It bears repeating, that the system we live under(!), in the U.S., favors the wealthy. It is they who own the major media, accounting for why disturbed individuals in serious need of the tender care of mental health professionals, are given widely distributed radio and television shows. There they shape opinion and court discontent, steering it toward scapegoat and away from master. The range of opinion among media owners is the range of opinion we get. How many Socialist commentators can you name in the mainstream press? As the element that humanizes capitalism in western Europe, and other 'first world' nations, Socialism is certainly worthy of inclusion in a democratic dialogue. Instead, proven prevaricators are granted prime-time and incisive thinkers languish on the margins. The press is "Free" if you can afford it. One can understand media hysteria at signs of democracy rising in Latin America (Venuzuela for example) when one considers the numbers ­ as Arundhati Roy says, "They are few, we are many."

So as citizens we are charged with un-ensnaring ourselves from an ubiquitous propaganda system, then deciding what to do. Do we devote energy to resisting one of the myriad and constant, local and national, assaults on our hard-won if limited liberties and our life system, or the "foreign" policy that extends that assault to other nations? Or do we turn away and contemplate a more "spiritual" direction, choosing transcendence over material engagement? And do we ally ourselves in either of these endeavors, or are we alone?

The "activist" often derisively dismisses the seeker's project as new age "naval-gazing", naïve and self-delusional. The naval gazer might consider the delusion to ly rather with the "activisit" who clings to material illusion and misses the eternal. A third party might attempt to claim the high ground of "moderation" by blending the validity in each of these views. That would be me.

Eckhart Tolle describes the intelligence that is the universe as inaccessible so long as we dwell in fear-based egoic mind chatter. If you doubt that ego rules ask yourself who is, and surrounds, the president. Could that be the case if ego did not dominate our national psyche. And if ego rules there, how far is it from our own consciousness (or unconsciousness)? Neither activism nor contemplation are necessarily ego-free but when they are they tap into the intelligence of totality and become part of, and amplify, the awakening, which is, or ought to be, the object of both.