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EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH, an essay  

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Inequity 

We are on a shrinking planet. Shrinking because goods, people and information get from one point on it to another in less and less time, in larger and larger quantities, across greater and greater distances. When the Constitution was written it took 30 days to get from St. Louis to Washington DC, few people took the journey, and minimal information went along with them at the same speed. It takes one-fifteenth that time for someone to circle the globe today and 30,000 commercial jets are taking off and landing each day at all points on the surface of this sphere. Information transfer is virtually instantaneous. The world transmits in one hour what was 5 year’s worth in 1776 and the amount of messages double every 5 years. 

So, in 1776, we decided to unify these colonies into a confederation of states and to apply some uniform standards across the then 13 colonies. We thought that it was appropriate that constitutional law applies to us in common and that we look after our security as a nation in common. We thought it appropriate that we promote the free interchange of commerce and people across state borders and that we allow all citizens an equal opportunity at success. And, most importantly that we recognize each other’s common stake in the venture called the U.S. of A.  It was appropriate, and it worked. We now are a generally peaceful, law abiding, caring, well housed, clothed and fed, secure and multi-optioned society with shared ideals and a shared destiny.

In the year 2001 the planet as a whole is much smaller than were those thirteen colonies back then. Our planet, planet earth, now needs its human inhabitants to understand that they all share a destiny together. What happens to the world happens to each of us, what happens to each of us is what is happening to the world. There are no longer insulating barriers of distance, high walls of cultural isolation, nor defensible perimeters. The world is becoming more and more an open market of goods and ideas, of weapons and illness vectors, of cultural and historic world-views, of emotional waves and ideological movements.

It is becoming harder and harder to isolate any one group, any one people, any one nation, from the planet’s common destiny. If the ozone layer is stripped, cancer’s odds increase for everyone. If the water we drink and the air we breathe, the aquifers and the atmosphere, are compromised we all suffer. If virulent untreatable diseases appear we are all vulnerable. If people want to do each other harm, we are all potential victims.  The hungry of this world are today our neighbors. And we can and do see over each other’s fences. Our hearts harden in response to that view. Their hearts are filled with feelings of injustice, and many with anger.

We go to all lengths to protect our share of the pie, our lifestyle, what we’ve finally accomplished after a long and hard struggle. We justify the differences between our standard of living and that of the third world by a kind of chauvinism that says we, or our ancestors, worked for it; we want it this way; we have it and we deserve it. On the other hand, they, the third world, don’t seem to get it, are unwilling to work for it, may not want it, therefore mostly don’t get it and, what’s more, probably don’t deserve it. The principal of every man for himself becomes the operative principal of such a view, and nation’s responding to that principal believe their first and foremost duty is to its citizenry. Justice, compassion, brotherhood and humanitarian ideals across borders have nothing to do with it.

They, the very large majority of players in this drama, want to change things. They want what all of us want and what we, the industrialized nations, 22% of the population, have. They want abundant and safe food and clothing and adequate living space and the conveniences that alleviate daily chores. They want assured medical information, assistance and treatment and special social protection of the young and elderly, the infirm and the challenged. They want the opportunity to learn what mankind as a whole has learned up to now and to participate in the common venture with needed skills and energy. They want an adequate range of options and opportunities in their lives in order to grow wiser and happier, in order to feel part of this human enterprise called history.

They find it difficult to understand why a baby born in the USA gets most of these and that a baby born across a border, say Mexico, is usually hungry, often sick, becomes an overworked unskilled laborer, without options and with a life span some 15 years shorter than his or her neighbor’s. And its not as if time will work these differences out. In general, the last 50 years have seen an increase in the disparity between rich and poor, both amongst nations and within nations. They don’t see a better future for themselves or their children. They see that things are getting worse. From villagers to hoards of nomadic refugees, the lives of the poor of this world are getting worse. Our government is leading the world to maintain the present set-up in a secure and stable manner because we are having it good, we are profiting from this set up. We as a people, whose life-style we wish to maintain and pass on, and we as those amongst us, that few percent, who own most of the real assets of the American economy, and who profit enormously from the present status quo.

