SUE's Blog

Jane Goodall does a star turn. She is so on it for our bottom line. When I listen to her I think that if everyone in the world were listening we’d change our ways.

My favorite quote for this moving video:
“It depends on changing attitudes. If we could just get a critical mass of us who start to think about the consequences…We just have to get it through to our thick heads that what we do as an individual certainly in the big scheme of things doesn’t make a difference, but what we do collectively as billions of human beings making the right ethical choices, that’s going to move us in the right direction.”

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I feel funny issuing commands to my Google Assistant without my saying please and then my not saying thank you after it talks to me with a man’s voice as if it’s a person. What is there to say about this absence of civility? Is graciousness being programmed out of us in these meeting places where machines behave like humans and humans behave like machines? Is a mechanistic type of humanity what we are becoming?

I think we should be talking about this. It should be on our minds. We may want to deal with it. But, first, we have to realize there is something to be dealt with.

We no doubt can’t change what is reducing our humanity, but, to counter those things, we could be doing other things that add to our humanity.

One idea I have is about a connecting grid all across the world. Think of an app you can get on anytime you have 10 or 15 minutes to spare to randomly connect with someone somewhere who speaks your language. You’d have some prompts for what to talk about. This is a deck of talking topics I made that would invite meaningful sharing.

These engagements are just for that one connection – no ongoing pen pals or anything besides that little exchange. There would be a map of the world that gets another light wherever there’s a conversation.

Any other ideas out there?
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The world and I are one. It hasn’t always been so. For a long time, Earth was for me to live on and to do things on. I was a very high achiever in an upper middle class family where my parents expected a good performance and cheered me on. As a child, I saw the world through the eyes of my lawyer father, the closest thing in my life to God, who would explain what I needed to satisfy my limited curiosity. I never felt involved in any of it. Wars were good guys and bad guys doing their thing, and disasters around the globe were like movies and not meaningful in my life.

I am a 180 from there now. Maybe it was psychedelics that burst my materialist bubble. Or, the Human Potential Movement when encounter groups pushed me out of my comfort zone. I do remember a long time of being in-between worlds, when I tried to convince my parents that curiosity was in order. It was a hard sell.

I am unconscionably old now, something I never expected. Concern with self and caring about oneness are playing out in one theater now and I’m the audience, wondering what the drama is all about. While the curtain is up, something has to be going on, but “so what” is a haunting question.  

It’s odd to be stuck in reality when the curtain is coming down. Omg, so much trouble humans are in and I’m the achiever so it’s my job to fix that. How can I not knock Trump off his soapbox? He’s depraved. This drama we are in, where people pretend he’s acceptable, is surreal. We argue about his policies, things we can get our teeth into, or the tweets he sends or the laws he breaks, but, with him mean-spirited and endangering the world, the nightmare is being slept through. My job, dammit, is to get him removed.

Closing thought for this riff is some gratitude that I care. I guess. If I didn’t, I could concentrate on having a good time. I could paint again, and read books. I could eat out and find whatever else sweetens a life more than full-time calculation does. But oye, oye, oye, oye, I am stuck in you being me, motivated and despairing, not knowing how to get the world fixed in my time.

Maybe start a club. The Fixers. Big job. We take it on.

Lex Hixon, my superstar friend who died young, left me with this membership qualification. If it fits you, be in touch and let’s see where we go from here:    

A coalition already exists in spirit. It is coming together now in the social context by the attraction of its unconventional intelligence and compassionate form of high-mindedness. This natural coalition is drawn together by the recognition that the elevation of consciousness is our fundamental life work. This is a genuinely democratic, self-organizing force, flowing through persons of all descriptions. This force does not flourish as any highly structured form. It is not an institution or a foundation or a non-profit company or anything conventionally named. This coalition is a living organism — natural, wild, free. It is made up of individuals devoted to serving the world and developing themselves as finely tuned instruments of service. They learn to gather in the energy of will-to-good, from which authentic goodwill flows out subtly to the entire world.

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