Last edited Wed May 11, 2016, 09:34 PM - Edit history (1)
Ah, me, can we do it, lovers of Earth, lovers of humanity? Can we put an Earth-loving humanitarian in the White House to lead our country and the world to, at least, a viable future--and a great one if we solve the daunting problems that we have created for ourselves?
Looking at that shot of Mother Earth, I was reminded of my ant analogy for the human race. We are, in the Great Cosmos, like the tiniest of ants, crawling around and living in an extremely small space with almost complete ignorance of what lay over the nearby hill, let alone what lay far beyond it. As sentient ants, we couldn't see very far at all for ten thousand years, and, though we can now see much better to the far reaches of the Universe, we can't go very far at all, and we still know next to nothing about the vast context of the Universe in which we evolved, in which we became conscious on this little spec of Mother Earth--the greater, much greater, CONTEXT in which we have become active agents of change, here, within our little blue bubble.
An ant, as far as we know, has no consciousness of its context as the tiniest of bits of life on a very big bubble. We do, somehow, have that consciousness--have evolved that consciousness--which tries to wrap its brain around everything that is.
There is so-o-o-o-o-o-o-o much we don't know. Yet we have minds that stretch out to the farthest horizons of time and space, and into the deepest mysteries of subatomic particles and DNA and RNA. And who is to say that evolution is over? Who is to say that what we yearn to be will never happen?
Bernie Sanders, to me, is like one of those startling leaps of evolution, as when some sea creature somewhere first touched fin to sand and gained enough leverage to move inland, or when our most ancient forebears learned not to get burnt by fire and how to carry fire in a basket, and how to weave a basket that could contain fire. As we just start feeling our way into outer space, with our probes and our telescopes--and prior to that with the creative minds of our science fiction writers--we are also just beginning to feel the potential of what we yearn to be: Powerful, intelligent, adventurous, gentle, cooperative people, who feel happiness in the happiness of others.
Life has too often been a battle and a war for humans--or at least that is what many historians tell us. We want peace. We want to be creative. We want to be generous. We sometimes want to feel secure, and at other times are prompted to risk everything for a great or noble goal. But most of all, I think, we want others around us to be happy and whole and their great potential as human beings fulfilled.
I think this is a new development in our evolution. Some of us no longer think only of our own well-being and those close to us, and are no longer limited to our tribe, our community or our nation, in what we care about, but we think of the well-being and happiness of all human beings, and all critters, and of our planet as a whole, as a living entity.
At the same time, the political byways of our evolution have taken us down very dangerous paths, indeed--the path to destruction of the entire human race and all of Earth's critters, one way or another, by nukes or by pollution and climate catastrophe. Our intelligence and our craftiness have led us here. And we need a greater wisdom to lead us back out of this dead end. It is THE challenge of our evolution, now, to take charge of our evolution and find a better path to our true desire of happiness for all. We are following an immensely destructive byway of greed, egotism, massive pollution and mass murder. Can we transcend ourselves? Ants, so far we we know, can't ask that question. We can. Does this not imply that there is an answer in our favor and that the answer is possible and doable?
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