These are trying times: and the struggle is more important than ever

I’ve been silent for a while and there are several reasons why. The first has been a long, hard rethink about who I am and what I stand for. The second is that I’ve been thinking long and hard about the mission of this website. I established this website to do good in the world. In the time since I did, the Middle East has blown up and the Israeli war machine is causing grief and suffering on a scale that is unimaginable. The global arms industry is growing at an alarming rate, as is global inequality, climate change is accelerating and rather than world leaders working towards ameliorating these crises, more and more of them are actively provoking them.  Behind these politicians there are “big” moneyed interests that are stoking hatred, environmental destruction and the plundering of public finances. And, it seems the reason they do is to feather their nests by evading any responsibility to give back. It still astounds me that we can live in a world where the richest 8 people own as much wealth as the poorest 50% and that is not an election issue and that almost no one in power has the courage to say that some redistribution of this wealth might be a good thing for humanity and the planet as a whole.

The further slide of the world into war, misogyny, racism, primitive plundering of the planet by the richest portion of the world, has led me to feel increasingly conflicted about my role and the purpose of this site in these trying times.

A colleague of mine described themselves as “broken” not just because of the tragic events occurring and the victory of the forces of reaction, but by the comprehensiveness of the repression of any “struggle” for peace, protection of the planet or for any alternative to the profit-driven, plundering of the world.  While I am not “broken” by the events of this year culminating in Trump’s re-election to the US presidency, I am deeply and profoundly disillusioned. I was already very fragile and profoundly saddened by the violence that has been allowed to happen in Palestine and Lebanon. But what finally took me over the edge is not that Trump won, but that he won because the Democrats are so beholden to moneyed interests they lost any chance of speaking to the people yearning for change. Trump spoke the words of change, even if his form of change will, undoubtedly, widen the gap between rich and poor, worsen the environmental crisis and stoke hatred. In Australia, the Labor Party suffers from the same affliction of no longer standing for anything except that they are not as “bad” as their opponents. This strategy didn’t work for Kamala Harris and it won’t work for Albanese. Anyway, because of this, I have spent months swaying between transforming this site into a more overtly political one and the opposite position of focusing on questions that were at the forefront of my thinking at the time I put this site together.

My decision has been to focus this site on the politics of the everyday and on examining the question of what it means to live the “good life”. This quest of what is the “good life” is an eternal one and returns me to the original aim of this site which is to transform the world by invoking the power of health and fitness, the benefits that come from a commitment to others and to building the social and a reflection of a person’s legacy. A year ago, I believed that if more people, including the richest 1%, embraced the “good life”, and a commitment to the greater good, then the world would be transformed.

A lot has happened in the past year, and reflecting on it all, and what sort of person I want to be in this world, I have come back to the original message of the Herculean Way. It was a strong, positive and meaningful message a year ago. It is even more so today. Be back in touch soon. In the meantime, be Herculean.