The bill is overdue, and the mortgage is being called in now!
Our indulgence has created a planetary reality that is unsustainable and threatens our survival as a human species. A childish pretense that we can live in a reality of our choosing, changes nothing; only puts off our action till it becomes too little too late.
Our indifference to the health of ordinary people has left us with only ineffective tools and structures to deal with a deadly pandemic.
Our willingness to make excuses for the abuses of white power threatens to destroy our democracy.
Life is not a game, certainly not one we control. We can pretend to keep score with money, or property, or power or armies. But all of that has been stopped in its tracks by the pandemic and if we do not come to our senses and see that only adult solutions have any hope of saving humankind, we are not likely to succeed. We are all in this together.
Life and reality have their own rules which are dynamic and are not of our making. Remember that we live in a universe filled with dark matter and dark energy that account for over 90% of the universe providing both the structure and energy for the existence of the universe, the earth, and our own beings. All our knowledge accounts for about 5% of this reality. That alone should remind us to be humble in the face of life and reality. It should remind us that all human explanations, all ideologies and even all religions are limited to this sliver of human knowledge and insight and are tentative best guesses. All these things are helpful but humanly limited; they do provide some possible suggestions but certainly not ultimate answers or solutions.
We are simply left to try to find out how to survive within that framework of the existing reality. We are given guidance by attending to the realities that surround us in nature and in our lives. They will provide a guidance if we have the humility to follow them. As we get into more abstract explanations of how life works, we tread on thinner ice. The threat to our humanity is the temptation of hubris, the pretense that our limited knowledge is greater than it is, and we can proceed, godlike, to an imagined future. We are simply a part of some great web of life that we partially understand but which provides us guidance of how to survive within that framework. We found the uses of fire long before we understood the science of it.
Much of life is just a journey, one step at a time, and one day at a time, with faith in a future we only partially control. We can proceed, knowing full well that we will have to continue to review and adjust as the realities of life change and grow and we also do.
No matter how we might think about life, there is something sacred and unknowable about it, and that is OK, we must have a basic faith in it and honor it.
The judges, referees and arbiters are outside of human control. The scoring is about survival.
It is time for a kind of redemption of the human spirit, acknowledging our vulnerability but realizing that we are a part of some grander purpose in the universe, that we are each a piece of some universal puzzle which none of us understand. It is a time for cooperation, willingly sharing whatever resources we may have, accepting our differences and realizing that only a unified effort can hope to deal with the obstacles we face.
We need to put aside our differences and our childish desire for competition. We need to work together, accepting that the whole range of human characteristics exist in every age group, every region, every nation, race, nationality, religion, ideology, lifestyle, and gender, and none is superior or has cornered the market on honor, goodness, or morality. We need to accept the help of everyone who is concerned about the current realities, a veritable coalition of the willing.
Life is not some game and it never was. As adults accepting the present realities and challenges, it is clear how we must proceed while having faith in the human spirit to guide us to our sustainable place in the web of life on this planet and trusting the universe not to forsake us if we do.
