Yesterday evening when leaving the trails I walked past a group of women whose boombox (I guess it was an iphone technically) played the refrain “no sacrifice” repeatedly as our paths crossed.

I loved this as it related so closely to the idea about which I am learning that, ultimately, and in the spiritual realm, there is no sacrifice. I love the way that, in her seminal work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes that the term “mortal man” is a sort of solecism describing a parody of reality. And, likewise, it has been helpful to learn that the term “special relationship” in Course in Miracles – or, as I understand it, a relationship based on sacrifice rather than real fruitfulness – is, too, a sort of oxymoron. But, even though I do not feel it is right to feel compelled by other people to sacrifice one’s own well-being for others’ convenience or luxury, there do seem to be times when stand-in recipients for the rewards of others’ efforts do benefit.

Several years ago, when a Hollywood celebrity joined the British royal family and so much was made of her relationship to an organization (and one that profited largely from producing programming focused on royal gossip) orbiting a celebrity interviewer whose teams I have generally considered to be corrupt, it felt challenging not to assume she was corrupt. But, in perusing an article written by this figure, it was notable that she’d felt connected to a family history including an enslaved person. And I began to wonder whether it was possible that all that was unfolding in her life may have related to the prayers of this person.

In my own experience, as I have written before, I’ve often guessed that one reason I was assigned by a community development nonprofit to help a particular neighborhood where, generations ago, my family once lived but needed to leave after terribly violent armed robberies began targeting elderly women, may have been that my immigrant great-grandmother – herself brutally attacked in her home after devoting so much of her life to serving others by a family presumably only five or six generations removed from slavery – prayed for the well-being of the community even after moving.

Certainly, to assume all of one’s assignments in life relate back to one’s human progenitors seems wrong to me, however, to return to what has been the main theme of this blog, I’ve still wondered whether the political candidacy of RFK, Jr. may be even more directly linked to his family’s experiences standing up to the so-called military industrial complex (arguably, today, the corporate media military industrial complex) than is obvious at first glance. Of course, I realize I am biased for my longstanding hope of seeing some sort of systemic change to our country’s corporation-dominated communications infrastructure and this candidate has demonstrated a rare willingness to stand up to media corporations, but it still feels worth emphasizing how intriguing I’ve found his run. Still, when I see RFK, Jr. begin to appear on CNN or University of Austin media I feel simultaneously encouraged and worried his voice could simply be coopted and become part of a broken mainstream media machine and its pretend, WWE versions of dissent. But what choice does he have?

If the so-called “special relationship” between news corporations and their viewers is not really a relationship but is, at least sometimes, more of a conspiracy meant to prevent problem-solving, I feel it may continue to be highly important for voters to find candidates independent of mainstream outlets with whom they can legitimately relate.

A quality many people arguably seek in lawmakers, after all, is independence. Even if Hilary Clinton may have learned the same lesson hitching her wagon to her husband’s career (to reference a previous post) as Donald Trump may have ultimately learned hitching his wagon to the Republican party – that shortcuts may get you within view of the finish line but tend to lead to insurmountable barriers – it doesn’t discount the progress that was made independently in moving the baton forward. If feel independent politicians today, like video game players waiting in the wings and who have watched others founder, may be more likely to know this and be willing to pursue longer and less obscured paths.

I do not know whether RFK, Jr.’s presidential candidacy will end up having been more about a truly competitive bid or an opportunity to raise important topics no other person in power will allow to be discussed (to the degree that he is one of the only journalists left in America, it would, in a way, feel like a shame to lose his work in this capacity), but if one of the only ways for a legitimate journalist to be allowed to speak today is to run for president, I do not see how he had any choice, really. While I believe there are contenders on both sides of the political aisle who would agree, I am not sure it can be said too often that, even as media organizations amass greater and greater levels of political influence, in order to get things done, just like we need real journalists, we will need (and I do not mean to imply we do not have one now) to elect a real president every four years, not someone who plays one on TV.

I thought this recent Rubin Report clip was insightful and have included some of the comments it featured below:

BlackRock owns the processed food companies that are poisoning us and they own the pharmaceutical companies that are making $4.2 trillion a year – five times our defense budget – treating the chronic disease that’s being caused by BlackRock’s other … group of companies. BlackRock owns all the military contractors, General Dynamics, Northrup Grummond, Boeing, Lockeed, etc. that are destroying all the ports, and bridges, and schools, and … roads in Ukraine and they also have the contract (sic) for rebuilding Ukraine, so … both parties are being supported by BlackRock. Both of them are the war party, and both of them are kind of captured … The issues that would challenge their hegemony over our democracy are issues that are never talked about, although, when Americans hear about them … Americans think, oh, this election’s about abortions, guns and the border…. By the way, CNN, they’re all openly owned by BlackRock too.

When it started to appear that the celebrities who had coopted earnest attempts to address corporate media hegemony over the country – certainly predating but, I felt, culminating in the sale of Hello Sunshine to the BlackRock-affiliated Blackstone, especially as I had previously felt so deceived and muffled by the former after trying to reach out to its management – it started to feel to me like the well-being of the nation itself was in danger. (Here I would like to underscore that I do believe this problem is more about corporations and systems than people and that the work in which we all much be engaged is the work of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation.)

But the courage of public figures continuing to use their platforms to allow such topics to be discussed gives me hope the work of actually solving this problem (not just finding another human being to sacrifice to it) has neither been destroyed nor thwarted forever – it may just be unfinished.