Sunday, March 15, 2020

On who "we" are

I hope this finds you and those around you healthy and virus-free. The next few months will prove to be challenging, at best. They will also provide us with a much clearer picture of just how unlevel the "playing field" in the  US, and the rest of the world, has become. Many of those with the fewest resources will suffer the greatest harm from the  COVID-19 virus and its economic impacts.

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 planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn and scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.


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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

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