You Say You Want a Revolution?

It’s stunning. Our world is in bona fide revolution. Protest movements are mobilizing in more places than ever in human history.

 

But why? In the aggregate, the human race is less oppressed today than at any other time. Yes, there are still millions suffering under the thumb of dictators, fundamentalist clerics, and outright tyrants, but probably fewer by far than in any previous century. So why is the world so hell bent on hitting the streets and trying to get their world leaders run out of town?

 

Because they can!

 

That oft-used ’60s chant, “The Whole World Is Watching,” has never been more true. Like it or not, we live ubiquitously under a relentless digital lens. Despots don’t find it as easy to squash a few thousand protesters when their every move is being reported to billions of planetmates via cell phone video and Twitter feeds.

 

You can’t help but marvel at the stunning freedom of participation made possible by social media. The Egyptian revolt exploded, goaded on by a simple message from a local Google executive insisting that things need not be the way they are.

 

But it’s not just about being mad as hell and not willing to take it. It’s about people becoming smarter than their governments and the politicians that run them. Whether those same people do anything constructive once the walls come tumbling down is something else altogether.

 

But to what end? The obvious answer is that all anyone really wants is a chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, no small thing, as we Americans know.

 

Peel away all the layers of this particular onion and you find an inexorable, game-changing shift, seriously and irrevocably raising humanity’s collective bar. As McLuhan said, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

 

I remember back in the ’70s waiting for the moon to finally make it to the seventh house and for Jupiter to align with Mars. Regrettably, the only signs of the onset of the Age of Aquarius was Nixon resigning and bell bottoms going off trend. I had the same feeling around Y2K, another non-event. But with the world coming apart and coming together all at the same time, Aquarius may simply have been mistimed, now that the Zodiac keepers have admitted to balling up the astrological charts. A new age appears to be staring us dead in the face!

 

Release the Gorgon!