What I learned: 99% of you just don't care enough

My magic carpet post was meant as a social experiment.

Here in the United States people have been ranting and complaining, protesting and posting, about how much things supposedly suck. So I wanted to put people in the (theoretical) situation of being able to do something about it.

I gave people the opportunity to escape to a new world, where things could be better. I even recommended four leaders I thought might be fitting. Even further, I allowed people the opportunity to choose their own leader.

I invited approximately 700 people on my magic carpet ride to this new world. Of those, only 8 people responded, which translates to approximately 1%. This was a very, very sad statistic for me to review. I spent a significant amount of time trying to find a free and simple-to-use survey website that would allow the opportunity for limitless responses. I figured, how could people not answer just 5 basic questions??

My blog post received 138 views according to blogger, so there were certainly more people who started the journey, just not many who finished.

I began wondering why. I thought of a couple reasons for why people were discouraged:

1) They didn't know what it was for -- they perhaps did not, in fact, trust me enough to proceed

2) There was too much text and/or to much to do to proceed

3) There was too little time (only 60 hours) to execute

I think most people quite frankly got lost and confused.

So what can I conclude from this? Well, first and foremost, if I was to ever find myself in the midst of a zombie land, I thankfully now know the group of people I would roll with. Thank you, all eight of you, for being far more awesome than everyone else.

Next, I can conclude that if I ever want people to act on something, I need to provide instructions fitting for a five-year-old: minimal text, minimal work, and step-by-step how-tos and whys. (smh)

Last, I learned that things rarely succeed with the first round. So, look out, because there's a good chance that I will repeat this or something like it sometime in the near future.

Apokalypsis

Apocalypse originates from the Greek word apokalypsis, which really means revelation.

What happened was that I was looking for a documentary to watch during my late Friday evening after spending a good number of hours tweaking the fine details of my resume. I scrolled through my Netflix and narrowed it down to a decision between a documentary on dwindling honeybee populations and one titled 2012: A Time for Change.

The 2012 documentary didn't have a scene of mass destruction on its poster -- rather, a peaceful, almost meditative, image consisting of a spiral of jewels, eyes, and vivid colors.

Naturally, I was intrigued.

So I clicked play. And thus began my journey....

...into a movie that speaks perfectly to our present time.

The movie starts out by telling the story of how humanity was originally made of mud, then wood, and finally corn. The people made of mud were too weak, the people made of wood were too destructive, and the people made of corn were too visionary -- so their clear vision and understanding was slightly obscured, and thus they were able to build great feats of architecture and develop a system of mathematics and language. Human civilization was born.

Over a progression of various civilizations, we have further and further obscured our vision, to the point that we now have almost completely isolated ourselves from the natural progress of things. Well, the problem with that is that we, as beings of the Earth, are not above any other beings of this Earth. Just because we are capable of a higher level of thinking does not entitle us to anything remarkable -- especially when it comes to doing remarkably dangerous things like extracting oil and high density elements (e.g. uranium) onto this surface where they don't belong. Our biggest sense of entitlement comes from money. But what good are dollar bills and credit cards in the middle of the jungle or a tsunami?

There's a simple law that Sir Isaac Newton once published that applies to our concept of living just as much as it does to a truck coming at a sedan at 60 mph: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Numbers of people, highly intelligent people at that, have been speaking out about the obvious neon green sign hanging above our heads: STOP KILLING THE EARTH AND ONE ANOTHER -- IT'S GOING TO BITE YOU IN THE ASS!

Our problem really is that simple. Of course the more eloquent thinkers have instead phrased it as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"; and they have developed concepts and methods for nurturing compassion for living beings; and even showed scientific evidence that we and everything that surrounds us comes from the same original bit of matter.

The obvious message should be getting annoying by now to anyone who has been paying attention. I know it has for me. It's like I've been surrounded by advertisements about humanity's deterioration for a decade just like that scene from Minority Report.

Replace those ads for booze, insurance, and beauty products with crying baby sounds -- and that's what those of us who care to read important information have been metaphorically dealing with. Stop the crying!!! Whatever it takes, make it stop! 

Really. If I had 74 billion dollars like Carlos Silm Helu of Telmex, I'd funnel it into everything demonstrated in 2012: A Time for Change -- minimalist building construction, utilization of ecosystems to clean our waters, and employment of fungi to do things we excavate mineral sources to build machinery to do -- rather than Colombian oil excavation, like what he's doing. 

But why are so many people still not paying attention? Why is the message not striking people across the head who need to listen the most? What does it take to get them to listen? I think our Earth is generating these same questions in a sense. Need we forget, our Earth is a living organism -- and, when an organism, especially one this powerful, is attacked, it will attack back. 

I believe in the Revolution of Revelation. We are on the brink of it. Let's just hope we make the necessary changes before it's too late.