The news is full of "protests" - protesters advocating a boycott of BP gas stations, protesters angry at Israel's latest attack and justification, protesters demanding that Arizona behave as if they didn't indeed have unbearable crises they must address, protesters wanting the government to step in use a nuclear bomb to stop the flow of oil into the once rich Gulf, for God's sake. Every protester wants someone else to make things better, better according to their own perspective of how things should be.
Enough.
My heart aches so badly, I rant rather than speak. Fortunately, Fe at planetwaves.net is more than capable of speaking the words we each MUST hear.
There has been an incredible series of risks and innovations that have moved the world from the industrial to the virtual age. We’ve gone from steam engines to 4G networks in little over 100 years. We have invented ourselves to a place where we’ve eliminated distance between people on different continents, changed night into perpetual day and made the leap past our planet’s gravitational field into another part of our solar system. We have been supermen in that we have overcome the known boundaries of the world, exceeding well past them.
Longing for a new horizon has been hard wired in the consciousness of this country since it began, and indeed into the consciousness of humanity. Once we found our way to our furthest western shore, we unfortunately brought that consciousness to other nations, assuming it was our manifest destiny to use others’ resources to feed our material ambitions. We have gotten used to exploring the new boundaries: space, power, energy, chemistry, knowing that miracle cure, that mystic power, that marvelous new thing — regardless the cost to ourselves and others — was just around the corner. Our needs and ambitions have far exceeded our planet’s capacity to cope and right now, there is no horizon but deep water. We haven’t invented anything yet that can save us from ourselves.
I’m not advocating halting our quest to knowledge and innovation. On the contrary, we need to constantly improve the quality of our lives. But that improvement is not going to be from our gadgets, toys and vehicles or for that matter our energy sources. Our improvement needs to be in the quality of our thoughts and feelings, which affect how we live. It begins not with a product but with me. I need to take a look at what I’ve been thinking and reacting to and realize that I must confront my consumerism, my vanity, my insecurity and my desire to isolate myself from people different from me. This is more than just about driving too much. Its about what I spend my time on, what I’m chasing around pointlessly for, and what cost these pursuits have on our world.
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