Tag Archives: one world

1 people, 1 world

We’ve had record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes, and floods, but never before in our lifetimes has there been a catastrophe that hits the whole world at once.

We’re watching one another’s states and nations to see what works. So far, the US is coping worst of all. Led by our Denier-in-Chief, too many people refuse to protect themselves through social distancing or protective gear. But Americans seem to be learning – just the hard way, unfortunately.

This is not a fun way to find out that we really are all connected.

We’re seeing celebrities in sweatpants, not glammed up on the red carpet. We’re seeing which corporations care about their workers, and which just want to seem like they do. We’re finding out how much our casual contacts with neighbors and friends mean to us, now that we can’t have them.

Americans are also finding out why we need a federal government. We’re discovering this the hard way, too, since our current government is trying to shift all its responsibilities to states.

Individual responsibilities have never been so clear. We have to be kind, and we have to be careful. Every day, people we never heard of are showing us how to behave. Not only disease is contagious. Good cheer, courage, and helpfulness are also possible to catch from other people.

Climate change has already made us aware that we have to build a new world. We are starting to build a new civilization, from useful parts of the old one, with our amazing and under-rated imaginations.

The old culture was based on greed and violence. The new one is based on community and compassion. One of my friends calls this change “the warm shift.” Another points out that when a big ship makes a small course correction, it will lead to a whole new destination.  Humanity is a damn big ship. And we might now be making the small but vitally necessary course correction that will lead us to a survivable future.

Poem for Cockroaches

It is quiet in dark places.
Through a crack comes the smell of food.
Without volition, the cockroach moves
with a swiftness that’s been honed for ages.
Sometimes one of the brotherhood
is caught by sudden light, halfway back home.
Ancestral memory of man
awakens. The cockroach, handless,
knows somewhat of hands.
There is a laden silence.
A wasp, in such a situation, panics,
blunders into walls, at last attacks.
A fly would be long gone.
But calm as one
who’s been in tight spots before,
the cockroach waits, being nothing but aware.
When the shoe falls, the roach is no longer there.
Three things have sustained the roach through every era:
a fondness for copulation;
a taste for garbage;
and a stillness that unnerves predation
by saying: Look: this too is Buddha
This too
This too is Buddha.

Common Cause with China

Making cheap stuff for Americans has helped China’s working class in some ways. In others, it has hurt them. Working in a factory making plastic gimcracks can be terrible for a person’s health, and terrible for the environment.

Why should we buy that cheap junk, anyway? Plastic stuff that ends up as poisonous smoke, or tiny particles that animals eat instead of food, or shards that will fill the sea and cover the earth for thousands of years. Nevertheless people mine for the materials, labor to make stuff out of them, ship it, shop for it, put it somewhere, forget it, and finally throw it away.

Stuff Americans always knew people suffered for so we could buy it cheap. Stuff to brighten our shabby lives. We’ve known all along that poor people have worked long days to bring us our changing fashions and collections of trinkets.

China is investing in solar technologies.

China’s booming economy has supported a growing middle class, which in turn encourages people to get more education and invent new enterprises. They now have many more options than making cheap plastic stuff for compulsive American consumers. They’re leading the way in sustainable energy technologies, for example, since Trump has hobbled that industry in the US in favor of fossil fuel development.

It’s better for all of us that we stop making, shipping, selling, and buying plastic things destined for landfill. Right now, in many workplaces, people are making personal protective equipment instead of plastic crap. Once the worst of the corona crisis has passed, maybe we can shift production again.

The long-term interests of Chinese people, Americans, and everybody else on the planet will be best served if we never go back to the plastic cycle. We need to make solar panels and windmills, trains instead of cars, pack seeds and plants instead of toys and knickknacks.

No matter how our governments fuss and struggle for dominance, let’s remember that Chinese people are just like Americans and everyone else. We all want to live, and our children to live, and our grandchildren. Building a new world where this can happen is our common cause.

Almost Exactly the Same

People are all almost exactly the same. I say almost because, even though we are 99.9% alike, that one-tenth of one percent difference is very important to us. That’s how we tell one another apart. Since we’re social animals, we depend on knowing exactly who another person is, even though she is almost exactly the same as we are. So we make a big deal out of that one-tenth of one percent difference.

Race, gender, class: these things help us tell one from another, along with details like body shape and facial features. But the differences are tiny. If you’ve ever seen a montage of many diverse faces, you have seen what Human looks like. In the same way, if you read the literature of any language or time, you know what Human behaves like. We are fascinated by our tiny differences; we obsess about them. But they remain tiny.

If you doubt how much we are the same, remember what it’s like to see a movie in a theater. You laugh and gasp in the same places as everyone else there. You like the same characters and have no trouble identifying the bad guys. Also consider the fact that a good actor can play almost any role and make us believe it. How is that possible, unless we each contain in ourselves the whole range of human behavior?

There are other ways to tell how small our differences are. We think race, gender, and class are very important, and in some ways of course they are. Yet when you know someone’s race, gender, and class, you still know almost nothing about them that really matters. You don’t know if they’re kind, for example. You don’t know if they’re funny.

We will always be fascinated by the details of how each of us is unique and different from all the rest. We will always be interested in the soap opera of our secret, special, individual lives. But there come times when we have to look up from these details. We have to look at our civilization as a whole. We have to look not at personal behavior but at the behavior of our society.

When civilization has behaved so badly that we have begun to threaten our own survival, it’s time to think about what we can do differently.

Because each of us can be anybody. Each of us is capable, under the right circumstances, of every kind of human behavior. We contain in our own secret selves the complete spectrum of human behaviors. Which of the many possible behaviors we enact in our own lives is decided by our imagination of ourselves and of our circumstances.

Our imagination is tremendously powerful, though we often discount it, and even refuse to believe it affects anything. In our urban world where everything except the sky is a product of people’s imagination, maybe the power of imagination is so obvious that we take it for granted and so fail to see it. Yet imagination is the key to our future. How can we imagine ourselves saving the world?

Instead of thinking about how to change individuals, we should think about how to change culture so as to encourage the creation of healthy, sane, loving, humorous, careful human beings; how to change people’s environments so as to encourage healthy habits; how to create the people humanity needs to become.

How to make it easier to be creative, and not kill imagination first thing in school. How to make it easier to raise a family, to learn new things, to grow old. Movies, tv, video games: what do we need to teach, show, tell one another? What message are we broadcasting? What will it do to the people it reaches?

False optimism is not going to work. We can’t slap a happy face on things: life is too awful for too many. We can’t keep distracting ourselves from what we can see happening more and more clearly: the poisoning of the planet, the whirlwind we have reaped through our bad behavior. The longer we ignore the consequences of our greed, the harder they will be to make right.

If the species is going to survive, it’s time to get serious about it, and figure out how to save ourselves from this mess we have created. We have to look at exactly what our culture is: what we glorify, what we despise, whom we imitate, what values we adopt. This is crisis time. We need to pull an intervention on ourselves.

Anyone who has spent time with babies knows how smart we are and how much we can learn. Our bodies stop growing but our minds never stop. We can learn new ways of doing everything. That’s culture; we do it all the time. Every day we sing a new song.

Until recently, most of us have appeared to be frozen. We’re so used to watching life instead of living it, we’ve become passive. We have forgotten that everything around us has been formed from the action of human imagination upon the materials of the earth. We, ordinary humans, have invented it all. Our power is tremendous when we agree on something to do.

Some events in recent years indicate that we might be waking up to the crisis, and responding appropriately. Our most powerful moments have been singular and quite spontaneous. The Arab Spring, undermined by the usual gangs of thugs though it was; the Occupy movement; the Women’s March; the appearance at U.S. airports of tens of thousands of people to support Muslims when Trump announced his travel ban; these are symptoms of a vital resilience, a resistance to the forces of death.

If we can ever convene the species and discuss the situation with everyone at the table, it is entirely possible that we can agree on our mission and our direction. We will understand one another. Because in spite of our splendidly elaborated cultures, our fascinating personal uniqueness, our endless variety of experience, we are all, finally, almost exactly the same.

Race is an Illusion

Race is an illusion. Hardly anybody is as black or as white as they think they are. Of course racism is all too real. It’s just one of the many ways we have been taught to hate and fear other ordinary people, instead of our actual oppressors. But the “race” it targets is a product of the human imagination.

Gender is an illusion. Nobody is as male or as female as they think they are. Human sexuality is not specific about its targets. If something has a bump or a hole, somebody will want to make love to it. Sex is real, and we can talk about it forever. But if we’re not actually part of somebody else’s sex life, it’s none of our business and talking about it is just gossip.

As for religion, we’ve been arguing over those questions for tens of thousands of years. We have lately learned some tolerance for other people’s beliefs, but we don’t seem any closer to agreeing on answers. So, can we please take religion off the main agenda? It’s a side issue. We have to hang on to the Golden Rule, which is the foundation on which all religions are built. But the rest of every religion is testament to the fact that people will believe just about anything. Nobody knows whether there is a god or an afterlife. Everybody is guessing. Let’s move on.

