Our Best Tool For Avoiding Catastrophe Is Equality
And demanding democracy is a good start
Vote for voting rights — and out of the box thinking
People love making little boxes to put things in. They often put racism, sexism, war, eco-disasters, and things like the price of gas, in separate boxes.
Nothing goes in a separate box.
Everything touches everything else. Even when this was partially true, and we ran in separate tribes on separate landmasses, we shared human strengths and frailties.
Most of all, until people see all others as the same, all living places suffer. We are not the same in every way, obviously. Nature appears to have invented diversity for the sheer fabulousness of what it does and how it does it. Nature, having a three-plus-billion-year lead on all our wisdom, found that biodiversity not only creates abundance and systems, but does it so spectacularly.
That said, we are the same in all ways that count.
All beings who can suffer need to have a say
The tribe we call humanity, or sapiens, needs to see our commonality.
We are all as deserving of the same liberty, choice, rules, and consequences of living in alignment with sharing, caring, and being a cooperative species with systems of air, water, soil, and food that support all life.
Nature makes most of our rules.
Nature is usually portrayed as a woman. This fits because for most of the last few thousand years people have framed every understanding of the control, or conquest of nature as “progress” that keeps nature under our cleverly opposable thumbs. Or tries to, anyway.
But this sort of domination hierarchy gave us massive headaches: slavery, colonialism, genocide, misogyny, and now potential World War Three, and climate disasters.
But, always, and forever, nature is never entirely under our control. Even in, maybe especially in, these days of the Anthropocene, it’s true. We influence nature, but nature’s laws, natural consequences of heating or polluting our home affect all of us, albeit unevenly.
We all have heard that the poor, the female, the BIPOC, the habitats themselves, suffer disproportionately under inequality.
Equality, the fight for both democracy and for autonomy, addresses all these issues at once. It also empowers those who would protect their water and land in ways that allow for stewardship rather than exploitation.
Connecting with community and nature is essential for mental, physical, and spiritual health.
Rise like an ocean
For example, there is an ongoing fight over feminism or migration. These will stop being an issue when people realize the down-trodden will never, ever cease to try to rise up.
To give up is also not in our human nature.
Things like control of resources — petrostates like Russia, or Saudi Arabia, or nuclear states like India and the USA — all struggle with ideas about who is more entitled to what.
We, human beings, it must be constantly repeated, are one people and need to begin to act as such. We who think some should have dominance over others, supremacy, bigotry, or prejudice against “the other” need to realize we all desperately need alliance.
Look up, the truth is out there
The truth is out there, and up there. From the soles of your shoes to the satellites linking your devices, you rely on others.
We put the JWST, a space telescope, into orbit with international cooperation. We found pandemic vaccines with global collaboration. We rely on one another for food, shelter, air, water, and all our interactive technology.
More now, in the new Cold war, in the new climate heating war, and the new reckoning with racial and sex/gender equality movements, we have to stand up for what provides the most good for the most of sustainable life everywhere.
We need one another; until we have one another’s backs, how are we to take the heavy yoke we have placed on Mother Nature’s back? Yes, she can give us tough love — metaphorically—but we don’t have to agree to deserve such punishment.
Let’s see to it that every person who loves freedom, liberty, choice, autonomy, and humanity, realizes that we all have to unite even if we disagree on details.
We are one pale, blue dot. Together, we got this.
