Excerpt #10 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE
We live with many contradictions in a difficult time, a confusing time.
Our collective joy has not kept pace with our technological progress.
Ironically, in finding the material freedom we had sought, we began worshipping it, became its prisoners, and created a new form of oppression.
Many among us have become slaves to our possessions, hand-maidens to our senses.
In a frenzy of acquisition and consumption, we have swirled away from purposefulness.
As we have become richer in means, we have become poorer in meaning.
The contradictions we both experience and observe in our daily lives contribute further to our confusion.
As a people, we find we are capable of both infinite mercy and the cruelest forms of brutality; simultaneously, we create extraordinary beauty while producing unimaginable horror; we sustain ourselves by the fruits of our labor while coincidentally we destroy the same fields from which our bounty is derived; we seek joy, peace, and security, but choose to reject cooperation in favor of divisive competition; we freely celebrate our uniqueness while we not only deny it to others, but profess superiority for our own; and we witness simultaneously the fall of life expectancy and the rise of racial and economic inequality.
We are suffering under stresses today that are straining the very fabric of our civilization.
“And what is as important as knowledge,” asked the mind. “Caring, and seeing with the heart,” answered the soul. (Anonymous)
Jonas Salk, who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines observed that: “We are moving from an age when it seemed as if things were going to be expandable forever, to a time in which there are limits, not only to our resources, but to what is tolerable in the way people relate to each other.
“There seems to be almost an instinct on the part of humans to improve not only their individual conditions, but those of others as well.
“We are beginning to realize more and more how we are parts of a whole and that for fulfillment we need to satisfy ourselves not only as individuals but also as members of the human species.”
We find ourselves today at an historical crossroads formed by the intersection of crises and opportunity.
For crises are unique in that they are value-laden with opportunity.
Crises represent a potential turning point which, if grasped, understood and acted upon, can thrust a person, a nation, or a world into a more advanced, constructive, state of being.
Conversely, if they are ignored, their tendency at best, is stagnation, and at worse, terminal deterioration.
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed. (Chinese proverb)
The future that lies ahead, that which we might achieve, is limited only by ourselves.
Our task in the present is to comprehend the forces of the past that have brought us to these crossroads.
For if we are to move through and beyond, there must first be awareness, comprehension, and clarity.
Only then will be able to salvage what remains of our vision and create one anew.
With firm resolve, unrelenting will, and appropriate strategy, we can then bring into being the world we seek.