The challenge we face
On January 24, 2016 | 0 Comments | Blog Posts |

We can remind ourselves that we are on and in a journey, this species of ours, arrived at this point in the story, this moment of danger and destruction, this moment of the climate change mirror and the habitat loss mirror and the population growth mirror and the violence mirror, this moment when we can look at ourselves perhaps as never we have, just as, in each our own lives we understand the journey of our individual life differently at the different ages of our life. There is opportunity here. How can we speak so that we can listen to each other? How can we reach across the divides? How can we find the ways to live in more peace with each other, in spite of our differences? How can we reverse our destructive impacts on habitat and climate? All of us are asking what will happen, how can we find our way forward. There is so much to do and we don’t quite know how to do it. It’s as if humanity is faced with the challenge of learning how to live together as no other life form has, in more collaboration and cooperation than is the usual. We who are alive now are faced with the challenge of learning how to live together as humans have never been before. We are asking ourselves about inclusion and nonviolent social and economic relations, about equity in the sharing of resources, about environmental sustainability, about participatory decision-making and deliberative democracy. Climate change, habitat destruction, species extinctions, and violence present us with mirrors within which to look at ourselves. Who do we see and what do we want to do about it? And the fundamental problem is in the “we”. Who is this “we”? What unity is there from which to act? How do we act as a cohesive entity? How do we find agreement? How do we find our way forward together? We are working at it in the crafting of rules and laws, norms and universal values. It’s a slow and difficult process. There is much disagreement in the town square and we face limitations in our abilities to manage and resolve the disagreements. Consensus is elusive. Self-interests, valid or misguided both, collide. There are no easy answers. These are the difficulties the characters in Last Stop Before Tomorrow confront. The climax of the novel presents one possible outcome. And the book asks the question how much control “we” have over that outcome.