an assisted living facility.

The residents were as vocal as they could be about it. They demanded to be heard. There were town meetings where people lined up, out the door, and spoke to the council about having gone to that land when they were young with their parents to see the egrets, or go fishing and the like. Adults cried over the thought of possibly losing this pristine land to another concrete structure and parking and traffic.

I spoke with all the members of the council about how they would vote after all the public outcry. They all said that there were many people in favor of the assisted living facility, they just didn't make it to the meetings, and they deserve to be considered too.

One of the members of the council, who asked to speak to me off the record, was very blunt. He told me the council had decided to vote for the development before the meeting. The meeting and what the people wanted meant nothing to them. They were going through the motions of "listening" to the people all the while planning to vote for the development. The developers had lined the council members' pockets, and that's how the council decided how to vote. There was no sense of duty to advocate for the people they represented, only the inconvenient necessity of having to pretend that they actually were advocating for their constituents.

This is what's going on with gun laws in this country that are allowing the mass shootings. The politicians who vote against gun safety laws do so because they have no interest in gun safety. They want to be in government to make changes that will enrich them and the people they care about. To get into government, they need money. And they take money, from the NRA, and then vote the way the NRA wants them to so they can keep getting money from the NRA and remain in government and get richer and richer.

How else can we explain that it's legal in the US to sell military style assault weapons to radicalized young men, and that when we demand changes in gun laws so we'll be protected from this domestic terrorism, nothing ever happens? Because these politicians are the same as the local town council that couldn't have cared less about what was best for their town and the people in it. It was all about personal enrichment at the expense of innocent people.

So who are these NRA? They're scared to death of the boogeyman. They want guns because they're paranoid that they'll need to protect themselves from a "stranger", and we'd better keep all these "strangers" out. Their fear is causing the violence that they're terrified of.

Innocent people are dying because rich people are afraid, and they're making other young, impressionable, easily brain-washed people afraid.

This country has an extreme imbalance of fear. You can feel fear in certain communities. Its energy permeates the space. And you can also feel peace and balance in other communities, where people are respected and respectful and happy and relaxed and not fearful. You can feel your anxieties lift just being in a space where vibration is high and in these places you know everything is OK, that life is good.

We need more of this. More raising vibration. More giving the cold shoulder to fear. More knowing that we are OK, nothing is going to happen, people are good. Because light is stronger than shadow.