DISABUSED

To free from a falsehood or misconception

It was some time early last year when I saw this report. Being one who watches very little TV, it must have been one of those Sundays that I had been watching some of the PGA tour and CBS programing went directly to this 60 Minutes report. I never watch 60 Minutes. It immediately grabbed my attention when in the promo for the piece the researcher made the comment about Expectations. The area of expectations, and how they had up to just a few years ago defined my life, had been going through some serious disabusing. This turned out to be one of the most transforming/reshaping experiences of my life. The expectancy I live with today has opened my eyes and reframed every moment which allows me to see possibilities the confining space of expectations had never allowed me to see. In a sense, I was freed from many mistaken notions that make up the American Dream.

I also get the sense that when most Americans hear something like that it makes them balk and more than likely tune me out...well, at least those who still have their hope shaped by the rhetoric of our systems ideology...especially the conservative Christians I have been surrounded by most of my adult life. I also get the sense that an assumptive leap is made by such people which in their minds firmly places me into another one of the world's political and economic and religious ideologies. That would be a mistake by those making such a leap. All human ideologies have their problems and at the same time these ideologies have such a blinding effect on us we can't see nor admit to the glaring problems of our own and at the same time leave us thinking all the others are evil. Evil or not they all are problematic and work against our freedom.

The beginning of the disabusing process was a painful one for me to say the least. It left me isolated from everyone as they all watched things they look to for security in their own lives being challenged in my life. Being called a socialist, and a Marxist, and being accused of being anti American were all new experiences for me. Having left the civil religion of our nation 20 years ago I had become use to being accused of heresy and being outside the will of God, so I had become pretty used to that. As the curtain was being pulled back and the illusions were being exposed I was left with choices that weren't easy to make and continuing to walk into the disorientation went against everything I had been shaped to believe previously was safe or wise. That former controlling belief system turned out to be one of the mistaken notions that needed to be disabused.

The 60 Minutes piece has it's problems, but for us Americans or for most anyone that has been shaped by the ideologies of Western Democratic Capitalist Consumerist Societies, there is much contained there in that could help us in the process of stepping back from what we believe, so as to take a critical look at the confining/blinding mistaken notions we are living in that we too often are found guilty of accusing others of being trapped in.

And just in case you missed it...I'm not promoting a socialistic system, I've just been going through a process of admitting to having misplaced my trust in the illusory ideas that our system functions on that are at war with the freedom I had been longing for...the freedom I have begun to experience for the very first time.