Strange Days - Part 1

Detlev Obst

Aug 14, 2011 — 3 min read

On Sunday mornings I like to watch films that enhance my awareness, educate and possibly inspire me such as TED.com videos about ideas on how to make our world a better place or documentaries about the world we live in. Sure, there’s also Hollywood but you see, when you eat too much chocolate, bad things happen … <SNICKER>

This morning I picked a National Geographic documentary entitled Strange Days. From it I learned (intuitively obvious to me but facts are good to have) a little more about the interconnectedness of our world’s ecosystems and from the depicted consequences, extrapolated how the lack of an intuitive sensitivity of our species, best exemplified by the loudest and most technologically advanced cultures on our planet, and reinforced by the most uneducated parts of our species, will all culminate into both the poisoning and annihilation of all plant, animal life and mineral resources on the planet. In the so-called 1st world countries our excuse is economic growth which simply equates to money and practically translates into wasteful overproduction. In the less developed countries, and I’m looking at this rather simplistically I realize, we’re looking at e.g. overpopulation and a growing need for resources.

Sustainability of these ways is a problem and cannot continue. Hence we have a dire need for change, not just external but an internal change of heart, values, actions.

Now to throw into that mix of problems a much more arbitrary and still very real example of politics, religious intolerance, cultural differences and thoughtless population growth, one wonders where do we go from here?

While we have numerous people and organizations around the world who, thank God, are working in various degrees to benevolently bring awareness to worldwide issues and devise solutions to our problems, all that effort is good and worthwhile, however it merely scratches the surface. It’s not enough. Why? Because most, if not all, approaches to solving e.g. social, economic and let’s say ecological problems are an outside-in approach and merely appeal to the fickle human mind.

Heart – the core

When crackers (hackers gone rogue) entered into the legal scenery, the law was not prepared to handle them; hence more laws were written to specifically address this problem. Did it?
Now that the U.S. has harvested an unimaginable amount of national debt that reaches into the trillions of dollars, what do we do? Print more money and spend more … Hmmm.
And for the last simplified example let me point out the diseases we have such as cancers which I’d hypothesize, if we lived wholesome and healthy lives, could be all but eliminated. Buther rather than dealing with carcinogenic reagents in our world and making healthy choices, instead what do we do? We produce a whole industry of pharmacology with a convenient subscription-based business model, catering to symptoms rather than attacking the problem or causes. There are tangents to this subject but I’m going to go along this particular straight line for the sake of argument.

Our current approach to dealing with this littering of our planet with trash, toxic industrial waste and human byproducts into the air and soil and groundwater is to send in some kind of mop-up-crew or simply sweep trash under the proverbial carpet. You tell me how well that’s working so far.

The real solution is something like this:

First and foremost, we are one species (irregardless of arbitrary lines in the dirt and culture [philosophy, language, …]) on the only planet we know and have access to, and we are merely a fraction of the global ecosystem. It therefore makes sense that we know our place among the multitudes of life, be a vibrant part of the ecosystem with humility, appreciation and respect towards ALL life for we are all inter-connected and inter-dependent.
Dignified living requires responsibility and mindfulness of one’s actions and their consequences. If consequences are destructive, abstain and find a better way. We’re all in this together, therefore every individual contribution counts, for better or for worse, and in the end, affects all of us.
Most importantly, while the solution requires an inside-out change in the individual, neither government nor any religious or philosophical organization has the right to impose and force such a change. Instead, as individuals it’s our responsibility, to ourselves and each other, to autonomously and collaboratively evolve, take inventory of our lives, connect with our world, first with our hearts, then with our minds. At present we have this backwards.

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