What the hell are we going to do? Part Two
Seeing ourselves as one humanity would come first
Here’s a quick trip through my life to make some sense of how, strange by true, I find myself uniquely positioned on the world stage in calling for what to do now that could evoke a massive shift of perspective where we see ourselves as one humanity.
I was an only child born to a talented mom, who, after entering college at age fifteen had been president of her class at NYU and then became a stay-at-home housewife, and to a big fish in a little pond dad, a born leader who would become a very successful attorney. From my parents doting on me I had the sense I was special and I delivered on that. When I graduated high school, where all my activities couldn’t fit on my yearbook page, my teachers were worried about me being good at so many things that perhaps I’d never figure out what to do.
I was born during the Great Depression, when it was a pretty black and white world with the good guys and the and bad guys, where we hated the Japs and the Nazis and we believed that America was the cat’s meow. And, it was a world where I didn’t fit in. When I was two, my parents bought a house in an all-gentile town on the south shore of Long Island. We were Jewish and it was a time when everyone hated Jews – if an ad for a resort said “churches nearby,” that was code for no Jews allowed. My dad started a law practice where – skip to the end – when he died they closed all the courthouses in our county for half a day in his honor. In school, I was the only Jewish child, and it was an odd juxtaposition where even though I was the smartest kid and the leader of everything I participated in, I always was the wrong thing and kids can be cruel. That had to be what set me on a lifepath of working to make it a world where everybody gets a fair shake.
College was a different story about acceptance, but the same about excelling. I rose to the top of everything: president of my dorm, secretary of my 2,000-person class, a drama major set to be the president of the Drama Society as a first for a junior. However, in my freshman year I’d hooked up with my future husband who was a senior – I wrote his papers so he could graduate – and at the end of my sophomore year I left my glory days at Syracuse University to be near him in New York City, where I graduated from NYU Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and, in a pre-women’s lib world, became Mrs. Him to a comedy writer who would become a very successful Hollywood darling. Most notably he was the head writer of The Dick van Dyke Show and the creator of Marlo Thomas’s groundbreaking That Girl, the first sitcom with a female star who was a career woman and didn’t want to get married. Three children later, after 14 years when I could have made more of myself than the little acting career I eked out – commercials only took a day or two to make (here’s a reel of mine) so I could squeeze them into my wifely duties – I left my marriage to be who I could be.
When I cut loose in 1970, writing a cookbook as a transition project, the human potential movement was underway, and I jumped in with a passion to learn about myself and how humanity needed to do likewise. And I snared a choice assignment from the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP), out of San Francisco, to produce an L.A. conference that showcased all the new modalities of self-development, which started me producing projects and events for a self-aware audience that people to this day say were best times ever. I had a proclivity for fun, and eventually four years were spent with a boyfriend who had been a stranger when he was in San Francisco as the coordinator for AHP, who had picked me for that producing job. He left AHP when business turned to romance and he moved into my house where we became the Elfinselfs. “Put the elf back in self” was the motto of ELF Enterprises Unlimiting, with ELF standing for Enlightenment, Love, and Fun, and We’re Making it All Up so it Might as Well be Wonderful, was our song.
Never having gotten into corporate culture, I was a maverick who was treated as an equal by a few very special avatars, with Lex Hixon, Willis Harman, and Brian Thomas Swimme chief among them. They kept me confident enough in myself to say yes when a producer wanted to get me on a soapbox to try to enlighten everyone. After 36 episodes of The Cosmic Fuel Pump on local TV, where I practiced my delivery, and some automatic writing I did that fingered me to try to change the world, I got derailed by my next boyfriend getting me arrested when I tried to break up with him. I was scared he’d hurt me if I told the police that he, not I, did the drug dealings that got me in the criminal justice system for two years until I convinced the court I was innocent and escaped without a record, leaving me less well known than I would have been had I gone on the lecture circuit but still dogged to create a fair world. You can get more highlights about me from a chapter I was invited to write a few years ago for a book, never published, to inspire young girls with a few women’s exemplary lives.
And so, welcome to Now What?, here on Substack, where, still looking to make it a fair world, I sound an alarm for how vital it is to change the path humanity is on.
