...maybe too brightly

It's October and I'm thinking about power. Power in my life and in my college and town and county and state and country and continent and world. Power is in every little facet of life. And power can be so ugly, mutant. Transforms one's conception of oneself, of one's world, of one's relationship to the world. Power manifest through action, word, and culture. Control. Fear of losing control, of losing power of losing influence and meaning. Fear. Scare tactics. Powerful scare tactics - used since the beginning of time by the weak, by the fearful, by the ignorant. Influential on the weak, the fearful and the ignorant, causing regression, crippling society. Fear designates power to the feared, the fearful beware.

More personally; the desire for power can seize unawares, cause you to interact in ways you had never dreamed could be driven by that molten force. Such a detested filth could never be part of your own cleansed constitution and yet it's there. Discovered. Putrid fumes rising from the chest and the breath of the very person you thought could escape it. Yourself. What for? When did it arrive there? Has it been more positively expressed or have you been governed by it, making an undetected mess, for years upon years? How many interactions were tainted, stained and permanently drained of value due to an irrational desire to become mired in the minds of people somehow perceived to be higher? Though equality is professed somehow you didn't manage to manifest that belief in living action. Somehow you were able to deny the true meaning of the word on a fundamental level - power still seemed like something one could be entitled to, had a right to fight for; but power is not a goal, it is a punishment and a tool for repression. If equality exists than power as we know it can not be the way I understand it to be... because we would all have it and it would lose it's value. There would be no power. No struggle for power. Power over what? Over whom? Is this too encompassing? Equality may not equal utopian communities based on sharing and the meeting of basic needs. But power definitely doesn't, and power doesn't promote equality, it promotes subordination. Could the climate crisis release the world focus on power and link it to a collective challenge based on survival? No, we compete to survive. Competition is a way to determine a power-scheme. Power. Fear. Humanity?