On Being Right

You see, in a topsy-turvy world stirred by stories about our planet, our cultures, and ourselves as humans, it’s too easy to shirk the fascinating idea that humans are just not what we’ve pumped ourselves up to be.

Humans are like an apostrophe to all of creation rather than the reason for it. ~ DM

In our hubris, we could feel smug on being right about answers to queries of unknown realms, for instance, on the sun and climate change.

Many of us assume a cloak of control over what we want to believe is true and attempt to manage zig-zags in our homes and lifestyles. However, considering ourselves absolutely right, we’d be wiser to reconsider old beliefs converging with a new batch of supposed concerns for us and our global sisters and brothers.

There’s a way of being that keeps us believing we’ve already got the answers, and feeling resolute on being right. I have to admit I’m still grieving that all answers to disturbing queries no longer spring out of one source, like religious moralistic platitudes, or any new thought espoused as a pet metaphysical enlightenment.

Until we’re studying and discussing sacrifices inherent in extinction, then the repackaged and retailed language of metaphysics and traditional worn out poetic religious sentimentality can only keep Earthlings unconscious and unhappy throughout the current species’ transformation. ~ DM

Just ponder what people are talking about; there are so many political and environmental dilemmas, one’s awareness vexes at the humongous effects. Apparently, no right answers exist what with all the memes in judgments, opinions, and evaluations floating about science. Anthropologists, political scientists, astronomers, cosmologists, and other kinds of scientists who’ve been closeted too long, are painting similar pictures on being right, framed by their particular specialties on global plights. Staying Awake ezine delights in relaying their messages as best it can.

Are our children or our grandchildren going to look back 20 years and wonder if we stayed awake to plans for taking care of each other in critical times? Are they to wonder why our high priority on being right about politically correct home and business environments? If so, our buying and selling of politically correct light bulbs, thermostats, and washing machines probably won’t seem as important to them as to us. Our progenies would see clearly our delusions, assuming an inevitable abrupt wake-up call was sounded. The future aftermath is only our children’s beginning.*

Our future families could perceive us Earthlings as prancing jesters, nearly wearied by notions we could actually have halted Earth’s disruptions and societal systems’ cascading failures. A great travesty about being right is the joke we’re playing on ourselves when we applaud the politically savvy alluding science by proclaiming moralistic metaphors as they present us with a bunch of material environmental things to buy.

*This is the premise for Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Upside of Down: Leveraging Catastrophe for Positive Change. He is the director of the Trudeau Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict, University of Toronto, Canada.

[…] Simply managing our problems is no longer good enough. As population, energy, environmental, and economic stresses build in force deep underneath our societies, as our technologies grow more complex and interconnected, and as events in one place increasingly cause effects that cascade around the planet, major system failure becomes more likely.

But rather than giving up in despair, we must embrace this possibility as an opportunity for revolutionary change. By adopting a prospective mind—a mindset adapted to constant surprise and instability—we can create something new from the unexpected, and something useful from turmoil and crisis.

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead