Stack Coordination

Orion Magazine is just about the only journal that I usually read cover-to-cover – a fantastic publication that deals with the ways that we can “live artfully on the planet.”   I was taken by the editorial opening to their January / February edition, because I think it fantastically sums up the challenge and hope before us in 2010 and beyond.

Below is a direct quote:

“The oughts were in many ways a decade of fear, having begun with the Y2K hysteria, buoyed along by the duct tape defense mentality, and winding to a close amid the H1N1 vaccine frenzy.  Fear can certainly be a great motivator; political leaders and marketing executives have taken full advantage of that fact.  But there’s a fundamental problem with making the focal point of the dialogue an undesirable outcome, rather than that which we wish to see transpire.  It’s awfully hard to imagine, much less build, a better world when you’re overcome by fear.”

“Then what of the teens?  Perhaps it’s time to try a new motivator.”

“It’ll have to be something powerfully compelling, something intensely alluring – dynamic enough to hold humanity in its spell, to hold each and every one of us to a higher standard of moral conduct.  It’s tempting to think that it will be some new idea or trend or even technology.  But more likely it will be something that’s been here all along, something enduring, if not eternal – something we call fall in love with all over again, unleashing in us a level of devotion we never thought possible.  The world as we know it, the one we appear to be hellbent on destroying, seems full of possibility in this regard.  Consider sunsets; great blue herons; spurts of laughter so overwhelming they end in tears of joy; a child’s sense of wonder; the Crab nebula; skinny-dipping by moonlight…”

“Is the beauty of the Earth enough to save humanity from itself?  Or are human beings so inherently dualistic that we can go on loving the world while concurrently ensuring its, or at least our, destruction?  One way or another, the answers to these questions will become clearer in the coming decade.”

Thank you to Orion for taking the big picture view and putting things back in the basic context that we must face:

“It’s time to let truth, thoughtfulness, justice, and beauty capture our hearts and minds; time to stop living in fear that things will go wrong and start making sure that things go right.  It’s time to change the way we live.”