Desperation grows. No relief is in sight. The poor get poorer. The rich get richer. The planet gets smaller.  The situation becomes more and more apparent. More and more people see more and more of what is happening. The inequity becomes less and less supportable, less and less sustainable. Walls, no longer the brick and mortar metaphors of times past, cannot be built high enough in the face of electronic eyed cameras flashing images worldwide. And as in any population bell-curve, as the central bulge shifts toward desperation, the radical end grows rapidly. More and more people become willing to throw themselves into the machinery of a system that is obviously gobbling up most of the planet’s resources, including their own worth, or rather worthlessness, as economic units. This system, which we support and encourage, either bypasses them entirely, or uses them in its lowest categories of worth, labor and skill. Is it any wonder that we, the industrialized 22% of the planet’s population, have, up until now, been spared the wrath of the poor and wretched of this world? Is it any wonder that we will be spared less and less as things get more desperate for more people?

Polarity

Polarity is one of the basic principles of the way this universe works. Thesis contending with antithesis resolves into synthesis. Opposing forces contending for survival and growth, result in an ever-progressing story line. This contest occurs at every stage in our journey. It started with quantum forces, grew to Chemical forces, these developed into biological forces, which, through hundreds of millions of years produced us, humanity. Then about 100 thousand years ago humanity brought opposing ideas, technologies, techniques and tools into being. These developed into differing ways of organizing societies that appeared about ten thousand years ago. History brings our modern world into focus, the result of these contending forces having resolved into today’s geo-political landscape.

We recognize this principal in much of the way we’ve structured our society. In economics we use competition as the driving force for success. We also allow the marketplace to determine which of many competing technologies will succeed. In law we use an adversarial system of defense and prosecution to attempt at dispensing justice. In politics we use a two party system to propose competing agendas and priorities. And in government we use two legislative houses, and we divide power between three branches that limit each other’s power. Even the family can be thought of as a balancing act between male and female energies and points of view.

We are at a particularly dangerous part of our human journey. Various planetary strands of history are being gathered together into one more or less unified tapestry. To put it another way, our vision, becoming more and more inclusive, can weave these formerly distinct strands into a planetary narrative. For the first half of the twentieth century, three major opposing ideologies were contending for the world’s attention, for the role of moving the human population of the planet into modernity: Democratic Capitalism, Fascist Totalitarianism and Socialistic Communism. All three offered the world a mechanism for moving from Monarchies, or Feudal states, or agrarian land-based societies, into modernity, for moving away from religious based cosmologies into reason based world-views.

As the twentieth century started, modernity promised to remove us from the land, from the brutality of peasant life. We were going to lose the attachments to the inherited aristocratic distribution of land ownership and political power, upheld by a hierarchical church structure. Modernity was thought of as bringing all the useful benefits of a reasonable, technologically proficient, and abundant society to more and more people. The future held the image of a clean, bright, new, sun-shiny day, the image of future opportunity and uplifting success, all assured by the inventiveness of humanity freed from dogma and superstition. The future would produce well fed families living in loving communities, dignified and skilled employees working steady, good paying jobs, children learning and old people taken care of, clean clothing and ample room, hot water and fresh food. This was humanity’s dream.

How to structure modern societies to assure the achievement of that dream became the question of the day. The answers to this question were being played out in real time throughout the twentieth century. Two possible solutions presented themselves. Where democratic capitalism was the evolutionary outgrowth of a distribution of aristocratic power to land and shop owners, socialism or its more radical offshoot, communism, challenged it with a promise of even more revolutionary distribution through communal ownership of the means of production.

Communism, with idealistic intentions, gave government, which represented, theoretically, the people, full economic power along with its political power, and with it practically a monopoly on all power. Some say we, humanity, were not yet ready to wield such power rationally, that baser forces, overlooked by this utopian dream, were the true human motivators.

