Pain is the Medicine Working

Fear and Anger are a cycle. A terrible one - but a series of reciprocities. They are curious in their predictability within human manifestation, as a series of neuro-chemical triggers shaped by biological evolution; taking form in the decision to flee or fight.

The society of the American Republic is in the grip of such a cycle now. Faster and faster the gyre wobbles, from one to another. They feed off of each other, as a snake devours its tail - and the tail devours the snake from the inside.

Action, reaction, reprisal, response, action, etc. The amygdala - that piece of the brain that regulates emotional response and memory - performs its function with masterful efficiency within the population... and fear pheromones dance from one skin to another's nose, triggering group emotional responses in the slide towards automated mob action.

Remember - we are but apes after all.

But the first trigger of fear is stress. What caused the stress? What creates it now?

Imbalance, antagonism, alienation. Social dissonance. Cultural dissatisfaction. Economic disparity and exclusion. You can correlate compassion and inclusion within a society to its stress levels. And it is ironic that the more stress we feel, the less likely we are to be compassionate and inclusive.

The point? If the society be structured hierarchically (as ours is), the stressors begin with a transaction from those at the top to those at the middle. The agents of socioeconomic control (the elite, if you will) introduce stressors through their actions into those below them, and they spread out from there. So if the "elite" create stress - ask if it because they themselves feel stress. And then ask - what creates fear in the "elite" that the pass that fear down to us?

Perhaps it is because they feel that more change then they are comfortable with has already occurred, and as apes, are responding according to their evolutionary programming - withholding resources and acting outside of the realms of far-sighted rationality due to the emotive hijack they are experiencing.

And if that change has already occurred to create this First Fear - then how much closer are we to creating the New Way necessary for our survival? Disease fights hardest against the Medicine when it begins to realize that it is losing ground, as all entities do when threatened with the possibility of their extinguishment. If the disease was not fighting as hard as it is, it would be because the Medicine was not effective.

But the Medicine is working. Believe not in this - Know It. Continue to Be the Medicine in all that you do, and Health shall come to pass.

-Three Feather