Part Two (following Part One) of how we could do that
What’s elemental is for us to change our minds about what’s important. Look up Bhutan, rated the happiest country in the world, for some clues about that. Here’s a little cut-and-paste from what I found:
“The phrase ‘gross national happiness’ was first coined by the 4th King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the late 1970s when he stated, ‘Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.’…The trivialization of happiness has been one of the most damning mistakes societies have made. When people dismiss happiness as a utopian fantasy, policy developers and decision-makers chase everything but what matters most to our wellbeing, fulfilment and happiness. Their Gross National Happiness Index (GNH) refocuses attention away from mindless growth as the destination of humankind, and towards a shared ideal of humankind’s happiness and the wellbeing of the planet. “
It’s not rocket science, and that we aren’t talking much about the ideation that runs us, where money matters more than love, is shocking to me. Would that we had a president like that Bhutanese king, but, short of that, it would be up to a united populace to come up with what to do, so how to create us being united as one humanity becomes the question that should get answered.
Here’s where we have science on our side, with findings confirmed by the Hubble telescope early in the last century. Before that, we thought there was just one galaxy, our Milky Way, and now, although we know there are two trillion, we’re still running on pre-Hubble ideas about who we are and what we are doing here. We know now that the universe isn’t fixed in place, with Earth here for us to use, but that it started from nothing and is ever expanding, i.e. developing, where we are all in it together as one humanity in a developmental process that’s been going on for 13.8 billion years. It’s all one thing, and you’d get the significance of that if you listened to Brian Thomas Swimme, the most charismatic storyteller about humanity being one family. He will thrill you with the glory of being the most advanced creature in the universe we know about, where you’ll feel privileged to take responsibility for your home.
A key strategy of mine is to get Brian to mesmerize everyone. I had a little animation made to a narrative of his, and I’m awaiting a short video he’ll make to tell the Universe Story about how we all are interrelated. Those will be tools for people who are tuned into this work to help tune others in. And I have in mind to get the pundits, who reach the political world, to use these tools to teach their readers who would take it from there.
Hey, we have the internet to set changeful things in motion, like, for one example, people turning on video cameras to flood the net with pep talks for humanity being hot stuff. We can do this. We just haven’t tried.
There are more intelligent way to do things that I have written about. I’ve talked about modeling our prison system after Norway’s and our gun laws after Japan’s, making Universal Basic Income the way we bring people out of poverty, turning lawns into vegetable gardens, creating an ad hoc Wisdom Council so we have a voice plus a Suggestion Box for anyone to give the Council ideas plus a massive coalition of people-for-the-good to advocate for the Council’s suggestions, Tim Snyder’s idea for a shadow government to give enlightened alternatives to the chaos ahead, have billionaires disperse their fortunes and even have contests for who does the most good, campaign ads on tv could only be candidates talking to the camera and debates would be unmoderated conversations, get an ad agency to make campaigns for new ideas. Those ideas and more, from me and from others, could go in the Suggestion Box.
However, the success of any and all are dependent on people thinking they are here to help the earth, so getting us shifted en masse to that objective would come first.
I have names of people who responded to a previous Substack where I was looking for big thinkers to think with, and I’m waiting to call a meeting until the group includes influential enough people so that what we come up with can matter. If you‘re someone, influential or not, with ideas and an interest in talking about them, let me know in the chat!
Since tis the season, here’s one of my all-time favorite reflections:
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I love the simplicity of "Listen to people" and I would add to it, actively take an interest in whoever happens to be in your vicinity, which is of course implied in listening. Get to know your neighbor, and while you are at it, be a good neighbor, which sometimes means offering assistance. Look for common ground, and never assume the other person is not worth engaging with. In my lifetime we have become increasingly tribal, divided along cultural grounds based on religion, education, politics, ethnicity, race, the list is endless. I came of age in the 60s, and the gap between those who strove to be hip and those who identified as mainstream seemed ever widening. I am just now waking up to the idea that my very mainstream neighbors are people, just like me, and I can benefit by knowing them better, and vice-versa. In other words, "Love the One You're With".
I would like to see political debate replaced by conversation. Conversation to me is based upon the assumption that we come to the table with questions, putting aside our pre-fabricated answers, and entering into a field of inquiry with mutual curiosity. That's how democracy should work (according to me). I believe that conversations have the potential to change everything, first on a subtle level and only later in ways that we can clearly perceive. We must start with what is directly in front of us.
Thanks for the invitation to ruminate!
You are uniquely positioned Suzanne, all your past experiences got you here.
I am interested in joining up , sharing ideas etc. We seem to be on a similar mission 💓