From Pain To Power: The Apathetic Activist Deals With A World Gone Mad (Pt. 1)

By: Russ Reina
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:40:01
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The end of our 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st found me living in intentional community in Oregon. There, amongst socially responsible, if not cutting-edge innovators in sustainable living, I found myself having to deal with my own incredible lack of concern about things going on in the greater world around me. For five years, while living at a hub of activism, I let the world take care of itself, and continue to do so today. Some call that apathy.

It started with that impending nationwide glitch called Y2K. While so many of the people around me were stockpiling food and water and building networks of cooperation, not to mention paranoia, I went about the business of running the community’s conference center. Did I concern myself about the impending threat and rally with them? Not a whit. Around the same time, the WTO Seattle protests found busloads of my friends traveling about 150 miles to get suppressed by the Police State, and I didn’t blink.

Then, some guy named Gore did blink in a showdown with a guy named Bush, and it was all a big Ho-hum, business-as-usual thing to me. Shortly thereafter, the World Trade Center got slammed, and, of course, at first appalled, within a short period of time I came to the conclusion that the bigwigs were using the whole mess to set something up for something that I wasn’t in the know enough to understand, let alone affect. Sure enough, the Iraq war (?) sprung from those loins and then occupation came and continues, and, outside of a cursory wonderment, I have no cry of outrage in me.

These are things that happen like many other things that happen throughout the world that I choose not to concern myself with anymore. The list seems endless. Yet, apathy is a pretty strong word to use to describe myself. How then, knowing that my life is about activism, could I live with my apathy?

The world I was born into was in the grip of forces that were beyond my reach. At ten years old, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. Daily, for weeks on end, we'd "duck and cover," practicing how to protect ourselves (!) in the event of nuclear attack. Once a week we'd have what I'd call "Hellfire Drills" where we'd be directed to silently file down into our concrete bunker-like basement and await an all-clear signal, which, depending upon the sadism factor of the nuns that day, would come quickly or excruciatingly slowly.

Every day for years, the noon air-raid sirens wailed and the radio regularly blared out an ominous tone, followed, at its cessation, by the message, "The foregoing was a test!” I’d have waves of apprehension commencing when I’d hear a plane overhead. The knowledge, drilled in to my bones, was that death would come from above. It doesn’t matter that with each report of danger there was an associated report of how our “resolve” would save the day, death was on its way. Period.

I fully expected the tension between Russia and my own country to explode in everyone’s face, much as I had been witness to countless explosions between my own parents. By the time I was six I figured out that adults, as a whole, were out of their minds and did not have the love in them to avoid destroying everything in my world, from top to bottom.

In my own home, Mother was poised to go berserk at any moment. At school, the Nuns laid in wait for me to do anything wrong as an excuse to whack the pointer on my butt. And then, in the news, Nikita Khrushchev armed with God-knows how many nuclear warheads was looking for any excuse to obliterate my neighborhood, which happened to be in Brooklyn, close enough to Manhattan for horseshoes.

When I was in my thirties, I started to really delve into my childhood experiences. The word that kept coming up for me was grief. It was personal grief, of course, but on the larger scale, grief about living in a world of moment-to-moment uncertainty. I really wasn’t gonna get to see a whole lot in my life because the USSR was out to get us and we were willing to retaliate unto total annihilation. History had brought us to the place where we were so well-armed that it was only a matter of time before we eradicated everything. I was convinced we truly were an experiment that failed.

As a child I was asked to make a decision that most people don’t face until they are adults. I had no doubt that the world was going to end, though I didn’t know when. So the central question of my life became, “How am I going to do this thing called life between now and when?

Next: A simple concept.

Russ Reina shares over 35 years of experience in the healing arts through his web site http://mauihealingartist.com It is a potent resource for those wishing to deepen their abilities in connection and develop their powers as healers. For a powerful free tool to explore your inner world, please check out his adjunct site http://thestoryofthis.net

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