When I saw the movie, The Matrix, I was intrigued like so many others about the concept of unwittingly living in a fabricated world run by our own, manmade machines. I have used the choice between taking the blue pill and the red pill (offered to Neo by Morpheus in deciding whether he was willing to see the truth) as a metaphor many times in my own life. Some years back, I hit bottom with drinking, gambling and … other things. I had to decide whether I would “see how deep the rabbit hole goes.” I made a decision to embark on a spiritual journey. I thought I would be on a quest of self-realization, but my journey took me much further than that. I began to see ominous signs of a rapidly dilapidating humanity and have been climbing deeper into the rabbit hole ever since. It has been the most painful, ongoing experience of my life and it still ain’t over. It has flattened me physically. It has crushed me emotionally. It has bankrupted me financially. I don’t recommend it to anyone. Yet, I must say something to my fellow journeymen or to anyone who is feeling funky about what is happening to all of us and needs to hear that they’re not crazy.
Your Humanity is a voice concerning our shared experience as humans in this post-modern world, which peers beyond the social, cultural and media rhetoric to examine what’s really going on in our world and what we might expect in the near future. Nearly everyone seems to have an innate feeling that something is amiss; that something has gone awry in our world, especially in the United States; and that there is a void in our human experience. What is that void? I am not sure, but I would like to explore some possibilities with you. Are we lost? I believe that we are. Can we be “found,” or rather, can we return to a place where we belong in the natural world? I don’t think so. So, why bother with this project? Well, first, I might be wrong. I hope that I am wrong. Second, I cannot simply sit back and do nothing while my world crumbles around me; I must say something. I want to hear what others have to say as well. I want us to speak to each other with honesty and compassion. If it were your last day on Earth, wouldn’t you want to just talk to someone? Wouldn’t you just want to feel that sweet human connection and the joy that comes with holding your humanity dear?
The outlook is not pretty. This forum’s purpose is not to make you feel better about how far we have fallen in our human history. Consumerism, nationalism, family, religion and other forms of propaganda hold that place in our culture. Here, the object is to share and connect. Share information and connect emotionally. My audience is made up of people like me; people who are starving for truth – or at least a sacred place where the bombardment of bullshit is not omnipresent – and a connection with others, who are so lonely in their feelings about our humanity that it is like being trapped in a Twilight Zone kind of scenario. I don’t know what we will discover. And that’s actually a good sign because life is mysterious and should not be foolishly considered otherwise. One thing does seem fairly clear and that is that this experiment of human history will not end well. Before then, let’s take our heads out of the sand and from out of our asses … let’s grab a red pill and face the truth together because it’s the only way we can truly experience the most beautiful ways of being human.
Mo McGowan
Your Humanity 