Changing to a Sustainable World

If we are to have a future, what would it be like? The only thing clear to me is that we will NOT have a future unless we all make radical changes in how we are doing things. I can talk forever about what we have to stop - such as allowing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide to get into the atmosphere - but lack the imagination to paint an attractive picture of a better future (though I know that's possible). A lifelong obsessive reader, my brain is full of good and bad possibilities for us. Our future will be the result of the interaction of all of our expectations, desires, and fears. For instance, those of us who think that war or other types of violence (such as eating meat) is necessary play our part - by our actions based on that belief - in creating a world based on violence. It's the jungle mentality: kill or be killed, the survival of the most violent, you have to forget about morality if you want to make money, etc. It's the kind of strategy that wins battles but not wars. Wars are never won really, first of all because all sides suffer heavy losses. Then the victor's gains turn into losses. Look at the United States; what have we got for all these years since World War 2? And how long will it last? People are understandably (though not correctly) hateful of us, both for our government's secret mistreatment of people all over the world and also for our capacity and willingness to be ignorant of the dark side of our own history (an unprecedented level of destructiveness in defense of the privileged status quo of a relative few). Ever since we "won" the Second World War (immediately after which my dad said he saw the beginning of World War 3), we've been on a downhill ego trip - till now some of us actually think we're closer to God than are people from other parts of the world. Well, duh, I'm afraid God will beg to differ. It's been the consequence of these collective mindsets that have resulted in superior military capability so that 2-3,000 U.S. citizens killed on September 11th, 2001 has been reacted to by the killing of millions of humans beings who are not U.S. citizens. But we don't much see that, preferring to honor and mourn our own losses as if they were more important than those of citizens of other parts of the Earth. So we won? I don't think so. We now have - through both massive military expenditures and corporations unwilling to either spend to switch to safer technologies or to make their facilities safer from attack - a world which is a high-tech tinderbox. People used to fight hand-to-hand. Now we have mega-death at the click of a mouse, war powers held by people who have never experienced war, our borders as full of holes as a sieve, our ports and markets owned by international players we barely know, and our elections subverted by elites who care little about us. Would you call this a sustainable success story?