During the 2012 year-end holiday season, deadly gunfire in an Oregon
mall and a Connecticut elementary school left all Americans with broken
hearts. Wondering how to stop the carnage, most responses call for greater gun control, school security, and mental illness prevention and treatment. This incomprehensible violence followed Hurricane Sandy that caused at least 125 deaths and over $60 billion in direct losses(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/superstorm-hurricane-sandy-deaths-2012_n_2209217.html), whose impact demanded immediate help for recovery to those devastated and displaced, which has been forthcoming.
A confounding backdrop to the American psyche during these national tragedies is the entrenched refusal by Democrats and Republicans, White House and Congress to compromise at the perilous fiscal cliff, seemingly oblivious to their caustic and divisive impact on all Americans. Adding end-of-world Mayan prophesy, many Americans are more fractured, disconnected and uncertain than ever, with a feeling of hollowness in search of greater meaning and purpose, community and togetherness. Nothing can be good about the Sandy Hook massacre of innocent children in their schoolhouse, but maybe it will have jolted politicians to act together at long last in considering our gun-violent culture and stepping back from the fiscal cliff in 2013 for which new, bitter budget battles loom larger than ever.
Certainly, these recent calamities provide thoughtful reflection on our “normal” business-as-usual path, correct? Well, no, or maybe. At the individual level, many Americans delighted in unwrapping gifts of AR-15 assault rifles and 100-round drum clips under the Christmas tree this year. Gun homicides and suicides in American communities are tolerated as unfortunate consequences totally unrelated to preserving our privilege and right to bear arms, presumably for maintaining individual freedom through enhanced security by our own hand(gun)s. Many Hurricane Sandy families and shop owners intend to rebuild in the same vulnerable location to reassume pre-storm life-as-usual with confident “can-do” certainty. Some low-lying cities are considering, however, adaptive measures to safeguard citizens and property from certain sea-level rise, like Norfolk, Virginia. While some lip service is given to reinstating a ban on military-style assault rifles and 100-round magazines, similar lip service at the state and national levels is given in banning reconstruction in storm surge and flood plain zones. The 2nd amendment right to bear arms and the appropriate urgency of reconstruction for sheltering citizens and re-opening shops and factories concurrent with increasing construction jobs and restoration of commerce, are used, however, as the basis for returning to our business-as-usual trajectory. As horrific and heinous slaughter continues in our neighborhoods and as climate change accelerates, my concern hastens on the choking grip of business-as-usual morality and mindset for ever-growing growth and profit on planet Earth. As the glaciers of Glacier National Park and elsewhere worldwide increasingly disappear, as the ice cliffs of Greenland and Antarctica melt and splash increasingly into rising seas, and as our political leaders of both parties wholly committed to the sacred throne of American oligarchy were hard pressed not to push us lock-stock-and-barrel over the fiscal cliff (in what I call a New Year’s “Lack-of-Resolution”), we ask ourselves “who are we? what are we doing?” Without change, we risk our future drowning in the ever-rising seas of business-as-usual, artificial and inconsequential life.
We can, however, counter this bleak image by rejecting the present corrupt and bankrupt business-as-usual path to oblivion. Many before us have advocated a different path towards fulfillment, happiness, and peace, such as Socrates, Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), Confucius, Jesus, and Mohammed in ancient times and Henry David Thoreau, Black Elk, Aldo Leopold, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), and Nelson Mandela more recently. Ancestors and current wisdom keepers lead indigenous peoples on a different path that respects Nature and values connectedness of community, and informs human behavior accordingly. Heeding this advice, many grassroots groups of like-minded individuals who seek a resilient, sustainable future are choosing an alternative path and living a life envisioned through local, personal action. Examples include Permaculture (to heal and transform our food, water, and energy production systems, society and landscapes through earth care, people care, and fair care for resiliency and sustainability), Transition Towns (to build resilient, sustainable, vibrant, and happy communities in response to peak oil, climate destruction, and economic instability), and The Natural Step (to engage in sustainable human activities to eliminate buildups of extractions from Earth’s crust and artificial chemicals/compounds, and to eliminate degradation and destruction of Nature and conditions that preclude meeting people’s basic needs).
These green movements all offer a healthy response to business-as-usual pathology. Like the Hippocratic oath that physicians pledge in treating their patients to “first, do no harm” and like the Precautionary Principle (“better safe than sorry”) codified in law by Canada and the European Union for protecting environmental health and the public from exposure to harmful activity or policy, we need to reshape society values. Ultimately, the answers Americans seek during these hard times are not stopgap measures at gun control or reconstruction of homes and shops, or even tax relief and national debt reduction. Rather, we need to ask questions of essence, rejecting the business-as-usual values that create a false security, hollow feeling, and artificial lives empty of meaning, truth, and survival. Our current values are upside down, floundering. We’re all in the same boat. It’s high time to right our ship and sail before the mast together.
Let’s not go-with-the-status-quo-flow of consumptive greed at the edge of the world. Instead, to stem the tide securely, as agents of change for moderation, building community, and repairing Nature—our ultimate life support system operating free of charge, let’s live life without fear, bolstered green, active and vibrantly connected.
Onward on the bulwark at the brink,
Prof. Victor D. Phillips, GEM Director
GEM Education Center Blog 