Natural Harmony

We humans do so many strange and unnecessary things, causing ourselves suffering. Children are born willing and able to smile, but soon are taught so many crazy ideas that by the time they are adults it's almost like smiling is a sign of weakness. Being friendly, our real first impulse, is so often mistrusted by others who assume the world is full of people trying to hurt other people. Spend your whole life being suspicious and therefore unfriendly and what do you get? A world which IS unfriendly in response to your suspicious behavior. We live in a world of our collective making. A history of trillions of decisions based on the assumption that we each (and collectively as nations, for instance) have enemies - has yielded a planet full of weapons manufactured and then used, actually CREATING enemies. Life's first impulse, from microbes to man, is harmony. We have been taught (We have taught ourselves) so many fears, so many incorrect negative judgments it literally qualifies as brainwashing, terrorism. Masochistically, we unconsciously hurt ourselves by assuming the existence of so much evil we waste our lives protecting ourselves from imaginary dangers - and make those dangers real by our actions based on belief in them. How else to explain a planet - full of the things we need - in which a relative few have more money than good sense while most feel a crippling lack? There's no shortage - of food, jobs, or anything else. There IS a shortage of the cooperative spirit that is able to make things run so efficiently. When we first started this neighborhood newspaper the Hazelwood Homepage, we had the cooperative spirit (at least in our better moments). We conceived of this part of the city as one. When we started planting gardens, such as that luscious flower garden we had at the corner of Hazelwood and Johnston with the help of the Nature Conservancy, people started saying "Hazelwood's moving up!" We dug into the garbage and pollution of a century of being at the heart of the world's industrialization, starting a process of welcoming a new economy that some of us knew had to be green. The forest across the river became visible again, and the wildlife started to regenerate. The cockroaches and mice and rats and other little varmints now have hawks and snakes and cats and I hear even coyotes to keep them in check. We should recognize that our regenerating ecosystem is what keeps our part of the world from becoming the hell on Earth we can see in many other places. And it is that living community (which includes us), from soil and river muck on up, all the life forms which by their daily activities - eating, reproducing, excreting waste, dying achieve relative stability such as re disease suppression - which can help us make opportunities out of all the problems coming up. The Earth is not something that can be sectioned off into safe and unsafe parts. The changes we face are earthwide. The prime example for me is the danger to the whole world if the situation with the three melted down nuclear power plants in Japan is not stabilized. Reactor Number Four's spent fuel pool has been damaged by the earthquake and tsunami more than a year ago, but they're only now getting started building a new building around the old destroyed one. In their usual effort to assure the public that everything's okay, the nuclear industry, the government of Japan, and our own government have failed to admit that the ecosystem of the whole Earth (which includes all of us, of course) is in grave danger should another even moderate earthquake further damage that spent fuel pool. But, by analyses by reputable scientists and groups in both Japan and the United States, should that one spent fuel pool lose it's cooling water, the resultant possibly inextinguishable fire will release sufficient radioactive pollution to seriously jeopardize life on Earth. So we need to work together, all of us - Japan, the United States, and everybody else - to quickly rebuild that cooling system. To me God and Science are two words for the same thing. Reality delivers what we have coming to us. There is a morality found by scientific logic. We are at the moment of history in which we are called and able to move to a world in which all life is one - one family, one love. Should we fail, not working together on our common problems such as at Fukushima, it will be the end for us. We'll go the way of the dinosaur, and it will be good riddance for us a species because we've learned how to destroy so efficiently but just couldn't handle that love stuff. There need be no unemployment, anymore than there need be a shortage of food in the world. There's plenty of constructive work needs done; getting paid's the problem. Our unconscious fear-caused greed has made it so that we possess MANY more things like cars and hammers than we would actually need if we lived in a cooperative world and would share. If we forge a system which pays people to do constructive things like transition to conservation and non-destructive energy, then we can have the next BIG step in human progress. It's right around the corner. I am convinced the creation of the nuclear power industry was partly in order to manufacture nuclear weapons. That is why so many safety and pollution concerns were sloughed off. It was felt that being more powerful than the enemy was more important. We see now the results of actions based on fear - a polluted world armed to the teeth, increasingly unable to feed itself.