It seems to me that for every Contact we make, there are Signs of another Independence Day, 2012 around the corner. Why is it that our society so often tends to appeal to our deepest fears rather than our deepest hopes and inner strength? It’s not just Hollywood, either.

One of the national platform doctors I respect, Dr. Mercola, sends me his newsletter every week and there is always a list of hot topic links to draw me in to his advice and ideas about healthy alternatives. The problem is, however, that they are almost always fear based, i.e. “If you don’t stop using Splenda, you’re dead!” That’s a bit of a turn-off for me. Alternatively, Dr. Andrew Weil sends me his newsletter with lots of love and positivity, recipes for healthier meals and recommendations about how to overcome challenging habits. Which links do you think I click on more frequently? Are you different? Are the fear-based marketing strategies working on you?

Prior to Barack Obama’s election, I received a deluge of emails and appeals from conservative Americans assuring me that his election would be the end of civilization, the end of Democracy, the beginning of a new Communist, Islamic Republic of America. A couple years later, President Obama is still doing his best to make this country better than the day he arrived in the Oval Office. And we have not made it easy with our tendency towards doom and gloom.

Yet, it is so easy to appeal to fear. I believe humans have been historically susceptible to fear as a primary tactic of manipulation. Give the church the deed to your house and we’ll make sure you get to heaven. Hell, Dante’s Inferno did slightly more for church attendance than the classic film, The Exorcist. Fear has been a tool to sustain racism, ignorance, sexism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and even the mistreatment animals experience in industrial meat producing centers across America.

I suppose we each have a choice as to which voices we will listen to throughout life and the fear based bullhorns tend to seem louder, imminent, and more seductive. Like the Karate Kid, limping into the last round of the tournament, the other kid get’s the command from his sensei to “sweep the leg.” While he knows it is an immoral approach to solving the conflict, his own moral fortitude is overruled by the fear of his egotistical teacher.

As the recent events in Egypt have shown us all, it is possible to ignore the voices of doom and gloom and manifest positive change. Yet, a week later as swarms of other protests occur across the Arab world, there are still leaders who attempt to hold on to power through fear and aggression. There will always be leaders who use their villainy and force in order to cut the voice of peace and love out from under them. Let’s just hope that we all have within us at least one little trick in our toolbox that is like a talisman of light, pouring our truth into the darkness.

“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. C.G. Jung

It was a fascinating synchronicity in my life. As my house was pelted by thundering winds and layers of thick, unrelenting snow last week, rocks, bottles and bullets flew in Cairo. The inundation I experienced here in Chicago felt in some ways to be overshadowed by the revolution taking place in Egypt, and yet, in other ways the two events felt strangely aligned. I skipped back and forth between CNN and the Weather Channel, watching for a break in both relentless storms.

While elements of change ebbed and flowed from the heartland of the United States to the ancient sands of the Middle East, I couldn’t help but ponder the significance of an apparent web of momentous physical and psychic events occurring on our planet and in our consciousness.

I suppose I unconsciously took it for granted that folks in the Middle East were not willing to fight for their rights. Regime after controlling, oppressive regime in the Arab world seemed to have taken advantage of a few convenient scapegoats (the U.S., Israel, capitalism, Hollywood, “The West”) through the years, conveniently overshadowing their own horrible human rights violations, the economic rape and pillaging of their common citizens and the general manipulation of hearts and minds.

Over shadow is truly at the core of it, too. It takes a lot to blur the deep human longing for wholeness, joy and love and it relies upon an overarching, bloated shadow that swaddles our essential love for life in rags of doubt and resentment. The greatest tragedies in human history have typically occurred as a result of similarly monolithic entities who have successfully brainwashed the collective consciousness with a tribal cool-aid aimed at using our inherent desire to protect against ourselves.

