Reality check
I saw Stevie Nicks in concert, and while I enjoyed the show, I’m still wrestling with the reality that she somehow sounded better live—at seventy-seven—than she did on the studio recordings from her prime.
The other night I took my SO Jodi to see her favorite witchy songstress, seventy-seven-year-old, two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Stevie Nicks.
I’ll admit, I had doubts about Sister Stevie’s ability to hit notes she navigated dubiously even in her prime. Stevie’s voice has always been more vibe than virtuosity, and I joked that she should bring along some powerhouse backup singers, maybe the same sistas who helped Madonna get through Like a Prayer.
But how it went is that Stevie sounded amazing. Shockingly amazing. She sounded better live, at seventy-seven, than on the studio versions of songs she recorded decades ago—which strained credulity.
Jodi said the sound engineers gave us no choice but to suspend disbelief and accept that Stevie had somehow reversed time and found a pitch she hadn’t previously possessed. Because the alternative was to admit that what we were hearing was sprinkled with a little digital fairy dust.
We chose belief. After all, we’d paid good money for tickets and had emotional skin in the game. Her singing was real, but the experience was still an illusion — a carefully crafted one we wanted to believe in because we were invested.
And that’s when it hit me:
Our country’s leaders have been fooling us much in the same way.
They know we’re too invested in the illusion to challenge it — too comfortable to face the feedback. Like concertgoers enchanted by the lights and the legend, we’d rather stay under the spell than confront the truth.
The truth is that our leaders have deliberately built—and meticulously maintained—a society centered around corporatism, which demands an infinite supply of fuel to sustain an infinite growth economy on a planet with finite resources. It doesn’t take a quantum physicist to see the mathematical madness, yet we persist.
Corporatism’s relentless pursuit of profits has inflicted deep wounds on the Earth and our species’ collective consciousness, and those wounds deepen each day.
Corporations get away with devouring the planet and exploiting its people because the system opts us in to owning them. That’s why we cheer when the stock market rises, thinking we’re all doing well — when in reality, the higher it climbs, the more extractive and unstable the world gets.
Everyone senses the insanity on a soul level, yet our leaders keep us running the same doomed program that devours people and planet alike.
They’ve even tricked us into funding it.
Through automatic 401(k) enrollments, our wages flow directly into corporate coffers. Our retirement accounts are the lifeblood of the machine. If Americans divested en masse, corporatism would collapse overnight — and something saner and sustainable could rise from the rubble.
Our leaders know this, so they’ve conditioned us to believe that investing in corporations is the only way to secure our future. It’s the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history, and our country’s leaders— billionaires like President Trump and multimillionaire limosine liberals like Harris, the Clintons, Obama, and Biden — are its beneficiaries.
Trump doesn’t even pretend to care about the common good, and his policies reflect it. The limosine liberals, on the other hand, talk a good game about justice and equity, but their portfolios tell the real story — multiple vacation homes and millions in corporate stock tied to Big Oil, Big Pharma, and war profiteers.
Reality reflects the quality of our consciousness with surgical precision. If these leaders truly cared about the common good, they’d divest. After all, they could do so today and live in the lap luxury for the rest of their lives. But they don’t. They just virtue-signal while cashing dividends.
They don’t want change—they just want to keep cashin’ dem checks. From where they sit, the system’s working just fine, and the only change they want is the kind that fits in their pockets.
I used to believe there was a moral difference between Democrats and Republicans. Now I see the only real distinction is that Republicans are upfront about their greed, while Democrats conceal theirs behind comforting illusions of slogans and self-congratulation. The limousine liberals keep poor folks dependent on crumbs and call it compassion. They’re running the same script as Trump, only with sneakier branding.
Someone once said we should leave every place better than how we found it. Maybe limosine liberals like Obama once believed that. But now, with millions in the bank and billionaire buddies on speed dial, they’re way more concerned with protecting their paper than advancing the common good. That big “hope and change” energy faded when dem fat royalty checks started rollin’ in.
So instead of clinging to illusions—political, financial, or musical—I’ll keep doing the one thing within my control: divesting from delusion and investing in the quality of my consciousness. Because the only way to reshape our reality is by transforming ourselves, as real change always comes from the inside out, and never the outside in.
In the reality I’m choosing to fold into, we’ll stop electing leaders who bankroll systems that devour people and the planet. And in the New Earth, seventy-seven-year-old legends can still dance and sing their hearts out without a trace of digital fairy dust.
