Just saw a peice in the Huffington Post about a mother throwing acid at her teenage daughter for looking at a boy on a motorcycle. That, coupled with the recent shooting of a teenager because she wanted to go to school has temporarily flattend me. It doesn’t matter where in the world this happened; let’s not cloud the issue by getting into a race/religion bashing thing… it would be pointless. All races and religions have committed attrocities against each other at some point; black, white, brown and ‘yellow’, Christian, Muslim and Jew. It’s not because of race or religion that some of us act in this way; it’s because we’re humans… clever monkeys really. (In fact that’s unfair to monkeys) When I think of all the high-minded, leadership talk and theories that I and others like me glibly spew out on a near daily basis, and all the HR professionals who talk about engagement and whether an individual or team is blue, red, green or puse, I despair. So much of the world is still living in a world of myths and legends, gods and demons, ritual and dogma. While that continues, I’m afraid all the Western world’s personal impact, presentation skills, influencing, negotiation, teambuilding (leadership development) is just papering over the cracks of the veneer thin mask we laughingly call ‘civilisation’. A whole heap of root and branch work has to done to get this species into a position where it might just evolve and not simply fester away. Our species is light years away from being truely civilised, light years. I guess all we can hope is we eventually turn ourselves around and get our heads out of believing there’s some superbeing out there responsible for it all and it’s all out of our control. There is no superbeing, there’s only us and maybe other ‘life-forms’ screwing up their particular peices of rock flying around their suns the same as us. It’s us… we are the universe made into flesh (probably an electro-chemical error) but that’s the position. So here’s my own world changing message… The sooner we stop praying and start consciously creating and ‘being’, the quicker we might draw a veil over the last few millenia and get on with the next.