Capitalists, those who held the reigns of most all economic power, and a great deal of political power, in the west, fought the upstart system, which gradually succumbed to its major flaws, the absence of polarity and the premature reliance on man’s higher consciousness. But that battle caused capitalism to soften its rapacious tendencies. Faced with the possibility that the vast majority of workers and farmers, might elect, through political or other means, to nationalize the industries that gave capital its power, in other words, to turn communist, capitalist societies implemented many policies that freed, empowered and gave dignity to the common man. This give and take between capital and labor, this polarity made the capitalist democracies, the way we inherited them in the second half of the twentieth century, strong, fair and vibrant societies.

Not withstanding that progressive movement, capitalism fought its communist counterpart with all the means it could command and that was always considerable. It even, some say, put Hitler in power to thwart a possible communist takeover of Germany, as it did with Franco in Spain. That was the third contender, Fascism, a kind of throwback to an earlier tribal mind set, through concentrating power in the leader “der Fuhrer”, the tribe would prove its natural superiority and run the world as it should be run. And although the capitalist democracies joined the communist powers in the major war on authoritarian fascism, WW2, there is no dearth of countries today ruled by authoritarian power. And, it could be said, the cold war was in part a repetition of the habit of capitalism to support such power when the alternative might be communism.

Russian Communism distorted by a realistic paranoia, too reliant on the idealism of its leaders and without the healthy play of internal polar forces lost the battle and collapsed. Now we, democratic capitalist societies, mostly the industrialized nations, 22% of the planet’s population, stand victorious, with a number of very shadowy partners, the fascist authoritarian states we encouraged and supported. These are mostly in the Muslim world. And rather than having communist societies, certainly possible entries into modernity’s potential, we have monarchies and dictatorships, left in the wake of history, now being challenged by fifteenth century theocracies lead by bearded and robed mullahs.

And now capitalism stands alone as the only power capable of taking the world into twenty first century modernity. There is much to worry about. The absence of meaningful polarity is a major worry. We’ve eliminated the other path to modernity, the one that legitimately challenged our capitalist values, the one that made us arrive at humane compromises. We are left only with surrogates that want to move backward, theocracies and authoritarian regimes that we supported. Will we succumb to what the Greeks called hubris? Will we, as an unchallenged system, become another example of ultimate power becoming ultimately corrupt?

We see it coming. Politics is moving to the right. The ratio of rich to poor is increasing. We withdraw from worldwide cooperative bodies. We increase spending for armaments and law enforcement. We disassemble government and its regulating powers. We sell off communal holdings to the highest bidder. We allow abuse of our commonly shared air and water. We minimize foreign aid to the poor of this world. We represent ourselves abroad through our corporate interests in labor, resources and markets. We reduce human worth to economic values of production and consumption. We relieve the tax burdens of the rich and restrict help for the poor. We abjure social legislation that might interfere with the performance of capital markets. We measure progress with the movement of the Dow-Jones Average. Government by, of and for the people is held hostage by trans-national corporate entities threatening downward market spirals and economic catastrophes.

Will capitalism, without a worthy adversary, develop the means and techniques to move humanity, to move the planet’s societies, toward the promise of modernity? This is the major question confronting our planet at the beginning of our twenty first century. Is this movement by the leading capitalist democracy to the right appropriate to the task at hand? Will this produce more tranquility and stability here and abroad? Are we lessening the chances of terrorist threats? Are we leaving a safer more secure world to our children and their children, and the world’s children? Or will we not be up to that goal? Will we stand by as our society is taken over by special interests and corporate values? Will third world societies slip back into feudal theocracies as many of the religious orthodoxies of this world would want it? Or will they be taken over by the iron fists of power concentrated in uncaring dictatorships and wealthy autocracies, protecting the existing privileges of the few against the dreams of a future by the many? Or will another system capable of moving us forward come along, pushing an increasingly inappropriate capitalism aside?

And, immediately, will we, the industrialized capitalist democracies, in lieu of an appropriate counter-force, require a series of disasters to remind us of our mission, to remind us that there is much good and helpful work to be done in the world, to remind us that we have the duty to promote and encourage modernity and all its universal, sought after benefits? I sometimes imagine how Pharaoh was forced, against his will, to let the Israelites, such good workers, go, by being subject to a series of plagues, each one of which hardened his heart, until he could support his stance no longer. I hope we, America, the world’s only superpower, think Pharaoh, will not require ten tragedies to wake us to this leadership mission. Let us hope September eleven is not number one.

