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-snip-
So, if you are holding onto hope, I say: Hold on tight, because the ride we are on is going to get rougher -- rougher, in fact, than you and I sitting here today probably can imagine -- and we will need that hope. We live in a world in crisis on every front -- political, economic, moral, cultural, and, most crucially, ecological. This is not the first time the world has faced crises, but it is the first time that we must confront such global crises on so many fronts with so little time for correcting the course. Our margin of error is shrinking by the day. I cannot offer definitive data and logic to prove this, but I firmly believe that these crises pose a threat of a new, and quite frightening, order. The widening of the inequality gap, the pace of technological change and the accompanying unintended consequences of that change, and the destructive capacity not only of our military machine but of the way we live our daily lives -- all have upped the ante. The fallout of our failures can no longer be easily contained and will not remain localized.
We are stumbling into something that I believe we don’t really understand, but the markers of the intensity of the threats -- the breakdown of the values needed to sustain real human community and the weakening of ecosystems needed to sustain life -- are easy enough to see if one wants to see them.
And it’s going to get much worse before it gets better, at least in the United States. I think that at some level many people feel what I’m talking about, even if they keep themselves from thinking about it. They sense that we are on the edge of something that is, at best, going to be destabilizing and destructive, and, at worst, catastrophic. I think part of the cultural fascination with the rapture and the Book of Revelation is rooted in this; it is not crazy to talk about the end time.
-snip-
Personally, I do not call those forces Satan. I call them nationalism and patriotism, capitalism, affluence and greed, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the reflexive glorification of high-technology. The problem is not some abstract notion of evil that lives below, nor is the problem simply the devious actions of a few bad people on earth. Instead, the problem is in the nature of these big systems and powerful institutions, and the painful reality that decent people will abandon their stated values -- and, therefore, some part of their own humanity -- when operating in those systems. We know this, because most of us have at some point in our life done it; we have twisted ourselves to fit into those unjust systems and institutions.
-more-
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=9125
Well worth reading! |
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