It's Messy. Get To IT!

The history of life on Earth is messy, wasteful, bloody, painful, and constantly changing.  But it's mesmerizing, awesome, sublime, elegant, beautiful and unlikely.  Yes, it is all of those things, and human society is all of those things.

Today's world evolved through tooth and nail, extinction and explosions, famine and flood, drought and deluge.  Each still living organism sufficiently adapted to have survived until today, and there's no guarantee for any of us for the next millennium.  Any of us (fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, etc.) could be gone in the geological blink of an eye, and any of us (individually) could be snuffed out tomorrow.  But one thing is common -- all the surviving species so far had to, at some point in their lives, fight to the death for our place in the ecosystem.

Society is like that.  Different ways of living, models for community, and modes of thought have ebbed and flowed, risen and fallen, been invented and become extinct, using the same fundamental dynamic as life: the most adaptable for a given environment is the one that survives.  It's in this invention and adaption/adoption and the competition for dominance where the interesting things happen, and it's happening right now in every aspect of modern human life.  The species is healthy when people are striving for something, for their survival, and whoever strives hardest, is willing to join the fray for the sustainability for their ideas, to help them propagate and thrive, will dominate.

My question to you is which ideas are you out fighting for?  How hard are you fighting?  If enough of us are willing to sit by and let the elite, the desperate, the enlightened, or the others do the fighting, if we don't choose an ideal we'd like to see flourish and get behind it, those ideas will wither and die.  We are most alive when we are in the arena, we are most at peace when we are struggling for what we know to be a worthy cause.  Are you in?  Or are you on the sidelines watching.  Pick up your tools and get building.  Get on the bullhorn and lead.  Grab your bat and step up to the base.  Take up your cross and follow.  Whatever your favorite metaphor, the more people representing what they deeply believe, the better we'll be.  As real members of the chain of life still inhabiting the planet, the fighters will own the future and either make it better, and the idle will hasten our demise.

Use your limited tenure to advance your cause, and if you don't have one, open your eyes and ears and let the one that makes your blood boil, that raises your hackles, that makes you cry, or that brings you to your feet with a shout, drive you.  Get into it, learn more, and get to work.  Get off the damn couch, get your butt out into the real world, with your community action teams, your legislative working groups, your staff of volunteers building something, your horde of volunteers cleaning up the estuary, your neighborhood watch watching for crime, your church group gathering blankets for the homeless, your art co-op creating posters to spread the word about injustice, your design team to create the new school, your youth-group teaching teens about savings accounts and budgeting.  You name it, there's something you can give to be part of a solution.  Yes, your main occupation is often a great goodness, and unless your job is directly improving policy and process, there is something you are particularly suited for.

There will be casualties on both sides, but letting evil (however you see it) win is a bigger casualty for all.  No cutting yourself slack because life's hard.  No cutting yourself slack because life is easy.  Join your cause and advance it with gusto.  And if you find out you're fighting the wrong battle half way through because you learned more, broadened your perspective, saw the light, then cut your losses, undo your damage and get on the right side.  It's through the fight that you know -- like the soldier who now fights for peace, the former racist to now teaches acceptance, the gangster who helps children avoid his mistakes.  Fight to make your community, or state, or country, or mankind better because of you and for your children and mine.  If you don't fight, you may not suffer, but your progeny will.  Face the fear, take the risk, and when you do die, you'll be in heaven (which I define as dying with a smile in your heart (if not on your face) for having done your best to better your world and pay back the universe for blessing you with the sublime gift of life.

You can do all that while giving your family all the love they need when they need it -- it's not an exclusive proposition.  In fact, if you are not living to your potential, you're not doing a very good job of modeling and teaching your children what it means to truly live.  That's your job as a parent. Get to it!

