With growing human population and consumption, our planet is already strained with water scarcity, fossil fuel scarcity, food scarcity, mineral scarcity, and environmental degradation. Is the big picture that humans will eventually kill each other to compete for scarce resources?
The most humble eat grains and seeds. They don’t have anything else. They live off the earth.
The poor eat refined starches, rice, beans. They can’t afford anything else.
The luxury many strive for is perceived to be meat.
Then the cycle gets completed. As people learn more about nutrition and the environment, they start avoiding meat, they start avoiding refined sugars and starches, and they steer back to grains, seeds, vegetables and fruits straight from nature.
It sounds so crazy. With growing climate change, planet earth as we know it is on the brink of a radical transformation that could endanger the very survival of the human race, if not at best require the most painful and radical adjustments for us all.
Why then would any rational human being want to stand in the way of finding solutions to prevent an epic catastrophe?
It is striking how often we resort to recasting our fallen leaders into molds of perfected humanity. No matter their flaws, once assassinated, their death transforms them to immortal epic heroes.
In re-casting our fallen, we humans do not just pay tribute to their courage and compensate them for their lost years. We also re-write history to make society seem more enlightened and history more bearable, if not downright inspirational. We re-write the fallen to have us seem more pious.
And so it is that Martin Luther King Jr., whose tragic passing we have just commemorated, has been re-written into a Disney prototype of a civil rights leader. Whereas at 39 years of age this courageous human had failings like all of us, we cast out any weaknesses and remember only his “dream” of co-existence. We purge any problematic comments that some today would consider “unpatriotic.” And we conveniently forget that on the night that he was killed he was being called everything from a sell-out to a “menacing” instigator by leading newspapers and critics. According to modern lore, we fantasize that he embraced and was embraced by all of mainstream America, except by the one coward who shot him.
The phenomena of post-mortem-transformations is not uniquely American. Yitzhak Rabin is now revered by all Israelis as a unifying symbol, the soldier of peace who sacrificed his life for the cause. He should indeed be admired. But history seems to have conveniently swept aside that a large percentage of the Israeli population considered him a reckless traitor and the media was replete with condemnations and calls for his lynching in the weeks leading to his assassination.
Why is lionizing historic figures a problem? Don’t we all need to be inspired? Yes, but in transmogrifying the fallen into impossibly perfect figures to emulate, we make it very difficult to sufficiently appreciate and praise the mere good effort of the still-living leaders, not to mention our own responsibility to do our small part.
Why is re-casting history a problem? Because it turns deficient but illustrative history into unusable fairy-tale legend, and it leads us to draw distorted lessons from the past.
Gandhi, for example, was an exceptional leader, but he was not – as most people imagine him today – a heavenly pacifist. Yes, his tools were non-violent, but his strategies were often not. He was a brilliant strategist who knew he had the high moral ground and forced violence to be inflicted on his people in order to arouse moral rage around the world. He would ask his followers to walk and push their way through British soldier lines, knowing the soldiers would be forced to either give up control or hold the line through brutal force against defenseless white robed activists. He did not draw blood but caused others to draw it. Yes, one can admire Gandhi’s many positive contributions, but nobody is served by blind exultation of his “non-violent” path without critical examination of his means.
Contrast Gandhi’s approach to the still-living Dalai Lama, who has at least so far truly adopted a path of absolute non-violence, calling on Tibetan youth not to engage in violence or cause violence to be unleashed upon them, advising he will resign as spiritual and political leader if his call is not heeded. Gandhi would most likely have reacted differently. We have yet to see if the Dalai Lama’s path will change the status quo in Tibet, but if the path itself is the way, there is plenty to study and reflect in his life.
Only by analyzing the unvarnished nuances of human character can we accurately evaluate our past, our present, and our future.
Only by avoiding the tendency to create mythical messianic figures who must come to the rescue to rid us of human suffering can we own up to our shared responsibility as human beings, however imperfect and flawed we may be, to do a little of the leading ourselves.
At the Skoll World Forum, Al Gore spoke poignantly about the imperative of joining forces to rescue our planet. If enlightened self-interest is to mean anything, it has to be that our personal well-being is dependent on the well-being of our planet. And each of us has to share in the responsibility to prevent climate change from endangering future generations, not to mention ours.
