Our species will become extinct if connection is not nurtured!

Our willingness or unwillingness to connect to our individual humanity and to each other will determine the survival of our species.  I truly believe this. The heinous, inhuman, and inconsiderate things that we do to each other, to our environment, and to the beautiful creatures that inhabit our planet, makes us excellent candidates for the fate that destroyed the dinosaurs!

To be clear, I don’t believe our unnatural detachment from each other or from our individual humanity will magically attract colossal rocks from space to fall on our planet and destroy the human race!  But I do believe our reckless disregard for each other’s well-being over successive centuries have created “meteorites” of disconnection that continue to shatter the thoughts, words, and behaviors that nurture connection. These callous comets of our own making appear to have permeated the earth’s atmosphere, rapidly fraying the delicate fabric of the oneness of humanity, and unraveling the emotional, mental, and spiritual strands that our souls harbor when we leave the shores of heavenly mystery and are born to our mothers.

The psyche of humanity has been bombarded by asteroids of disconnection for such a long time that we are more likely to accept the illusion of our differences and are often amazed when we find so many things we have in common with our fellow Americans, immigrant neighbors, or the so-called foreigners that are separated from us by the oceans. 

This is not a doomsday prophecy from ancient or biblical scripture.  No spiritually inspired guru revealed this prediction in an overpriced book on Amazon.com, and neither did I go into a super trance after smoking some powerful weed to receive a divine message from a deity in the heavenly realms! This theory about our demise was developed from the personal observations of an aging, American baby-boomer whose childhood experiences taught him a lot about what human beings are capable of when they’re disconnected from their humanity. 

Throughout my childhood and adulthood, I’ve watched this disconnection in its many forms play out on the world stage, confirming that detachment from our humanity has humble beginnings as the infant (but annoying) inconsiderations that our fellowmen perpetrate every now and then in our daily lives. We rarely link the behaviors of these “infants” to the heinous actions of disconnected adults. But, if we look closely, we will see that full-blown disconnection starts as little inconsiderations. Over time, these behaviors mature into harmful forms of detachment.  

Intolerance of diversity of any kind in our neighborhoods is a microcosm of the worldwide cruelties of ethnic cleansing, religious bigotry or sexual assaults of women that we read about on our smart phones; the degree to which these cruelties are levied is the only difference.  When disconnection matures and severely deteriorates the conscience, human beings are capable of the heinous things we see and hear about way too often.

On a daily basis, we’re witnessing the awful outcomes of disconnection, when humans cut themselves off from their individual humanity and to each other.  As the tragedies of harmful detachment unfold on our televisions, over the internet, on the radio, in our newspapers, and in our water-cooler conversations, it appears that we’ve become a species sadly desensitized to the horrors.  Desensitization is a wicked consequence of our heartless behaviors from one age to the next era. It’s an indication that we've become conditioned to expect the worst behaviors of our lot, accepting the horrors as the rule and the beauty of humanity as the exception. How sad is this?

Only when one is disconnected from his humanity can he inflict the devastation that occurred in Orlando. But did this really surprise us? Haven’t we witnessed this type of inhumanity in our past? The horrors of the holocaust was the direct result of humans that chose to cut themselves off from their connection to other souls. Slavery or servitude still exist in our modern day, and the perpetrators - mostly men - will continue to enslave as long as they dethrone their humanity and empower their rationalizations.  

The decisions of governments and corporations that favor profits and/or cost cutting over the health and safety of people are sinister forms of disconnection that hide behind the veil of free enterprise or rationalized public interest. A few years ago, in the city of Flint, Michigan, a decision was made to draw the drinking water from the Flint River, which was known by all parties involved this decision to be highly contaminated. This was a purposeful act that exposed anyone who drank the city tap water (especially children) to lead poisoning. Very few people want to connect this decision to a glaring demographic: that the citizenry of Flint is made up of mostly African Americans. Shhhh...don't tell anyone that race played a role in this decision, because color is no longer a factor in how decisions are made in America since Barack Obama was elected leader of the free world!

The Michigan decision-makers were able to sleep at night, knowing, but not caring about the inhumanity of their decisions. I have to believe that the families and loved ones of the decision-makers did not live in Flint. And, if my assumption is accurate, I am forced to conclude that they considered the health and safety of the citizens of Flint, dispensable. The only way one can do something as callous as this is when they have little or no connection to souls outside their small circle. Disconnection is a disease of the heart and mind that calcifies the conscience of humanity, transcending race, color, creed, religion, and gender.

I could go on and on about many horrific examples of the poisons of disconnection throughout history and during our modern times.  I could spend all year aggregating countless instances of man’s inhumanity to man, but it would only serve to bolster a sad truth: that as a species we have evolved intellectually, but our emotional evolution, the key to meaningful connection, has either devolved or evolved at a significantly slower pace. 

We can't afford to change the woeful patterns of a disconnected world at a slow pace. We need to act quickly, decisively, intelligently, and consistently to counter the internal (psychological) and external (societal) forces of separation that weaken the connection to our individual humanity and to each other.  We must learn how to restore and strengthen our connection to each other and our environment or continue on the same path as the dinosaurs. In other words, if we don't change, we are going where we’re headed!

So, how did we get to this place? How did we disconnect from our individual humanity, from each other, from the beautiful creatures on the planet, and from the planet itself? How did we not know what was happening to us over the centuries? How can we send men to the moon, conquer polio, or exceed the speed of light in our flying machines while forgetting, ignoring, or purposefully destroying what is necessary to maintain a genuine connection to our fellow man?

In the upcoming weeks, I will try to answer some of these questions and hope that you will chime in and provide me with your thoughts and insights.