The Care and Feeding of Complacency

On the cover of Time this week, (3 Apr 2006) is a special report on global warming, “Be Worried. Be VERY Worried,” says the cover with the polar bear stranded on melting ice.

“Look on this picture and weep over it!” wrote Thomas Paine in the darkest days of the revolution. Is anyone today weeping? Is anyone really worried?

I am worried. I wring my hands, ask myself what I can do. The one thing I know how to do is write. I have spent months writing pages for the Web site and now feel foolish for overkill. I fear I’ll numb people’s minds with my slew of words.

But what else do you in an emergency? You scream and yell for help. As Thomas Paine also wrote: “There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one.”

I don’t know how else to say it but in these stark words, Please help, please join me, please let’s do something, please let’s take the next step, please let’s combine our strength, please let's move this crazily tilting planet toward sanity.

All my arguments, all my trying to come up with the "just right" combination of words... It's time wasted. There is no way to argue people into taking action – they must be moved from within.

On one hand, I am sure that we must all be painfully aware of complacency sticking to us like a suffocating gel, we must all be feeling equally desperate to get it off, get it off -- and move and do something! But so many folks have banged the gong to get the attention of the townsfolk that no one pays attention anymore. The sky is falling, quite literally these days, warming and falling and flooding the earth – but we are too busy to stop and do anything.

I know I am busy to the point of weeping – last night putting my son to bed, I felt caught in the relentless flow of daily activity, in which some work/parenting/family activity is required of me at nearly every moment of the day. Like being dragged around on a non-stop merry-go-round, it gives the impression that each day is the same as the last, that everything will continue indefinitely in this numbing rhythm. Thus complacency is fed and grows thick.

Even though each day feels the same for me, it is not the same day for the planet, not after absorbing another 24 hours worth of damage inflicted on it by me and my overflowing trash can and my water down the drain and my conspicuous comsumption. The sands of the hourglass are running out, even faster than anyone could have predicted – or so says Time magazine.

Of course, as I learned from reading Michael Lerner the other day, it is not our self-interest or our will to survive that motivates selfless action. Self-interest usually only kicks in at the last hour, when the problem comes barreling through the front door in a flood or with a gun or an eviction notice – when it is too late to do anything about it. No -- any effort we make toward a better world rises only from internal values.

I've got the words from that Les Miserables song stuck in my head -- “Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?" Such nice stark words.

New Age Quixote

At my sixth grade graduation, we sang “The Impossible Dream.” I remember my eyes tearing up, my voice wobbling, my whole heart swelling in compassion for poor mad Don Quixote. He could not help but tilt at windmills.
This last month, planning this Web site, writing its first pages, I have felt the strange burn of Don Quixote’s madness. I wake at five or earlier, cannot stay asleep, so great is my desire to be at the computer. I read at night until my eyes give up on me. So much to do and so few hours!
This task I have set for myself, or rather, this task that has grabbed hold of me, I have no idea if it is crazy or sane. Oh I tell myself it is my destiny, my purpose (music swells here). But I have no idea the souirce – spirit or my little lonely ego. I just don't know. They say you’re supposed to know, because you feel all light and energized and things just magically fall into place.
But I wouldn't call what I feel energized -- more like fevered and driven and scared and excited and aren’t those ego droppings? I know it has to be my threatened ego that’s whispering in my ear: This is stupid, no one cares, you are making a fool of yourself. No one, absolutely no one but me, wants to be New Age any more.
Even when I tell people the name of the site, I feel a twist of embarrassment, give a little laugh -- because I am revealing myself to be a clueless cornball egotist, the champion of a movement long ago declared dead.
The poor thing, I imagine people saying. Or the compassionate people anyway, the ones that aren’t laughing themselves silly.
I don’t watch TV much, don’t watch the news, or read newspapers, just a few news magazines here and there, so I have no qualifications or information to put me in touch with the spiritual pulse of the nation. I have only the feelings swirling around in my heart—
As soon as I ignore the voice in my head and listen to my heart, I feel that I cannot be the only one who feels the urge to bust out of this life of passivity, I cannot be the only one on the verge of screaming down the walls of --- what? I am not sure exactly who or what I need to scream at, I think perhaps it is just the energy gathering in me, the energy that is finally allowing me to get off my ass and choose something to do. I do not think this Web site is my one and only task to undertake. But it is a public commitment to beginning…