Karma

What have we created? Think about it. We put the Shah of Iran in power to thwart a democratically elected socialist government and now they have a theocracy.  Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, supported by us in its war against Iran, and once a middle class secular Arab country, now a pariah authoritarian state with weapons of mass destruction, bombed into stone-age poverty. A general who overthrew an elected government and who whole-heartedly supported the Afghan Taliban leads our nuclear-armed ally, Pakistan. And the Taliban, now our mortal enemies, mujahadin and religious fanatics that we encouraged, equipped and assisted in their efforts to push out the Russians. These are all actions that have karmic consequences, these are seeds sown of plants we have yet to harvest.

Saudi Arabia and the other oil producing sheikdoms, also our staunch allies, are the only absolute monarchies still in existence now in the twenty first century. Syria’s Assad passing power to his son; Jordan’s king passing power to his; Egypt languishing in dire poverty under authoritarian power, these are our friends, these are the governments we support. Some say the only reason they still exist is through America’s good graces. We’ve recognized their governments, consulted their leaders, armed their armies, contracted with their family owned industries, bought their oil and came to their aid when threatened. We share intelligence and assist their often brutal and autonomous internal security agencies; we train their police in the art of crowd control, interrogation and the use of U.S. made weaponry. Is it any wonder that we have enemies amongst the people governed by such an array of self-serving monarchs and dictators and their minions?

We think of ourselves, we Americans, as a kind, friendly, fair-minded and tolerant people, and we mostly are. We find it hard to imagine that there are those that could hate us, after all we, as a people, don’t really hate anyone. We have been taught not to hate, to try and be neighborly and helpful to each other. Our constitution tells us that we were all created equal, as does our wisdom traditions. America is an experiment, we believe, that proves that people from very diverse cultures can cooperate on a vast scale to carve a nation out of a wilderness. We are proud of America. Who can fault us for this noble venture? How can anyone hate us? Hate us enough to want to hurt us, kill us, we Americans, you and me, church going, home owning, working parents and their school attending kids, infants and retired parents?

But as a nation we do not deal with the world on the same terms that we deal with one another. We do not treat the people of this world as though they were all born equals. We are not kind, friendly, fair-minded and tolerant when it comes to our dealings with much of the world’s population, nor neighborly and helpful. We, our government, the United States of America, most often looks out for our own interests above almost all other considerations. This policy tends not to consider the needs or aspirations of the vast majority of people whose governments we deal with. And exactly what are our interests?

Our interests, internationally, are basically economic and security issues. Our economic interests are to secure materials, amongst which oil ranks first, to provide markets for our products, to provide investment opportunities or linkages for our corporations and, lately, to allow these corporations to secure a source of stable and cheap labor. We, the people of America, are represented in these dealings by American, or transnational, corporations, who make the deals that result in the sought after economic transactions. Our government, as facilitator of these transactions, is responsive to the needs and desires of these corporations.

Even security issues boil down to keeping corporate wealth intact. Remember that we fought all Communist and some Fascist regimes because they threatened to nationalize their country’s industries and these included industries partly or wholly owned by American capital, or tied in with American corporate structures. Where that happened our corporations lost out. We, our corporations, our government, never liked that, no matter what the change to communism or socialism meant to the people of the country, no matter the brutality of the dictators overthrown, or the mediaeval worldview of the fanatic war-lords introduced to thwart it.

When we could, we supported any government that allowed our corporate interests to thrive, and discouraged and sometimes overthrew governments that limited or squeezed those interests. As long as we could strike a deal with them, sign a contract, pump out the goods, we were happy. You see, our international reach is mostly through our corporate interests. Much of the world sees these interests at work in their own local situations, and not you and me at work in our American setting. Our corporations are not necessarily good neighbors, nor are they picky about the sorts of people they might be making deals with, as long as he, or very rarely she, has the authority to make the deal and the price is right. That’s all we ask.