Not dissimilar has been the environmental snow job on the planet…

The only thing that matters is our advancement. You want to protect our evolution as a species, don’t you? Then who cares about strip mining? Who cares about aerosol cans and light bulbs? Who cares about sucking the earth dry in a matter of a few hundred years what took millions to create? You want to be the best nation, don’t you? The strongest power? Drink, drink, it tastes like fruit punch…

The archetype of the wounded healer is one that has long resonated for me. The notion that in order to truly help others heal one must have done his or her own fair share of suffering and grown from it, i.e. placed the pain and near death experiences (physically and/or emotionally) into a constructive context, is probably the most potent response to “why bad things happen to good people.”

However, when an archetype is not expressed in a meaningful, transformative, dynamic way, it “loads up with energy and becomes inhuman” (Marie-Louise von Franz). I believe that is the situation we are facing on our planet these days.

Without transforming our collective suffering thus creating a sacred wisdom of the heart borne from pain, we risk the creation of something terrible and ugly in its place.

Without choosing to learn from our arrogance, immaturity and selfishness as a society we don’t really grow up as a species and end up retarding our psycho-spiritual development as well.

When a government (headed by people we the people elect) say and do crazy things, are their absurd behaviors a result of the individuals themselves or is it part of a larger, systemic institutional insanity that is really to blame?

If a man walks into a school board meeting, spray paints a red “V” on the wall that resembles something concocted in and by Hollywood to resemble some authentic symbol of revolution, anarchy or dissent and then goes on to shoot up the place, can we say that his instability is personal and not institutional?

When a body of law-makers votes for a war based on unverified evidence of weapons of mass destruction but everyone seems to believe there are in fact weapons of destruction, is the insanity about the individuals themselves who voted yes or about the tribal consciousness that believes that one country has the right to attack another country?

When a couple of high school kids murder their fellow students on their way to eat an unhealthy school lunch and a few miles away hums one of the largest assembly plants that builds weapons of mass destruction, is it about the personal mental illnesses of the boys or the national mental illness of the corporations, governments and voters?

If a shark appears in the Red Sea (a body of water connected to every other ocean in the world) and starts eating tourists much in the way that Jaws terrorized Amity but the Egyptian government suggests that the shark was trained by Israeli intelligence to disrupt tourism, is it about the absurd ideas of an individual who suggests it or about the culture that allows such thoughts to exist? Jaws or Jews?

“What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark (in the sea) to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm,” South Sinai Governor Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha was quoted as saying by state news site egynews.net.

If I never had a fear of sharks until I went to see a movie called “Jaws” at a very young age, is it me that is crazy if I fear sharks and I live thousands of miles from an ocean or is it Steven Spielberg, or Hollywood, or a society that pays for tickets to see horror films, or a nature channel that airs an insatiable series called “Shark Week?”

We are so quick to label this or that person “insane” or “sociopathic” and yet we typically resist the notion that an entire way of thinking or doing can be mentally unhealthy.

I turned on the TV the other night to find Sarah Palin, a candidate for Vice President of the United States of America, teaching Kate Gosselin of “Jon & Kate Plus 8” fame (a reality show about a couple, well now a woman, with 8 kids, bad hair and an attitude) how to shoot a shot gun because they were going on a camping trip together with their kids and they might, just might, encounter a bear so they had better know how to defend their kids.

Sarah Palin, herself, is a fascinating example of how things have gotten totally insane in this country. Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist, suggested that Palin is “running her career in ways I intuitively think we should all be running our careers.” Why? Because she left an elected position as governor of Alaska so she could better position herself to become president… Does that really make sense in the grand scheme of things? Or, right now, Rahm Emanuel, who left Chicago to go work for the President of the United States, is being pummeled here in Chicago, where he’d like to serve as mayor, because he left the city temporarily… Really?

That’s absurd. Isn’t it absurd? How is it not absurd? Am I crazy for thinking it is crazy? Are we all crazy? Is it just me?

I’m still afraid of sharks and I watch Shark Week every August with a fervor that deeply troubles my wife who would jump for joy if her husband would just once go diving with her (in the ocean).

One of the few times in my life that I have actually ventured into the open sea happened to have been snorkeling in the Red Sea. “There are no sharks in here, silly, it is just like a big lake,” said my buddy as we kicked our feet harder and farther, past the coral and into the oil streaks… That’s insane.