Furthermore…

To the moon, but what of the earth?

I’m writing this on the 53rd anniversary of our landing on another world.

Back then, we seemed to be on the verge of making so much progress for humanity. It was a thrilling time to be 10 years old. The future seemed bright, vast and open to possibilities.

Now, we seem to be regressing: losing ground in the struggle to save our planet from climate catastrophe, to provide basic human needs, and protect basic human rights.

We can point fingers at this person or that event for our current state of dysfunction. One can blame any other one chooses to, but we’ve done this to ourselves, together. We have allowed the hollowing out over the last 50+ years of the values, structures and principles that underpinned this country and which helped us to create better lives for the many. What you permit, you promote, the saying goes.

Together, we have allowed a corporatocracy and a kleptocracy to form which has dissipated our future while we did nothing to stop it. In fact, we seemed to cheer it on with our celebrity-obsessed, I want somma that culture.

We have allowed kindness and compassion to become the exception, or to be shown only to our tribal members. And we scoff at those - or worse - who try to practice gentleness and compassion; calling the caring whimps and wussies.

We’ve allowed ourselves to turn inward, and become focused on self-interest, rather than collective good and action. We are both more connected and less connected than any time in human history. Our lives are dichotomous.

We’ve become unserious. We are disintegrating the legacy of our forebears - those who fought for freedom and against oppressors - and are destroying the future of our children.

We have forged the chains that we wear. And we point fingers. You don't build with individual pointed fingers; you do so with many hands coming together.

It’s time to get serious.

We all have come from and will end up in the same place. We will perish as fools together if we do not lift ourselves up together.

Many words are so much better than mine at expressing what we need to do, together. Here are a few of them:

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass

Let’s get going.