A friend shows up here today and tells me that there’s a new trend in “shrink talk”. Recently laid-off Vice Presidents – the upper management crew of America–are talking to their psychiatrists about the meaning (or lack of it) in their lives now that they no longer have a job: What were they doing all this time? This is particularly poignant in the financial sector as you can imagine. If Wall Street is really a bunch of numbers disappearing in mid-air, then what the hell were these people doing with their lives for the past 30 years…or more?

It’s the Crisis of Meaning for the “powerful”. Better late then never I say. If you didn’t already know you were more than the name on your door or your checkbook, 2009 was the time to figure it out.

We are entering the age of “It doesn’t matter who you thought you were”. Seemingly indispensable folks are now becoming dispensable and painful slaps in the face are heard everywhere. People who once wielded power over hundreds, maybe thousands, are crying in the arms of their accountants, wondering how they ended up in bankruptcy.

The men behind these masks of power (and yes, they are mostly men) are staring into headlights without a clue. Defining the importance of their life by the size of their office; the letters after their name; their expense accounts creates a pretty high dependency on the accoutrements of power. There’s little incentive to look inside or beyond the game you seem to be winning.

Real power is not easily seen, and not easily destroyed. It only comes from inside, once you’ve taken the time to question, to stop and really listen (to yourself), which may not come naturally for some. Any power that is given to you from outside yourself can be taken away; and these days it seems more likely than ever to happen.

As we step into this great redefinition of authority and personal significance at the beginning of a new century, remember to look inside for what your life means, and do it now. The power you have within yourself cannot be taken away; the most valuable part of you is invisible. Didn’t you always, secretly know that?

The saddest thing to me about non-profit organizations is that so many have the classic victim mentality. Of course, not the big successful, national ones, but this attitude is pretty common in smaller, local groups. Many don’t get beyond “startup” mode because of it.

When most people think of non-profit, they think of stuff that’s free, stuff that’s really discounted, or stuff for a very good cause. But I guess they don’t really think of the rest of it: that somehow everyone thinks good cause is reward enough. Money is something else again. There’s never enough money to make these organizations happen – for many, even on a survival level.

But I think the reason why so many non-profits fail, is because they focus on what they lack and are unaware of what they do in fact already have. They consider themselves victims of society, always on the other side of a handout. This point of view is entirely disempowering and it mostly keeps the organization in a nasty psychological loop, sometimes for decades.
Sure, you say “But non-profits don’t HAVE anything except the desire to help people (or feed them, etc etc)” They certainly don’t have money! Many non-profits are in “just squeaking by” mode so they never feel like they have much in the way of valuable assets.

But actually, the non-profit has an asset it seems to take for granted: the love, devotion, actions and commitment of its core group of people. Not just a Board of Directors, this means the person who gets the mail, or counts the money, or who will take an extra subway ride to deliver that package after work. If someone does this as a volunteer, or even as a terribly underpaid professional, their affection or commitment to this “cause” is probably priceless but it will commonly go unacknowledged and ignored.  Priceless sounds kind of dramatic, but it might be true.

If non-profits don’t begin to see abundance and “prosperity” in the talents and devotion of their own people – those unknown (or even maybe not so unknown) souls who are opening the doors in the morning, or locking the door at night –  non-profits will remain undervalued and under appreciated in society as well. The micro, after all, reflects the macro. If non-profits are under-appreciated by society, maybe it’s a reflection of their own lack of “internal” appreciation, starting with the folks inside the group who contribute their hearts and minds and make things happen. Money may not be able to buy you much of anything these days, but devotion and commitment are hard to come by at any price. Value the invisible assets you have and you will attract “real” ones.

I spent some time yesterday listening to all the buzz around Charlie Sheen, his 20 questions to the president about 9/11, and all the misunderstanding and anger this seemed to create for the sleeping masses and the controlled media.

I don’t watch “Two and a Half Men” but it’s rare for any celebrity to care about anything more than their hairstyle. And it’s rare for anyone in the public to care about a celebrity unless they’re adopting African kids or found drunk in a bathroom so no matter what you think of Sheen, (me included) this is not your usual celebrity fare.

Sheen created a series of 20 questions about 9/11 to ask the president and then artistically answered the questions himself. Everyone got their pants in a bunch about this part, even though every time I heard him talk about it on internet radio, he clearly explained this and I never thought anything else. I understood it the first time I heard him, and thought it was dumb actually. I guess I felt that by just coming out publicly with the questions alone, he would make his point. While Sheen wouldn’t agree with me, adding the “artistic fiction” of the president’s answers brought the attention away from the points everyone needs to look at.

Alex Jones got in a lot of trouble with Coast to Coast AM host, George Noory, who openly said he was disappointed with Alex for putting Sheen’s stuff “out there” without saying the president’s answers were fictitious; lying to people, “misleading” them. At the end of the mock interview transcript on Alex’s site, it did say that the interview didn’t happen, but you’d have to READ THE ENTIRE THING to see that. Of course, I would have put it at the top of the interview myself; I know in advance that people have no attention span and would probably not read it through to the end. What I would have liked Noory to have said instead was “I’m disappointed with the short attention span of the American public…it’s dangerous not to pay attention”….In the end, he and Alex came together on air and cleared it up, but none of this was the discussion we really needed to have: what have the powers that be hidden about 9/11 and why?
This purposeful kind of distraction (“Sheen faked it!!!”) is created by Big Media, and successfully kept the public from the real points Sheen made: the unanswered questions about 9/11 and the fact that 8 years later, they remain unanswered.

Our stupidity and short attention span is what Big Media counts on and I guess it’s still a sure bet. A populace of under-educated, Ipod-distracted people can be told anything; then to add insult to injury, these distracted folks will monitor each other with nonsense and lies and laugh at anyone who disagrees with what they heard on CNN.

Control of our communication when it comes to what is really going on in our world is a dangerous thing to have in the hands of a very very few. Please learn more about actually how few control every piece of information publicly available in the world. 
The distractions and the lies we are fed daily will kill us…like literally.