Here We Are Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
An online article raises the question "What would happen if the world reacted to climate change like it’s reacting to the coronavirus?" At first I thought it might be satire, directed at US, since, in addition to a failing, uncoordinated, falsehood laden coronavirus response, we're also the country that's pulling out of the Paris Agreement. But, as noted in the article:
“Climate change also affects the most vulnerable first and worst,” says Boeve. “So we see that pattern play out as well, and how this is unfolding and how the response is and is not responding to that inequity and impact.”Is it possible that the coronavirus emergency is yet another effort by mother nature to help us all to see that there is no Planet B; that we are all in this together; that we need to manage our commons for the sake of all of us, not just to increase the wealth of the 1% or the profits of corporate "persons" and the politicians they own? I'm not naive enough to believe we can and will change quickly enough to avoid significant problems resulting from our broken climate. I am enough of an optimist to hope that we can, over time, change enough to learn to work together so we can first bring the coronavirus to heel and, in the process, notice that, as Senator Wellstone used to tell us "We all do better when we all do better." For that to work most effectively, we need to broaden our definition of "we," don't we?
A Brave and Startling Truth
by Maya Angelou
We, this people, on a small and lonely planetTraveling through casual spacePast aloof stars, across the way of indifferent sunsTo a destination where all signs tell usIt is possible and imperative that we learnA brave and startling truthAnd when we come to itTo the day of peacemakingWhen we release our fingersFrom fists of hostilityAnd allow the pure air to cool our palmsWhen we come to itWhen the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hateAnd faces sooted with scorn and scrubbed cleanWhen battlefields and coliseumNo longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughtersUp with the bruised and bloody grassTo lie in identical plots in foreign soilWhen the rapacious storming of the churchesThe screaming racket in the temples have ceasedWhen the pennants are waving gailyWhen the banners of the world trembleStoutly in the good, clean breezeWhen we come to itWhen we let the rifles fall from our shouldersAnd children dress their dolls in flags of truceWhen land mines of death have been removedAnd the aged can walk into evenings of peaceWhen religious ritual is not perfumedBy the incense of burning fleshAnd childhood dreams are not kicked awakeBy nightmares of abuseWhen we come to itThen we will confess that not the PyramidsWith their stones set in mysterious perfectionNor the Gardens of BabylonHanging as eternal beautyIn our collective memoryNot the Grand CanyonKindled into delicious colorBy Western sunsetsNor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into EuropeNot the sacred peak of Mount FujiStretching to the Rising SunNeither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shoresThese are not the only wonders of the worldWhen we come to itWe, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globeWho reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the daggerYet who petition in the dark for tokens of peaceWe, this people on this mote of matterIn whose mouths abide cankerous wordsWhich challenge our very existenceYet out of those same mouthsCome songs of such exquisite sweetnessThat the heart falters in its laborAnd the body is quieted into aweWe, this people, on this small and drifting planetWhose hands can strike with such abandonThat in a twinkling, life is sapped from the livingYet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tendernessThat the haughty neck is happy to bowAnd the proud back is glad to bendOut of such chaos, of such contradictionWe learn that we are neither devils nor divinesWhen we come to itWe, this people, on this wayward, floating bodyCreated on this earth, of this earthHave the power to fashion for this earthA climate where every man and every womanCan live freely without sanctimonious pietyWithout crippling fearWhen we come to itWe must confess that we are the possibleWe are the miraculous, the true wonder of this worldThat is when, and only whenWe come to it.
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