In the face of terror, there are choices the human can make. Faced with terror--the human nervous system becomes extremely hard wired to limit choice. Faced with utter, existential terror--the kind of which comes with being beaten, raped, deported; the kind that comes with finding your best friend or daughter, dead of a preventable drug overdose, what do we do? You and me. Me and You. Us. The people who have inherited the Earth.
US Americans and all global citizens are facing a level of terror, unmatched for its collective nature. It's not a person, we people fear. There is nothing to fear about a person--when wounded, a person bleeds. What we people have come to fear is losing what we think we need, what we think we have--all the while, a geopolitical Sharknado promising a massive human extinction by our own hands is at hand. It's definitely one helluva inconvenient truth.
There is no war that has ever been fought over ideas. "No ideas but in things," William Carlos Willams writes, and no things within us at all that give rise to fighting for any "thing" but LIFE. The poet served as an obstetrician in Patterson, New Jersey in a time when women enjoyed almost no reproductive rights, during years where labor shifted to make women count as income earners rather than property and producers of more consumer/producers. Patriarchy has trapped most everyone I meet in a way of thinking that has us scared enough to actually kill ourselves with ignorance, even though we actually know better. How crazy is that?
If you are one of the 165 million people out there, who have reached out and reached in to be the change the planet needs, who remember a time, in a land before time, when survival didn't depend on the Dow Jones, join us to build, an industry based on radical love and acceptance, one neighborhood at time, and may a total eclipse of the sun turn us back to a future time when we did know--we were born into a garden where, really, every single species, relationship, love and loss, is granted only for a season.