Soundtrack in my head: Melanie, “Lay Down”
I came up with the phrase “A Hundred Hands Will Catch You” based on a line from a poem I wrote years ago. I knew that the title would catch people’s attention and make people think, but it has always occurred to me that it could come also across as a bit naïve.
To be brutally honest, I’m actually quite pessimistic about the human race over the next 20-100 years, but I’m optimistic over the long-term. We always seem to choose hard lessons over easy ones. The last fifty years have presented us with urgent questions about the way we relate to ourselves, each other, the environment, people who are different from us, people who are angry at us, and so on.
My faith in the political system and the ability of EITHER major political party to respond to the urgent questions facing us today has sharply eroded over the last 20 years. Frankly, I don’t think either the Republican nor Democratic parties in the U.S. are capable of taking even the first of one hundred steps necessary to get our society and our world out of the mess we’ve created for ourselves.
One of my favorite blogs is The Automatic Earth, which minces few words when talking about today’s world economic situation. Today, I found a great video which I’m sharing below. It puts in relatively simple terms the issues as I see it and the solutions as I see it–involving many changes that I’m trying to put into place in my life.
Very honestly, we are going to need one hundred hands to catch us in the future. And each of us need to provide two of the hundred hands to catch other people.
Like the line from my poem, the video might come across as a bit optimistic, but I think it is important to put out what is possible if we put our minds to it. In any case, I find the contents of the video much more credible than what is emanating from either of the two enormous propaganda extravaganzas being thrown two months before our presidential elections–the one that just finished in Tampa, Florida and the one that’s about to start in Charlotte, North Carolina.
