Month: May 2017

Take a look at your hands. Ten fingers attached to two palms…each with unique functions, capable of moving individually or in concert with each other. Think of each of us as the fingers and our Earth as the palms.

Now consider our independence…our individual liberty…our inalienable right to advance our own interests. How we express our liberty through individual choices shape the life we live, the careers we have, and the families we form. But are we actually independent?

Most of us don’t produce our food, or build our homes, or provide the protection that secures ourselves and our loved ones. All of us relied on others to provide the education and skill development necessary to succeed in the vocations of our choice. Still others provided the roads, highways, bridges, water systems, electric grid systems, and communications systems necessary to function in a modern society. In fact, as individuals we contribute very little to the components that provide for our living conditions. Yet we still reserve upon ourselves the right to advance our own self-interest, even to the detriment of the people and resources we rely on to live.

We have one planet that produces and replenishes a finite amount of resources. All of us rely on these resources to provide the living conditions we enjoy. Under our current economy, we access these finite resources based on the amount of money we possess. For those few people who possess enormous amounts of money, control over the lion’s share of our global resources are in their hands. They alone retain the right to exhaust these resources or utilize them in a sustainable way. We are experiencing their decision playing out in the Climate change debate.

The question for the rest of us is simple: If global temperatures rise as predicted, unabated by fossil fuel utilization, can life as we know it exist for long? Globally confirmed scientific observations say no. Yet the reason scientific evidence is not determining our only rational choice is because fortunes built on the use of fossil fuels are being deployed to raise doubt about climate change. This illuminates the danger of self-interest. Does it make sense to define individual liberty within the context of self-interest when our preservation relies on advancing our common interest? The answer is obvious when you look at your hands again. Can the fingers survive without the palms?

Intimacy is a clue to our universal oneness. By intimacy, I mean physical proximity. Consider the term “personal space”…loosely defined as the physical comfort zone between ourselves and anyone else. Take into account how this personal space varies based on the relationship we have with individual people. The more we trust someone, the smaller our need for personal space becomes. In rare occasions, our personal space becomes synonymous with another person…and we no longer are separate people. We actually feel the other person. We hurt because they hurt. We feel joy because they are happy. We feel lonely when they are not present, and complete when they are with us. Yet who ever this rare person is, they once were a complete stranger. The experience I describe is not unique…it is all too rare, fleeting, but pervasively true.

The question this truth reveals is whether the separateness we experience from strangers is true or just a widely accepted illusion? Context is another clue to answering this question. What makes a person a stranger is the cultural assumption they are driven by their own interest, guided by values of their own choosing, with no inherent responsibility to provide us with any consideration. Such a person cannot be trusted without knowing more. Therefore, when dealing with strangers our need for personal space is at its maximum.

Now contrast this generic stranger with the litany of strangers we see on the evening news. Seeing something tragic or wonderful happening to a stranger on our TV screen can invoke very powerful emotions within us, depending on how we relate to this complete stranger. These feelings come from the same place as the emotions that join us to people we trust. They too are all too rare, fleeting and pervasively true.

All that remains are the strangers we don’t relate to…or do we? Who amongst us doesn’t cherish the air we breathe? Or the water we drink? Or the warmth we feel when sheltered against the elements of our environment? What stranger can you imagine that doesn’t seek safety and comfort for themselves and their families? Who doesn’t have high aspirations that their children will live more fulfilling lives than they did?

We are one humanity because at the heart of this life, even at the moment of apparent individuality, our deepest hopes and aspirations are synonymous.