Tag Archives: human survival

How we’re feeling

How are you? Fine? Really? I don’t believe it. Nobody’s fine right now.

I wanted to communicate some good news today, but I couldn’t find any. Some things do give me hope for the long term. Short-term, with Trump doing all the harm he can, the world ignoring climate change, and the virus running rampant through the US, I got nothin’.

It’s not my personal situation. I’m way luckier than most Americans: so far, so good. I just get panic attacks several times a week and fight depression every day. But money is no more of a problem than usual and nobody I love is sick. We’re all just having panic attacks and fighting depression.

If a household didn’t depend on my health, I’d have been in the street with Black Lives Matter for a month. There is joy and uplift in a crowd like that, gathered for a righteous purpose and determined to be peaceful in spite of the worst police can do. There is community, creativity, relief in taking action together. I’m very grateful to all those who do show up, and a little envious. I miss that feeling.

I miss a lot of things, a lot of people. I’ve been missing peace of mind since the 2016 presidential election. None of my friends has slept well since then. Now it’s hard to escape the feeling of nightmare while we’re wide awake.

So how do we get back to feeling okay? Counting blessings helps; so does counting breaths, and slowing them down when we’re anxious. Communicating with people we love. Being in nature, which remains beautiful. Making things, whether it’s music or masks or gardens.

What helps me most is remembering that the real problem is not individual people but the culture we have created. And culture changes all the time. We each change it, with every word and act, everything we buy or avoid buying, our tones of voice and our body language, even what we click and like on social media.

What becomes of humanity is up to humans. We can move toward destruction, or we can move toward sustainability and loving-kindness. We know what we must do. I believe we might yet even do it.

The Meek & the Elite

Nations, ruling elites, masses
Nations, elites, & masses

This is a map of imaginary nations. The colored ovals stand for the ruling elites. The green stands for ordinary people. The elites are different colors because various small groups are in power in different countries: religious or not, capitalist or not. But they’re all very rich.

The super-rich & their beauties

The elites appear to be separate from one another. They pretend they have more in common with the masses of people in their own countries than with elites elsewhere, but that is not true. Elites everywhere are connected by their interest in staying in power. Their lives are quite separate from the lives of ordinary people: they don’t live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same schools, or buy from the same merchants. The super-rich are their own country. They form a secret international union that treats the rest of us like interchangeable, expendable servants they can safely ignore.

Without national boundaries

Now look at the imaginary map without national boundaries. There are just ordinary people everywhere; the ruling elites stand out like the spots of a nasty infection on the body of humanity. That disease is the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands.

The tragedy of the masses, aka ordinary people, aka the meek, is that we don’t realize our own power. We think nations are real, though we have to imagine them afresh every day. We think our interests align with the rich, though we know by now they don’t really care about us. If the ordinary people in different countries ever realize that we share the same interest in human survival, and that together we vastly outnumber the elites, the power in this world will shift to our hands.

The ruling class tries to persuade us that other nations are our enemy, but our real enemy is the elites’ bottomless greed. They fear our solidarity. Ordinary people around the world are natural allies, if we only knew it. The boundaries that separate us are imaginary. Instead, we must imagine sharing the earth.