Can we come up with an ask for humanity?
How to move from helplessness to action
If you didn’t see last week’s video, watch Peter Russell that’s cued up here for the explanation that rings truest to me about the scary overshoot, collapse drama we are in. It’s exponential growth from our success and not anything from an evil force that descended on us that’s sending us south. With our success taking us to breakdown it’s like I said last week, what a dilemma.
As we deplete what’s life-giving to us, either we accept doom or we keep creating. I’m on the figure-out-what’s-best-to-do highway, and, with some guidance from Geoffrey Deihl, a heartful analyst dealing with what collapse is all about, I’d like to get the people who are sounding the alarms to come up with an ask for humanity. What should everyone do?
Look at all the Likes, that keep getting added to, for this comment I made on Here’s Why It's Not Too Early To Call For Trump's Impeachment and Removal. It encourages me to think it may be time to collect ourselves!!!
From Suzanne Taylor’s Now What?
There is no flagpole raised for us to rally round. Take MLK Jr's Beloved Community idea and get signatures to make it tangible or just call it The Movement. Whatever the name, we need something to turn the gadflies we are now into a force that can command action.
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Scroll a bit down for mine where you can Like it, too.
I held a contest last year for essays from 2050 when the world was working. How did we get there, starting with something you did? Now, here’s my story:
2050 Reflections on How We Got to our Workable World
At the beginning of 2025, the double whammy of devastating fires in Los Angeles and of Trump sworn in to his second presidency shifted something in the American mind. As celebrities that people cared about were being ravaged hearts everywhere were touched, and when a bulldozer of decency and morality steamrolled into the presidency we got our crack in everything that let a new reality come in.
What happened was that with us going faster and faster toward the ending of industrial civilization I invited people who were savvy about civilizational collapse to have a conversation. The ask they came up with for humanity was to unite and cooperate.
That got everyone who was fearful about what was to come involved with looking for what humanity should do, and people were very clever. That’s how we got our Beloved Community that grew large enough to have the power to make things happen. It launched when Marianne Williamson, who had become well-known in her bid to chair the DNC, picked up the baton to call it into being.
Our Wisdom Council that steers the Beloved Community Movement came into being again thanks to the leadership role that people recognized Marianne to be in. She, as its first member, picked Timothy Snyder as the second one. The two of them picked MacKenzie Scott, and the three picked Arnold Schwarzenegger in that same process of existing members picking the next member which continues to keep our Council modeling the best we can be. And thank goodness for their first deliberation getting us our Suggestion Box so everyone can pass along strokes of wisdom.
We live inside a giant idea. It changes. The internet gave us a vehicle for working on that, and so much of what we take for granted now came from that early time when we got things like our ad agency campaign for kindness, our prisons being for rehabilitation, the Pep Talks for Humanity that keep inspiring us, and the biggest thing of all, UBI as a birthright for having the basics. That got everyone in the game. One humanity was in play.
I love the competition for the super-rich who do the most good, and the way candidates just talk to cameras instead of having commercials produced for them and that they have conversations instead of debates. It used to be rare to find worker-owned businesses like most of ours are, and there didn’t use to be a sense of community everywhere, where I bet a lot of you don’t know that so many of the vegetable gardens that are everywhere used to be lawns, and that all the benches that people sit on to chat were an outgrowth of an essay contest held then for ideas to help the world that Benches and Snacks won a prize for. And how about no executions anymore, and how all the nukes are deactivated? The list goes on…
It’s still a living planet where nature votes last so no guarantees, but for however long it will be it’s wonderful to have gotten good at living with Earth and not just on her and to be fueled by a palpable loving essence.
Anyone who belongs on the invite list and doesn’t know if Geoffrey or I would have put you on it, reply to this email to tell me. Let’s see if something like this, that The Scientific and Medical Network would host, can happen:
This is an invitation for people with expertise about degrowth/collapse/global warming to have a conversation. Where wanting more is what’s natural to us and consuming less, that’s essential for us, only could be achieved by everyone sensing its necessity for survival, the objectives of a conversation would be to deal with how to get the need for downsizing across to everyone and to come up with what to ask everyone to do.
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The main problem imho is that extreme economic inequality has eroded the standard of living for the majority while it has given untold riches to the few. The media, which are owned by the rich, turn desperate people against each other, blaming trans people, minorities, immigrants, Muslims, etc. instead of blaming the rich, whose greed is actually causing the suffering. This leads to violence and all sorts of chaos. The Democrats are guilty of this, too--they became the party of war instead of the party of the people because they get their campaign contributions from the same donors who fuel the Republicans. Politicians' main interest is to secure their offices and stay there, so they will do the bidding of whoever pays for their campaigns. We can't expect anything from politicians until we get the money out of politics. Imho, there is no point voting for candidates who accept campaign contributions from anyone other than the voters they represent. Meanwhile, we can work on ourselves, making sure that we treat everyone, no exceptions, with kindness and generosity.
I keep finding myself of two minds: the human one desperately trying to figure it all out, including what to DO, and the higher mind/self/soul that knows there is much more to all of this than human minds can figure out alone. We are human BEINGS, not human DOINGS. I'm continually working to integrate these as I come to know this is really why we're here.
Shortly after Trump was inaugurated and immediately unleashed the changes he and Project 2025 promised, a phrase came to me, "necessary disgrace". This is part of our individual and collective unfolding. We have to experience what is happening to transform; as many others have said, we have to "breakdown to break through".
I'm not advocating for no action, just to act in concert with our higher selves. Quiet our lower minds, breathe, ask for guidance and sit quietly so we actually listen for and can hear the answers. Anger, fear, and panic cannot give us anything different, I know, I've tried to get them to for much of my life. Hear these parts of ourselves out, then give them the reassurance that we are wise, capable, and resilient.
Peace, health, happiness, and safety are what most people want. As we feed, nurture, and cultivate these internally they will increasingly be the outer environment we share.