#127 / Playing For Change

One of my Facebook Friends made a comment on my blog posting titled, Gaia, Revisited. Here is what he said: 

We face two possible futures: one where we look back on this moment as the time when humanity evolved a greater sense of sustainability, empathy and respect for other living things which allowed us to survive, and another where some distant civilization surveys our remains and wonders what happened.

I couldn't agree more! That earlier blog post linked an article suggesting that the coronavirus pandemic really represents just the "first in a series," and that "COVID-19 may be just the beginning of mass pandemics." 

Our inattention to the imperatives of the World of Nature have made humankind, in general, vulnerable to global disasters of various kinds. Worldwide disease epidemics are certainly one way that the vulnerability of our human civilization has come into evidence. But global warming, surely, more than any disease pandemic, is the largest, and most serious, and longest term threat we face as human beings on Planet Earth. Slower-moving, certainly, and self-inflicted, but it can topple us all.

And there is no vaccine that can save us from the consequences of global warming, either. There is no "quick fix." Staying home and buying things online is not going to solve our problem.

What can solve the problem is exactly the formula prescribed by my Facebook Friend: the development of "a greater sense of sustainability, empathy and respect for other living things." That does include humans, as well as all the other species with which (though we forget it) we are so deeply intertwined.

We must, among other things, and perhaps above all things, realize that we are all, truly, "one people." We will need to coordinate and cooperate across every national, cultural, ethnic, economic, political, gender, and other boundary to mobilize our song of deliverance and to escape from the impending fate that we have (oh, so thoughtlessly) created for ourselves. 

Understanding this, I am always inspired by the dramatic demonstrations that Playing For Change has provided, to show us that doing this - coordinating across all those boundaries - is, in fact, completely possible: 

Change must come. Fundamental change, and we must create it. We must create it together, on a worldwide basis. It is no "game," in fact, to recognize where we are - together on this beautiful but threatened planet. 

Panic and fear are not the right response the place in which we find ourselves. Worldwide, global cooperation is. 

That kind of cooperation is something we can accomplish, if we will. And as this music, I think, suggests, we can accomplish this new art of connected and conscious interdependence with great, great joy!

Image Credit:

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