That is the face of American power seen by much of the third world, especially the Muslim world. Since most of the deals made are with sheiks, dictators and their families and friends, there have been many casualties amongst the vast majority of the less fortunate, bitter impoverished families, shamed young men, oppressed women, hungry kids, and threadbare elders. These are breeding grounds for desperate people to take desperate action, action that would shake up those supposedly in control, their governments, or, the big controller, us; actions that would remind those on top not to forget those on bottom, not to disregard, discount, ignore them; to remind us not to harden our hearts to the poor of the world simply for the sake of our already rich American purse. It should not surprise us that we are made into a symbol to be hated by desperate factions in the world, that we could be labeled the great Satan, that we can be shown by our detractors to be gobbling up the world. So again a strand of history, the fruit of fields sewn throughout the twentieth century, a karmic equation meets the twin towers on the eleventh of September, 2001.

Lessons and Objectives

September eleventh is a date that cleaves American History. It ends one long chapter and begins another. Our domestic peace is being shattered. The Oklahoma and Trade Center bombings and now the Trade Center loss, an ongoing series of domestic tragedies whose end is not in sight. The oceans are no longer barriers that insulate us from most of the world. America can no longer be defined as a remote nation, tending to our own national and local business, concerned only with our own success. That worldview is no longer applicable since it no longer describes what exists. There is enormous work to be done on the planet and we, in the leading role, must find ways of getting that work done. We must tend to planetary business and measure success in planetary terms. We are all in it together.

Let me say from the first that bombing Afghanistan is the wrong lesson to learn and the wrong one to teach. It says that we send messages using high explosives. But that is precisely the lesson we want to discourage. We wish the disgruntled of this world would talk to us instead of using violence to get their message across. The events of the eleventh were caused by people using high explosives to get their message across. So we use higher explosives to get ours across, so next time they’ll use even higher explosives. And who is receiving the brunt of these high explosives? Mostly just people, not the people who committed the crimes or who profited from them, or whose manipulations led to them, no just working people, parents, young men and women, in office buildings, on airplanes, in the army, driving trucks, working in warehouses.

It should be remembered that when we put our Neanderthals in power, their Neanderthals rise to power. The Israelis tried it with the Palestinians, are still trying it, after fourteen months, has it brought them peace and security? We are promoting the use of violence to solve problems, not the message we, a vulnerable, free, open, democratic nation want to promote. I know that punishment should follow wrongdoing, but the exercise of power must be appropriate, just and precise. We have many laws that assure that within our country, a crime must be proven in adversarial conditions and judged by an impartial jury. The punishment must, in addition, fit the crime.

We didn’t bomb Idaho because Timothy McVeigh who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma, came from Idaho. We tried and convicted McVeigh. Did any of the several thousand Taliban that we killed by this Afghan bombing have anything to do with events of lower Manhattan on the eleventh? I’ve been told that the suicide mission of the eleventh may not have involved more than forty people. The one in Oklahoma only involved two. What’s going on here? Why have we become convinced that Osama and his minions, his bankers, his political supporters, in addition to all those who joined the Taliban, all officials and apparatchiks, all those soldiers and civil servants employed by the Taliban, are all guilty of this crime? How did we get from the forty probable perpetrators of this crime to intense bombing of a country and its government, Afghanistan?

I think we can call ourselves civilized when we count all lives lost as tragedies. It always seems that we count by ratios, one of ours is worth 10 of theirs, or 20 or 30. One of our casualties calls for stories and pictures of his or her childhood, family, the hopes and dreams left behind, while one of theirs is just a number, sometimes not even a number, especially from twenty thousand feet up. We must learn to relate to every human being the way we relate to fellow Americans. Every life is precious. Every death, the Rabbis say, loss of a world.