National boundaries are figments of our imagination, enforced by the nations we have imagined into being.

Nations are just as made-up as those other fantasies. We draw imaginary lines on the earth’s surface, placed according to power plays, stories, and rivalries local or distant, and behave as though they made people on one side of them different from people on the other. Languages are real. Nations are collaborative fictions.

Money is also fictional. Worldwide, if everybody at once wanted to trade their money for real things, the real things would vanish long before the numbers on the balance sheets. There is nothing real behind the numbers. They don’t add up. The global economic crisis of a decade ago should have taught us that. Rich people are rich because we choose to believe the numbers. If we ceased to believe, they would just be naked primates surrounded by a bunch of mostly useless stuff, exactly like everyone else, though perhaps lacking in some basic survival skills.

All these imaginary boundaries between people have claimed multitudes of victims. The damage is real and ongoing. It is not enough to heal wounds. More damage will be inflicted until we realize that the boundaries, the categories, the divisions, are all products of our collective imaginations and we are free to stop believing in them.

Maybe then we can begin to pay attention to the real world, and how we can survive the damage we have done to it.

Every holiday season, the New York City Macy’s department store covers its block-long front with a huge neon sign saying “Believe.” This is a good way to sell unnecessary goods. Believe you need them. Believe you can afford them. Believe other people will love you more if you buy them things.

I wish someone would put up an equally huge sign across the street. This sign would read: “Doubt.”

The Occupy movement did our culture a great favor by highlighting income inequality, an issue that illuminates the tremendous imbalances we have to resolve. Occupy did not go far enough, however. The movement we need will not be about the one percent, or the 99 percent. It will be about the 100 percent – about everybody. Because either we figure out how to live sustainably together on the only world we have, or our species goes the way of the dinosaurs, without even a comet strike for an excuse. And once we’re extinct, there won’t be anybody left to care what color or gender or religion we were. So maybe we could try caring a little less about all that before it’s too late.

Questions for a Dark Time

What if you wake up one morning
and peace is outside your window
walking, speaking, running
like a river,
what will you do?
Will you go out and kiss its feet,
which are working feet,
will you stand and watch
or will you join it
in your own time, like a duck
meeting other ducks in a river

What if you wake up one morning
and peace is inside your heart
Will you call the papers
Will you have a cigarette
How will you say hello to
the first person you see

What if you wake up one morning
and war is outside your window
hurting and killing the way it does,
racing like a forest fire,
what will you do?
Will you join it like
a stick of kindling
Will you watch
like the eye of a potato
Will you get dressed and
go to work with
peace in your heart
like a duck
meeting other ducks in the river

Flying Monkey Song

Once were some critters came from the sea
Thought they’d see what they could see
Climbed up in the nearest tree
Said, Hey mama, won’t you look at me

Unidentified flying monkeys.
Fly, fly, fly, monkey, fly

Tree to tree to tree they swung
Grew themselves an opposable thumb
Climbed back down to get them some
Watch out, sabretooth, here they come

Race around like a forest fire
Chasing every new desire
Always tryin’ to get a little bit higher –

Kinda funky
flying monkeys
fly, fly, fly, monkey, fly

Field Report from Alice T4

These human beings have donned thick hulls.
Within memory they came out raw and slow, and stayed long in the sun.
Now they are visible from time to time
scurrying between their burrows and their borrowed shells
on their way to or from their holes in the main hive.

They still war. There are spotty mass die-outs.
They leave large areas barren and desolate.
From their nests emerge mighty songs.
The rest of us are compelled to listen;
there is no place far away from them.

But their children, and certain mutant colonies,
show that they possess an innate sense of harmony
along with the five senses that they recognize;
that they can function in and help maintain
green heavily specied areas.
They are beginning to mind their manners at watering places.

Their population curve has rounded a corner;
the dizzying rate of climb is bending
toward a plateau on which others might live.

They seem to do everything they need to do
by the skin of their teeth,
the nails on the tips of their fingers, and tails
they don’t even have.
I am amused and horrified,
wheeling hysterically among them,
along for the ride.

We are this Web

We are the sum of our minds.

This new creature, Humanity, is a collective, as all complex organisms are collectives of smaller beings. Most life is collaboration.

We think that because our bodies are separate, our minds are too. But they’re not. They leak. They spread. The ripples of our thoughts rock the world.

Imagine there’s a thin bright line between you and a person you’re close to. Now imagine that person moves. The line connecting you moves with them.

Imagine there’s a line like that between you and every person you meet. The line stretches but never disappears so long as both of you exist.

Imagine the world as a web of these lines, these human connections. That is who we are. That web. That net.