It takes disasters to get massive changes to happen

Turmoil is grist for creating a utopian world

In the midst of things that are surreal to so many of us a little something good came along. It was when I liked what Timothy Snyder said in The Berlin Wall Never Fell that’s the way I think about what to do. From 144 people who posted comments, mine has gotten 133 likes. That’s the most people ever saying they agree with me, and it’s encouraging.

Suzanne Taylor’s comment:

This is core wisdom: "We cannot change the world all at once. But we can change the way we think. We can clear away the clichés and make ourselves more lively. We can work together and then, when other things are in motion, be ready to turn the change in the right direction."

I focus on changing the way we think -- from being rugged individualists in a world running on economic interests to being people who care about each other in a humanitarian world. Change that fundamental -- which is us becoming who we were designed to be -- and everything we do will change.

For me, the hardest part of Trump being elected is that I feel such revulsion thinking about him and now he will be in our faces 24/7. The best case would be if his supporters turned on him. Then he’d just be entertainment. I’m serious. Think about it. If he betrays them, they can revolt. Anything short of physically engaging him, that could have an effect on his power, I say go for it. He can wreck the world. Speaking of global warming, it isn’t negotiable and thwarting it is the #1 job on the planet. It would take a cooperative humanity. Put that top of the list.

In Descent into Madness - An election postmortem, Geoffrey Deihl says, “America has always been a violent, racist country, little wonder, being built on slavery and genocide, spawn of the brutal British Empire…” He explains how that worked out to get to the pain we feel now. The comments all commiserated. But something seemed left out, so scroll down in the comments for what I wrote that I’d like you to read.

Then, you’d see the little wink in this:

Nearly six hundred volunteers have stripped for the camera o­n a melting Swiss glacier high in the Alps for a publicity campaign to expose the impact of climate change.

By the time I posted my comment, Geoffrey had responded to someone else’s with more to say:

I haven't wanted to completely throw cold water on hope, because not fighting is a guaranteed outcome. Without hope, there is no fighting.

No doubt the election has made slim odds far slimmer. If people don't stand up and fight, we're done. We may be done anyhow. I suspect it, writing on overshoot recently and the state of the Greenland ice sheet. There are many other tipping points at hand.

I do hope more people will fight, even if the cause is lost. Punching nasty people in the mouth is far better than succumbing as fearful passive sheep, at least for me. 

We’re blaming the Harris loss on votes for Trump that came from the low-end of the income spectrum, but the causal factor that needs to be dealt with if things are to get better is from the opposite end. It’s the hold the rich have on reality, where they dictate how the world runs and they do that to keep it in their favor. 

It’s normal for the wheels of progress to grind slowly, but since the disasters facing us could be so apocalyptic best we think outside that box. Einstein famously said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” What to do to encourage the flip to another reality? Be aware that underlying everything is humanity in separation needing to come into oneness, and take some solace now from the fact that turmoil is grist for creating a utopian world.  

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Here’s six minutes of my most recent guesting, two days after the election, on Richard Dugan’s show, where I cut to some chases.

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