And if we want to reduce the threat of violence against us we mustn’t create orphans, widows and war-lords, we mustn’t create lawless impoverished leaderless countries, we shouldn’t create more images of destruction, of Islamic victims, of turbaned and bearded corpses, of another poor dusty Muslim country bombed into the stone age by blond American pilots flying multimillion dollar aircraft at a safely high altitudes and returning after a series of missions, to their green-lawned hometowns in Missouri and Montana. That is not the way to reduce the number and intensity of those who hate us, to reduce the population from which the perpetrators of terror, the martyrs for Islam are drawn, not the way to increasing our safety. That is only the way to escalating violence

I’ve been told that each bomb costs ten times what it destroys, sometimes a hundred times when it comes to smart bombs. We could have dropped a John Deere tractor for every bomb we dropped, or a well digging rig. We could have paved a thousand miles of road, or five thousand miles of railroad track for the costs of moving warships and flying planes into the region. We could have built one hundred schoolhouses and hospitals for the cost of putting all those soldiers on standby, ready to kill Afghanis.

We are Americans. We aim to produce a free society. The reason we have our freedom is that we agree to maintain and promote a civil society in which such freedom can exist. We agree to this responsibility because it gives us the opportunity to prosper in a secure and stable setting. The problem is that same kind of agreement cannot be demanded of much of the world. Most people do not have freedom, there is not always a civil society, prosperity is often not possible, and their surroundings are not secure and stable. These conditions are not an exception to an otherwise grouping of free and prosperous societies like America. The opposite is true. We are the exception. In most parts of the world the very few rich and powerful live well and walled off from the teaming poor, who are kept in line through the use of government and its uniformed and armed forces. It’s from these populations and their grievances that radical forces are drawn and terrorists recruited.

Our freedom, by definition, means we are vulnerable. Freedom to travel means ease and affordability of travel, means hundreds of thousands of travelers streaming through airports, train-stations and highways. Freedom to entertain means stadiums and concert halls filled with tens of thousands ticket holders. Freedom of speech and ideas means most anything can be said or filmed or written about. We have borders through which tens of thousands of vehicles pass daily. Our roads are lightly policed. No armed soldiers are in the streets. An eighth inch thick pain of glass separates the public from the private domain. Many unguarded reservoirs, pipelines, railroad tracks and electrical distribution systems exist today throughout our country.

That’s what makes us America, but it’s also what makes us vulnerable. Trying to increase security by giving the security forces of government a stronger hand is always a recipe for limiting freedom. Laws restraining police abuse and promoting citizen’s rights are usually suspended or applied less vigorously at first. The population is made to suffer the indignities attendant upon being confronted by uniformed and armed security personnel, searches, directives and screening for the sake of trapping one or three or ten or twenty amongst them that are terrorists involved in violent plots against America. And when the terrorists meet the challenge, and in a free society its easier to learn of the challenge and to scheme around it, terrorist incidents will multiply. If this road is traveled, it will result in even greater limits to our freedom combined with more high explosive responses that create more and more desperate terrorists. A vicious, and I mean vicious, circle.

Its much easier, cheaper and much better for the health of a free society to have a policy that aims at cutting off the supply of young potential terrorists from the organizations that send them on their missions. In other words our dollars are more effectively spent, our spirits effectively raised, and our ideals better served when we address the grievances of those that hate us. When you’re vulnerable, your best investment is to maintain a principled friendship with those around you. Putting up higher and higher walls just make you more and more a prisoner and them potentially more dangerous enemies.

Remember the world is shrinking. Distant countries are now our neighbors. The future just brings everyone closer. Information pours across borders. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. The karmic seeds already sewn are bearing steadily increasing harvests. We can’t stand still. Either build higher walls and fortify them with more and more armed forces that use more and more high explosives to make their point, or make more and better friends, be helpful and improve the lot of that part of the world from which terrorists, disease, violence, revolution and instability erupts. Give them a reason to agree to a civil society that assures them their freedom and promotes their prosperity in a secure and stable setting, they will do it and eschew terrorism, disease, violence, revolution and runaway population growth thrown in. Help them create a free affluent middle class society and you’ll have made the best investment in eliminating America’s preeminence as a terrorist target, while at the same time promoting us as a generous caring people.

The reaction to this tragedy was terribly expressed by G. W. Bush in his urging to Americans to go out and shop. It’s as though a child dies in the family and the father orders everyone to the mall. That’s how crazy we’ve become. Don’t you think it more appropriate for the president to ask everyone, and especially the wealthy whose success was made possible by the American experience, to chip in more money, to raise taxes, to propose a Marshal Plan for the third world, to ask for American sacrifice in response to threats caused by escalating injustice, poverty, repression and lawlessness in much of the population of the world?