So how do you create an identity and a logo to convey this? The job went to Brian Collins, who did a superb job at merging the concept of global and personal responsibility for planet earth.
The New York Times does a very good job at explaining the thinking behind Al Gore’s new logo. You can also learn more about what you can do at www.wecansolveit.org.
Thanks to Janera Soerel for an exceptionally explicit and precise interview and article tackling a lot of issues revolving OneVoice, PeaceWorks, and the philosophy underlying them.
Barack Obama’s South Carolina Victory speech is one of the most inspirational and powerful – and sincere – I have heard in a long time. It is also the right message that our nation and our world desperately need.
After months of researching all candidates, and after seeing the way they have conducted their campaigns, I have decided to help the Obama campaign.
On the Republican side, McCain’s principled public service is also admirable and worthy of support.
And on the Democratic side, I thought hard about Hilary’s experience, and the accomplishments of the Clintons during their administration, which I don’t think you can dismiss. After the dust settles, Senator Clinton would also work hard to bring America back to a position of positive global leadership. But the way the Clinton team handled the fight against Obama is a warning about what we’d encounter in a needless partisan "Clinton vs. Republicans" tenure, one which would not serve us well. Obama, by contrast, can possibly unite the nation.
Some of Obama’s positions concern me, and it is possible he will make some mistakes early in his Administration. But he more than makes up for it with his character, intellect, and his sincerity about healing our nation with a message of unity that will be heard across (and also impact) the world. The greatness that could come from his Administration is exactly what we need.
Odds today are that Senator Clinton’s strong network will beat him. But that is more reason to lend him a hand if his message appeals to you.
Listen to his South Carolina Victory Speech here.
Listen and watch his earlier Iowa victory speech here.
A revolution inside the human brain is taking place far beyond our capacity to understand.
What we call "A.D.D." or attention-deficit-disorder will become the norm rather than the exception, if it hasn’t already.
Our brains used to de-construct and decompress during leisurely walks between work and home, but if you see people walking nowadays, odds are they are speaking on a cell phone. No time to waste: we crave more input.
Email processing makes us "efficient" (though it can also invade our management time) but changes the very way we organize ourselves and communicate. The constant feedback mechanism turns us into creatures desiring a flow of data and messages.
Instant-messaging, social network platforms, the way we seek news over the internet, and email reminders, are all transforming the way we think, process, relate to other human beings, and relate to our brains.
The impact of this constant-feedback/short-span model of communications is already felt in entertainment platforms, where Youtube’s short-clips are becoming more the rage than long-format movies.
When we design a video presentation for OneVoice or PeaceWorks, of course we forget about the 1 hour or 20 minute pieces, but now even the 5 minute piece which was acceptable a few years ago is a total eternity. You have 1 minute max to convey your message, no matter how deep or complex. After that you’ve lost your audience.
I will not be surprised if the next generation of human beings is radically different in the way people relate to one another. We have no idea what we are going to become.
And I have a fleeting feeling (as feelings and thoughts increasingly are) that it is not going to be pretty.
Living in NYC you cannot help wonder if you are "keeping up" with the neighbors. Are you making enough? I am all for capitalism (to paraphrase, "as the worst system except for all others), but it is definitely unhealthy that we tend to compare ourselves to others and evaluate our "happiness" based on our financial accomplishments.
Now there is a way to keep things in perspective.
Click on this link to get an idea of HOW RICH (and fortunate) YOU ARE!
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
From purchasing raw materials for KIND Fruit + Nut bars, we get a scary first-hand lesson in the honey crisis.
Bees are disappearing across America. Americans are importing them from all over the world – buying Queen Bees from Australia and other places, trying to repopulate their honey-producing bee farms.
The crisis does not just mean that a core raw material – Honey – is endangered.
Bees perform essential pollination functions across many different flowers and fruits.
Nobody really knows what is causing it. Is it climate change? Is it a biological mishap? What is it?
Planet earth is frailer than we realize. This is a scary, under-reported plague that could really wreak havoc on our world.
It is certainly causing a shortage of honey – and a rise in prices. But this could be just the beginning.