Some, A Lot, Most, All Americans

America needs all sorts of people.  We need some bold, innovative entrepreneurs.  We need some prudent and thoughtful caretakers.  We need some independent, spirited individualists to fight for their rights (and everybody's through their courage).  We need some bleeding-heart, compassionate folks to tend to those less fortunate.  We need some insightful and effective leaders to cope with our problems and move ahead with confidence aforethought.  We need some focused and brave soldiers and police to defend us from harm from abroad and at home.  We need a lot of us to find our life-work in understanding and solving the many problems caused by human interaction with our environment, through scientific, engineering, education and project management means. We need a lot to work toward our physical and mental health, with a strong bent toward prevention.  We need a lot of us to passionately and skillfully educate our children to be their best future selves.  We need most of us to recognize that we're all in this together, to recognize the strength of our nation rests on the aggregate strength of all of us.  We need most of us to see that creating desperate, dependent, insecure people will sap the life-blood resources as we deal with more of them driven to criminality, dependency and chronic health maladies.  And we need most of them do do something about it.  We need all Americans to call upon their optimism and ability, to follow their calling and thrive by serving their fellow beings.  We need all Americans to raise their kids with tons of love and patience, to let them learn to struggle and overcome, to value learning, and to follow their own life path like they did.  We need all Americans to respect our differences and others' right to do their own thing.

I know there is no clear line between what's good for a society and the rights of individuals.  Or where a child's rights and their parent's right should be drawn, or where freedom to practice religion and child well-being (as in the case of Christian Scientists who deny standard healthcare to children, or genital mutilation).  I know the sensibilities about what is permissible (and what is not) changes as society winds its way through the philosophical shifts that naturally happen as a people interact with ideas over time.  I realize that, in the era of increasing globalization, as cultures continue to swirl around and within each other, we will continue to undergo development, often unpredictably.  As Americans, we will continue to navigate and refine where we come down on issues, but we all need to keep our perspective broad and deep, with our ultimate goal to allow us to live a life well spent, whatever that means to each of us.

No hurry, let's get it right.  Let's build this thing.  All of us.

Raising Your Children in the Age of Rapid Climate Change

It's a comin' and there ain't no stoppin' it -- the times they are a changin'.

Read this:

When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job: Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can't really talk about it.

So, given that we're going to be living in a very stressed out globe, how do we raise our children in such a way that they're good to go throughout the very real potential for major economic and social upheaval?

Well, I'm glad I'm thinking about it now, and I believe the more people who go this way, the better we'll all be because for every well-suited survivor, that's one less desperate (and therefore dangerous) helpmate.

• Comfortable migrating
• Living small, but with all you need to make it big.
• Psychologically fluent -- getting along with troubled people is going to be really important, so every skill you can muster to have people not want to kill you is going to work in your favor.
• Skilled at how the world works, physically, socially, politically and economically.
• Indefatigable sense of humor!  How important will this be to maintaining a positive attitude when the shit hits the fan.
• Multi-lingual.
• Survivalist practice
• Medical training?
• Adaptable
• Comfortable with their own mortality.

I'll explain these next time I have a minute, but I'm going to bed because I'm getting up early tomorrow.

NOTE: not only are these good for the environmental apocalypse, but for any major life-threatening challenge we face, like life-threatening illness, relationship nightmares, any manner of natural disaster, zombie scenarios, deadly viral pandemic, etc.

Big Eating, Let's Retire This Abomination Already

Whether it's the 125 ounce steak at Ward's Steakhouse in Milwaukee or Nathan's Hot Dog eating contest, there is no purpose for seeing how much a person can eat.  As we move toward conservation of energy and resources (still, after starting 40 years ago), and as we work to combat obesity in America, and as we would, naturally, want to work toward a more perfect union, could we ditch the glorification of wasteful, unhealthy practices?