And don’t you think that the circumstances, reasons and causes for the tragedy we Americans suffered on September eleven should call for some self-examination on our part? Shouldn’t we be reevaluating our international strategies and policies? Isn’t this tragedy a major failure in our goal of protecting and securing American lives, American economic interests, American defense postures and the world’s geo-political stability? Tragedy’s crucial lesson is most often a repudiation of an old narrow world-view and an opportunity to expand into a new broader one. That is what America is asked to do at this time in our history.

Aren’t we are being asked by the events of September eleventh to outgrow a worldview that has concentrated national power on America’s economic self-interests? This older worldview sees the planet as a checkerboard of individual nations and corporate interests, each looking out for its own self-interest and vying with each other for the earth’s resources and markets. Such a view is producing all the adverse trends talked about in the preceding paragraphs, all the sins of unrestrained and amoral commercialism: Increasing divisions between haves and have-nots, common needs ignored while personal wealth soars, the planet’s resources plundered, our precious air and water the repository for the wastes of giant machines, world treaties flaunted, impoverished labor exploited, and tyrants catered to.

September eleventh cleaves history, ending one chapter and starting another. We must now adopt a worldview in which the holistic nature of earth is seen, seen as the intimately interconnected and interdependent network of life that it is; seen as that singular silver blue sphere orbiting the sun that it is; seen as humanity’s home in which universal values can be honored and a common destiny shared.

In addition, our newly emergent worldview must produce a new polarity of function for assuring healthy growth and change for America, and for assuring that the rest of humanity progresses into the modern world in which we, the industrialized 22%, live and prosper.  The void left by the defeat of Communism should not be filled by an inappropriate and counterproductive Islamic fundamentalism. So what unifying, value conscious, and long-range counterforce to the growing and unrestrained power of economic and commercial interest can we imagine?

Some force must be found to represent and promote the dignity, potential and worth of human beings; to assume the responsibility of caring for mother earth and her resources; to aim at cooperating on a planetary scale to assure the advancement of these goals and the well-being of future generations. Lessaiz-faire Capitalism left unopposed, or opposed only by fundamentalism, doesn’t seem capable of accomplishing those high priority goals. I’d like to see the American people decide, through the exercise of their vote, to empower our federal government with the goal of achieving those objectives. That’s the most evolutionary development of a counterforce. Other possibilities are much less attractive.

The question “will we change?” may be asked several more times, with violent articulations, before we are prepared to affirm this new take on reality, have our pundits and intellectuals tout it, and maybe asked several more times before we put these changes into practice through political action. But for the sake of the planet, for the sake of all life upon it, for the sake of humanity’s success and growth, we must wake up to the truths that make such an expanded worldview necessary and this new view must dictate our course of action and our relations with one another and our relations with mother earth.

The faster we adopt this new worldview the quicker violence will abate. The more we resist, the more our actions continue to be based on our short term economic or military self interest, I’m sorry to predict, the more the violence will escalate, witness conditions in Israel. The long-term trends are moving in the wrong directions for time to be in our favor. It might get a lot worse, a lot more violent and full of forcefulness before we finally agree to attempt making it better instead. The “if not” alternatives leave the escalating problems to our children and our grandchildren.

Maybe we’ll reverse the trends next year and start increasing foreign aid as a percent of GNP. Maybe we’ll rejoin a reinvigorated and expanded Kyoto Accord three years from now. Maybe we’ll support the UN’s nation building efforts amongst the ravaged soon. Maybe we’ll begin a third world Marshall plan a few years from now. It is certain that the truths attendant a shrinking planet will become much more apparent over the next twenty years. America’s worldview must keep pace. If America is to fulfill its destiny as a model for societies worldwide, if America is going to lead the world into the future, if America is going to live up to its values and ideals, we need to learn from this dramatic challenge and own up to our responsibilities as the world’s leader. All our wisdom traditions would agree with me. All our higher selves, I’m convinced, do too. What do you think?

Morty Breier, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, December 4, 2001

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