Commenting on his new Album “Magic,” Bruce Springsteen told reviewer A. O. Scott "he had a re-infatuation with pop music.” This may be, but some of his songs make this Jersey Girl uneasy. In Springsteen and the E Street Band we hear shades of the old Asbury Park Boardwalk, eerie sounds of the magic man who lures you into the darkness with his creepy tricks: “I’ve got a shiny saw blade/All I need’s a volunteer.” Then the ominous counsel, “Trust none of what you hear/And less of what you see.” The refrain is downright uncomfortable with the gloomy forewarning … “This is what will be.”

Springsteen’s Lament
In “The Long Walk Home” a man travels back to familiar hometown places only to find everything has changed including the people he thought he knew. "The ideals they once shared, friends with whom he thought he had something in common; all are strangers in an alien world," writes Scott. Through his art, Springsteen is expressing what he believes has happened to the country in the past six years. While typically his music avoids targeting specific people or events, he cannot conceal his disenchantment with the way he and many others perceive things are—the politics of personal destruction, the politics of illusion by a government that creates its own reality. It is a viral sickness spread across the land for which the legislative, judicial and executive branches of our governing bodies cannot even imagine an antidote. I believe that is because they're mode of thinking is not what is expected of 21st century leaders and statesmen. Let's hope children being born now will be more consciously evolved than their elders.

The Individual You
Don’t get me wrong about "the boss." If you’re a fan of Springsteen, you will applaud this album. But its somber declarations are ubiquitous and they are depressing. On the air, the Internet and in print, among friends and on the supermarket checkout line, I hear the same angry, frustrated people. They say they want change. Yet, like their elected officials, they haven’t a clue how to make it happen so they continue to argue and whine about it. If they are looking for a magic pill, there is none. If they are looking for others to do it, there aren’t any others. There is only the individual, the one, the only, the one and only individual.

The Need to Always Be Right
It’s clear the old ways of thinking simply do not work anymore. We’ve outgrown our worn out patterns of behavior yet we cling to them because they feel comfortable, safe and familiar. That desperate need to always make “me” right and the other party or parties wrong is at the very heart of societal problems, at home and abroad. If Prince Hamlet will forgive me for misquoting his creator, “there is neither right nor wrong, but thinking makes it so,” is as true today as it was when he actually said: “there is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so.” Whatever the Bard wrote, the message is the same.

Children start out in life arguing about who is right and who is wrong. When they grow up practicing the same behavior they are immature adults in larger bodies whose consciousness has not evolved. Television talking heads shout at one another, each hoping to be seen by the public as “Commander RightHead.” Intelligent discussions are necessary, stimulating and productive, but where are they? In the broader picture, the entire world is in chaos about whose ideology or whose religion is right and whose is wrong. Needing to be right is childish, makes no sense and leads down that old warpath to hell.

I believe that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has. I stole that line from Dr. Margaret Mead and carry it with me always. If after all she experienced in her lifetime Margaret Mead could believe in this uplifting hope for humanity, why can’t we?

Springsteen’s album is a reflection of the mood of the country. In “The Devil’s Arcade” he sings of "personal loss suffered by friends and lovers of soldiers whose lives were destroyed or ended in Iraq." Forgive me if I quote another celebrated giant, but Ernest Hemingway knew a thing or two about war and peace when he wrote: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.” So let’s move on from this malaise, some of which we have created from our own neglect and complacency.

Humans Are Not Saints But They're Mighty Powerful
As individuals, everything we say and do has an impact on other people and the world around us. The most powerful, the most important thing we can do to change the world is not to be right, but simply to do our best to live a conscious life on a daily basis. To be conscious is to be constantly aware of everything we do and say. This is not some spiritual ideal like to always be loving and forgiving. Humans are not saints. But when we live a conscious life, accept our own faults and weaknesses as well as others without always judging, we are helping to change negative behavior patterns, and that makes the atmosphere delightfully light.

When someone says to me, “Just what did you mean by that uncalled for remark?” Oops! That means I wasn’t conscious of the negativity I had projected into the environment. How often have you witnessed a single individual walk into a crowded room and suddenly the atmosphere changed from mind-numbing to lively and enjoyable? This is what Dr. Mead meant by “thoughtful” citizens. We can be thoughtful, conscious without uttering a single world. That “lightness of being” comes out of our pores streaming live and contagious. It takes some doing but saving the world has to start somewhere and that somewhere is with the one, the only, the one and only individual. It's not complicated.