I have an idea: instead of encouraging these, let's put our excess energy literally and figuratively not where our mouth is.  There are a hundred possible alternatives -- many of which would give us a deep satisfaction to the cores of our souls.  In direct opposition to throwing away good food, how about helping with any of the anti-hunger initiatives from soup kitchens to food drives to school lunch programs for needy children to helping homeless people find the means to get off the street to mentoring young people on healthy life-affirming habits to donating day old baked goods and unused produce and expired food to those who need it.

In any event, if you would please pick something that serves your soul and your fellow travelers, you'll be be on the winning side of your deathbed reflections.  I know that's not for everybody -- it's easy to convince yourself that you did what you could, but when it comes to seriously facing your mortality and the honest legacy you left to mankind, you'll be giving up the sublime peace that comes from a life well lived.  If you're the religious, afterlife type, then you know there's no escaping the selfishness, Pontius Pilot-esque self delusion you go for when you're meeting your Maker.  If you're the humanistic, secular type, you've got nothing to work for except the to-the-core integrity that frees your conscience of stress.  OK, that's a little touch-feely, but it's also true.

Happy Birthday, United States

Let's celebrate the Declaration of Independence.  Let's read it.  Let's think about it, have an opinion about it, try for a minute to forget who we are and join the frame of mind of the desperate state of the men who had "had it up to here" about the way they were being treated by their authority figures.  Certainly we can relate.  With few exceptions, we've all worked for (or been subject to) an authority who was having a hard time hearing and acting on problems you're having.  And when that's the case, you either continue to suffer to your own detriment, or you step up and make a stand.

And the nascent states did that.  We admire that because we would like to think we had the same level of courage -- to stand up to wrong.  When the wrong is great enough, meaning when it becomes a matter of life and death for some, or a matter of thriving or withering of great swaths of people, then the stand we're willing to take has to be proportional.  For a people who had the audacity to come to early America and brave the wild, it was maybe of their nature to take care of themselves doing whatever it takes to survive and own their existence without compromise.

After a hundred years of struggle to make it work, an existential civil war, a couple all-out efforts to help the rest of the world and protect ourselves against the forces of tyranny in WWI an II, we've been able to settle into the comfort of the greater part of a century of relative prosperity for most, or if not actual leisure, then enough of it to get a little soft.  We want our children to have it a little soft, easier than ourselves.  Should we?  I guess the question I want to ask of myself is, "Do we have it in us anymore to do what it takes to preserve our integrity as a nation?"

We have some long-range (relatively speaking) existential threats, and are enough of us ready to "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."?*

Having grown up curious and literate, I've exposed myself to and studied no small proportion of the main ideas defining our lives as humans and Americans.  That's a luxury many of us don't get because of our socio-economic circumstances don't support.  A shame, since as a nation, we certainly have the wealth to erase that deficit.  Why don't we have the will?  Is it that the well-to-do, the accomplished, the wealthy don't have the breadth of vision to look deeper?  Or they've absorbed some of our ideals (individual rights, reaping the benefit of hard work), but not others (giving back to the community, strength of our nation arising from the collective ability to thrive), so the selfish side is overemphasized?  Are those that claim this is a Christian nation so consumed with the perceived threat to their ability to believe as they wish that they're blinded to the fundamental notion of Christianity: your purpose is to love (and serve), not horde and amass wealth?

The bottom line of the Declaration of Independence is pledging our lives, fortunes and sacred honor for the good of the people of America.  How far have we drifted from that ideal?  How far have I, personally, drifted?  Or have I ever EVER internalized that when I think of myself as an American?

Do we have it in us as a nation to face our threats with enough force to defeat them?

Our real threats, it seems, based on what I've been absorbing through the national rhetoric and information outlets are, in no particular order: Climate change, wage inequality/economic stability, globalization, mass human migration from war and unrest, splintering of our national culture.  Maybe you can think of more, but I have this irrational belief that together, with enough a sense of conscious agreement and cooperation, we could reduce the threat or find ways to effectively cope to the point where we felt it wasn't going to do us in.  How do we get there?  Ah, let's step up our game and figure that out.  Together.