DOOM, DESTRUCTION, AND …HOPE, IN SPITE OF IT ALL It’s a nasty little fact of human nature that most of us have an innate ability to justify even the most abhorrent behavior or belief when it’s ourselves who commit the deed.  Stealing is wrong—until I am hungry.  Violence is uncalled for—until I am attacked.  Torture is unconscionable—until my loved ones are threatened by what you know.  Crises that become personal tend to induce a sudden review of your ethics. If you look closely at the photos from the shuttle doing trazillion-dollar backflips in space, you can just make out that sign sticking out of the Earth below that reads, “Where am I going?  --And why am I in this handbasket?”  It’s a little hard to read through the toxic fog of both industry and intolerance spewing from all the places in which humans dwell and desire.  The planet seems to be having a zillion crises, all personal to some. Here we are in America, with our leaders insisting we’re tripping breezily along the yellow brick road to democracy in Iraq, while the ideals of democracy become ever more distorted and deranged here at home. The head of our land of the free is right now trying to quietly get himself pardoned for his illegal spying on American citizens (learn more at www.moveon.org), and trying to justify the secret foreign interrogation sites he first swore we didn’t have and now swears are necessary (because he says so, that’s why!)—not that we’re torturing people in them, of course.  We are interrogating them effectively, something that apparently cannot be accomplished within the geographical domain of the United States.  (Because he says so, that’s why.) Closer to our Florida shores, the oilmen’s bitch, the Department of the Interior, is busy gutting former environmental protections and restrictions to pave the way for the oil companies to drill hundreds more holes in the Gulf of Mexico in search of the industrial-age narcotic, petroleum—even though that same Department of the Interior admits the very most oil that might be withdrawn from the new sites under the very best of circumstances and with all the stars aligned…would not extend our supply beyond ten additional years.  Much of that supply is located in sensitive marine and coastal regions not meant to be disturbed unless dire crisis arises.  Can we really claim it’s a crisis when it’s been foreseen and forewarned for years and years? Meanwhile, the head of the Catholic Church has managed to offend approximately five gazillion militant Muslims with his suggestion that dialogue and enlightenment might go further toward awakening the world to the power and beauty of Islam than, say, beheadings and bombings.  The jihadists’ “revolutionary” response:  More promises of more beheadings and bombings.  Death by the sword, death to the West, yada yada yada.  Are these people for real?  Do they have a clue how many people are on this planet these days, and how fast more are coming?  --Swords.  Honestly.   (The pope, for his part, seems rather perplexed by all the fuss.  He seems not to have noticed that the extremist concept of “forgiveness” apparently went the way of their sense of humor at some point in history.)   A lot of the crises going on –crises of all political, social, and environmental stripes—seem to be spawned and connected by a common thread of short-sightedness, and so far our institutional responses to our crises have exhibited stunning short-sightedness as well.  From not thinking the New Orleans levees could fail, to not thinking people could run out of things like water or gas or arable land, the institutions of nations, including our own, have suffered from a remarkable lack of imagination. Like addicts, we humans seldom change our bad old ways without convulsions of protest, attempts at deception, and intermittent relapses.  It’s easy to despair over the state of things, but progress is rarely linear.  Much more challenging is the effort to look beneath the surface to learn what’s germinating there, to allow change to occur organically as a product of growth--not force, to allow transformation, in fact, at all.  And beneath the surface of all the things smoldering on our little blue- green orb, millions of positive transformations are occurring.  Renewable energy sources, sustainable forestry and farming and fishing methods, education and communication reaching into the darkest corners of the world… beyond religion or sexuality or ethnicity, we human animals are bound by our need for these things, and only we can give them to each other.  And we’re doing it, sometimes one individual at a time.  We’re sharing knowledge and ideas, the currency of the future.  We’re working together to employ and protect people and natural resources in innovative ways that don’t assume the two concepts are mutually exclusive.  We’re speaking up for the voiceless and speaking to each other from across oceans, across cultures.  We’re teaching.  We’re learning. It’s a slow process and we’re barely pulling a “C-”, and we probably should have been sent to detention by now, but we’re learning.  And in the grand scale of Earth’s history, humans, after all, are only kindergarteners.  If we apply ourselves (like your report card always said you didn’t), we might still make it to senior year without getting expelled. ###