Home » Mind & Soul » Self-Empowerment Skills » The Sleeping Mammoth is Awakened and the Glass Cage is Broken

The Sleeping Mammoth is Awakened and the Glass Cage is Broken

© Jennie S. Bev

America, the sleeping mammoth, is awakened and its glass cage is broken on September 11, 2001. That Day of Infamy, when four American commercial planes were hijacked and used by suicide bomber terrorists to destroy The Twin Towers of N.Y. World Trade Center and The Pentagon, has been engraved permanently in the minds of all Americans. What impact does it make to us all? How should we approach the future, then?

From that day onwards, our lives have been meaningfully changed and our existence has been profoundly altered. We now live a different life, think different things and act differently. We now understand the true meaning of a secure and safe life. We are taught the hard way to appreciate life more because we now realize that safety and security are privileges rather than comes naturally.

We used to find exploding buildings, tumbling bridges and terrorist attacks quite amusing. For years, we loved watching them in Hollywood movies. We even loved playing 3D video or computer games where we can pretend to become a virtual hero with license to blow things up without consequences. Violence and human suffering were two important ingredients in a successful Hollywood action movies and 3D games. Would we be able to find them so amusing now?

We used to be satisfied with ourselves, our convenience and our fast-paced lifestyle. We have been living a very convenient life in the past few decades, where life is simply a matter of career advancement, running errands, tight scheduling, paying of mounting bills and hoping for a more sophisticated lifestyle.

We didn't realize that those are facile and have been confining us in a glass cage without ever realizing it. We lived in too much comfort that we found time and space so precious and scarce. There was not enough time or space to work and play in a day or an hour. The microwave is too slow and the largest mall in the world, which is in Minnesota, feels a bit cramped.

Living in a glass cage didn't require us to breathe the air outside the cage. After all, we had everything we needed in it.

We have been ignorant to what is going on in the outer world. It was hard for us to really understand what it feels like being persecuted for being born a particular ethnic group or for having to grow up and live in the constant fear of civil war and political instability in Indonesia, for instance. We saw all the news on such supposedly heart-wrenching occurrences on television, but never really understood how it feels to making a living by pulling out some edible roots in a region where landmines are being planted everyday in other parts of the globe.

The copyright of the article The Sleeping Mammoth is Awakened and the Glass Cage is Broken in Self-Empowerment Skills is owned by Jennie S. Bev. Permission to republish The Sleeping Mammoth is Awakened and the Glass Cage is Broken in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.