Over the counter culture
Sometimes I feel like I AM LOST in a wilderness after a disaster of gigantic magnitude.
There are remnants of civilized thought, worlds and behavior all around but they are covered by the soot of our own perception.
All empires have to expire even the ones we built in our own mind.
My motto always has been challenge with courage rather than indulge in comfort without a future.
Sometimes we run around raining on everyone’s parade as if they had invited us to the party to be the critic in residence. We behave like hogs in a back yard taring into fertile ground and uproot confidence as if it were an obnoxious weed.
Art and Art events are not like a Sales event where we need to discern by like or dislike by size, color, price or preference but where we have to switch the button that is set on auto pilot off and become fully aware of our emotions, our interconnectedness and with our responsibilities towards the planet and our fellow human beings.
We forget or ignore that nobody had ask us to play the elephant in the porcelain shop to use a trite and triste analogy.
Critics are like fossils from an extinct era and in this modern day world with its multiple levels of relations we need more people to step up as avatars to use another laden term to become advisers that beckon with compassion and understanding to be granted a willing ear.
The revolution has already begun and it again is a counter revolution to cultural dogmas and its Intellectuphile leaders who fall in the same trap of previous taste mangers and know it best that have disappeared in the pit of self-indulgence of course in me included.
The job is to find light in the darkest corners of judgment and to begin to dismantle a mind that has become addicted to a self imposed Duality which limits our potential by reducing our perspective to a bird’s eye view.
From the distance everything looks like a threat to our own taste and opinions and we waste precious time to denigrate what is part of us and which is an aspect of the greater societal body we are adjourned too and can’t exist without no matter how the Ego claims otherwise.
I know that fairness is not something that comes easy and that our survival instinct is activated with quad speed before our logical capabilities have a chance to intervene but everything is re-programmable if that is our wish.
Let’s start indulging ourselves in each other’s wisdom and use the critic in us to self reflect to create a better human being.
The occasion is calling us to rise again and again above the lower instincts that are in a constant mode of defense against various degrees off so perceived competitors.
Now is the time to step outside the circle of yesterday’s confusion and to stop the self enslavement and to return to appreciation and acknowledgement of the value that each one of us brings to the table.
By Richard Schemmerer
