There is a point in time in which the brain starts filtering the images coming in, all the lines written, all the spoken words. All repetitive, the brain protect us from the unnecessary air time. The Mother Battery goes on power save.
The quota of pictures of despairing immigrants on boats or detention camps, the quota of Trump’s idiotic texts, and the quota of exposure to the epidemic of populism, all have been reached. Your mind is told: You’ll be running now in low battery mode. I am in low battery mode.
Yet, all those things are here, in front. Trumpism is on a rampage of destruction of dignity, decency and care for each other, with the salt and pepper of perpetual glorification of the self and selfishness. It’s not America first that I worry about, but the Me First epidemic that is supporting.
In Viral Change™ we say: don’t fight a negative behavioural epidemic from within; start a counter positive epidemic of something else. What about an epidemic of kindness, truth and care for others? An epidemic of ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts’?
What? Can I not say this in a blog about change, leadership, organizations, business and all that stuff? Is it the wrong blog? Well, unsubscribe.
I am biased today. Of all days. Because I have just washed online the documentary just released ‘The Final Year’, a real life collage of the last year of the Obama administration seen through the eyes and activities of their State Department, the foreign arm of the administration. Being non-American I am not part of its politics. But being interested in large scale change, Viral Change™, large scale mobilizing and ‘ exponential management’, it is impossible to ignore what happens in the USA and infects us all.
And infected we are. I have just seen in the last months a world which has been converted, as soon the current US administration took over, into a vast cultural Hiroshima. A world, with respect to the winners of the contest, in which America is Not First. Sorry. Nor is the rest of the world first, for that matter. It is Me First, the mother of all populist appeals.
We all now will have scares, and who knows even a Memorial Wall of Ideas killed by the repetition of lies.
And this is one of my optimistic days, no kidding.
When I watched the documentary, I wanted two things. One is to pretend that it’s just a nightmare and all will be all right with a glass or two. The other was to give a hug to Samantha Power, the formidable Irish born woman, then UN ambassador. Wow!
I almost hugged the screen.
I think it was the always impressive The Atlantic magazine that called it a mixture of ‘exhilarating and depressing’. A very good friend of mind reacted: just like any other day.