https://smag31.com/and-people-stayed-home/ This was written by Kathleen O’Mara, in 1869 after the Irish famine. And people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played, and learned new ways of being, and stopped. And listened deeper Someone meditated, someone prayed, someone danced. Someone met their shadow. And people began to think differently. And people healed. And, in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways, dangerous, meaningless, and heartless, even the earth began to heal. And when the danger ended, people found each other, grieved for the dead people, and made new choices, and dreamed of new visions, and created new ways to life and healed the earth completely, just as they had been healed themselves.
During the Great Potato famine, Ireland's greatest export was... people. But I get what you're saying. Thank you for sharing this lovely bit of poetry. We need this on a forum like PF.
On several threads there have been calls for an end to the division from both sides so I chose to only post the poem by itself in the OP without any comment because I believe we need to digest it first before we start asking questions. Having taken the time to appreciate both the Truth and the Vision in the OP poem we can now gain some perspective as to what is happening to ourselves in the here and now and that there will be a future after all. So my question is simple and none partisan. What do you imagine our future will be like?
When all of this ends what will be left will be We the People. We have an opportunity to determine our future again. We have an opportunity to understand what the term values really means and are we living up to those values? Things will be different. We can make positive changes. We just have to imagine what those positive changes can be.
Millions of lives completely ruined. Mass dependency on government. Significant reduction in standard of living. Highly regulated, and monitored travel. Highly regulated and monitored currency. Living like little rats in cages, thankful for our nibbles, waterr bottles and wheel to run on. Snitching on each other. Embracing our serfdom and feeling safe Meanwhile the finance titans will be living like kings in palaces, as we bailed their sorry asses out, again.
Historically emergency powers never completely disappear. I think we'll see a 9/11 type scaling back of some of the more drastic measures while a bunch will remain. Any way you slice it this will be a disaster in terms of civil liberties. Really it all entirely depends on when we get a vaccine. If we get lucky and make one within a few months it won't be as bad, but we have no real strategy except to slow the inevitible spread while we look for one. That could turn out to be a long term endeavour. As citizens we need to make it abundantly clear ahead of time that these measures must at any cost be temporary.
