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Salmon: Event Invitation- page 1
by William Salmon via OE 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

SAVE THESE DATES Colleagues: In the event you have not sent a reflection or plan to attend, please send a note. Better still tell a brief story that involved you and me and/or others. Such mail will be read during one or both of these events. Thanks. SAVE THESE DATES! -"My memorial for me!"- July 26, 2014 The City Saturday 129 No. 7th Across the street from Cozy Inn 4 to 6 p.m. Jazz Combo: Light refreshments Open Mic + + + + + + + July 27, 2014 Trinity UMC Sunday 901 Neal ½ mile South of Magnolia on Ohio 2 to 4 p.m. Church Music: Choir/solos & Gospel (swing) Singing Open Mic ---Come celebrate the meaning of my life as it comes to us in the meaning of death and resurrection-

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Remembering Charles Moore
by Al Lingo via OE 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

Recent witnesses concerning the life and death of Charles Moore have expressed deep respect for him. What a privilege it has been to hear the many voices of appreciation for the presence Charles chose to become. Charles Moore continues on in good company! Concerning Charles' choice to die, I believe that he chose not to be mechanized by any social institution, whether it be a religious or secular authority. Charles perceived the evil in being a dehumanizing cog in any church and/or community machine. Charles chose another human alternative: dramatically and profoundly saying "No" to continuing to live and participate in institutional acts of abuse. Charles echos DH Lawrence: "DEATH IS NOT EVIL, EVIL IS MECHANICAL." Charles Moore's death rattles our bones and recalls us to an awareness of divinity. Concerning Charles' decisions to live over nearly eighty years, I am at a loss for personal and memorable collegial encounters and interactions we might have had. However, today, his life has kept arising for me, beckoning me to attention. Please accept the following quote as another offering in celebrating the unfolding and fulfilled life journey of Charles Moore with us: "There seems to be a way for things to happen which is intrinsically right for them: they become what they were meant to be ... Do human beings also tend to unfold according to such interior designs, or is our life wholly random? It seems a reasonable and useful hypothesis to believe that we are like the rest of creation. According to the Eastern doctrine 'dharma,' we are each called upon to achieve a particular life-pattern. And while all patterns have equal dignity, each one of us should avail himself or herself of the possibility that is uniquely one's own and not someone else's. Each of us should try to discover the pattern and cooperate with its realization ... Our entire life's purpose is already present within us, and furthermore, at each stage of our life there are subordinate purposes---steps along the way toward the fulfillment of our ideal pattern." Piero Ferucci May Charles Moore be well remembered, Charles Lingo Al Lingo clingojr(a)aol.com

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7/10/14, Spong: Part XXV Matthew - Atonement Theology, Conclusion: Seeking New Possibilities
by Ellie Stock via OE 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Part XXV Matthew Atonement Theology, Conclusion: Seeking New Possibilities Have you ever wondered why the work of Charles Darwin has been so threatening to traditional Christians and to institutional Christianity? In fundamentalist and Bible belt regions of the world, Christians have gone to extraordinary efforts to blunt Darwin’s teaching. One recalls the publication of a series of tracts between 1910 and 1915, which were produced by literalistic Christians operating out of Princeton Theological Seminary and mailed each week to over 500,000 Christian leaders around the world. These tracts were called “The Fundamentals” and their writers called themselves “Fundamentalists.” They were funded by the Universal Oil Company of California (Unocal) and represented an attempt to defend traditional Christianity from the Darwinian challenge. Next, one recalls the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1926 when John Scopes, a young biology teacher in the public schools, was found guilty of teaching in a Tennessee school that which is “contrary to the Word of God.” This was then followed by massive attempts up to this day to control the curriculum of public schools through local elections so that Darwin would not corrupt the Christian faith of the children of traditional Christians. Finally, these critics sought to infuse public school text books in order to teach first, “Creation Science” and later “Intelligent Design” as alternatives to Darwin in the science classrooms of public schools. In 2014 four of the seven Republican primary candidates for the United States Senate seat in Georgia declared their opposition to evolution, a stand that they deemed to be critical to winning the nomination. Ultimately, each of these challenges failed, sometimes at the hands of the laws, sometimes at the hands of the voters, but it is clear that Darwin and evolution disturbed the faith held by many Christians. Part of their fear was that if Darwin turned out to be correct, the literal Bible could no longer be something that could be defended. On a deeper level, however, what Darwin really challenged was each of the presuppositions of the primal Christian myth, which had been erected on the precepts of “Atonement Theology.” Thus, Darwin was thought to represent a kind of ultimate threat to what they believed was the essence of Christianity. This kind of Christianity assumed that there was an original perfection from which human life had fallen into “original sin.” From that fallen and sinful state human life was unable to save itself and was therefore lost without divine intervention. Jesus was then presented as God’s divine rescue operation. In contrast to these primitive ideas, Darwin confronted us with a vision of humanity that was not fallen, but incomplete. For Darwin, life emerged out of the forces of nature in the simplest single cell form and began its journey through history. From that beginning some 3.8 billion years ago, life evolved through hundreds of millions of years first into clusters of cells, which allowed complexity, cell differentiation and cell specialization to appear. Next, and again after hundreds of millions of years, this thing called life split into two different streams, one animate and the other inanimate, but with each deeply interdependent with the other. Every living thing was and is in some other living thing’s food chain. Then out of the animate side of life, primitive forms of consciousness appeared and began to grow. How conscious is an insect, a clam or a lobster? Compare their levels of consciousness with that of a horse, a dog or a cat. Creatures that are alive and conscious do not transcend the boundaries of nature. Every living thing, conscious and sub-conscious, is also programmed by nature itself to maximize its survival. Vines in the rain forests of the world are driven to seek sunshine and water. Predators and victims alike share in what looks like a kind of “survival dance” in the jungles of the world. Survival alliances seem to form between various species of life that defy rational explanation. Ants and wasps build their nests in the same tree and each wards off the enemy of the other. Parakeets that live on the toxic seeds of the fruits of the forest learn how to lick the anti-toxins from the soil of the forest in order to survive. Each of these behaviors is instinctive, but all are in the service of survival, which controls and drives every living thing. A day ultimately came, however, in our evolutionary history when a major new boundary was crossed. Out of conscious life self-consciousness evolved. That was the moment when a creature emerged in the evolutionary process that did not see itself as part of nature, but as a self over against nature. This creature could say “I,” “me” and mine.” This creature did not escape its drive for survival, but it did transcend nature’s previous limits. It knew self-consciously that it was survival-oriented. Every decision it made was in the service of survival. Sometimes it gave up individual life to guarantee the survival of its species. So it knew and valued sacrifice. Nonetheless, it installed survival consciously as its highest value and both knowingly and forever acted out of the drive to survive. If one knows one is survival-oriented, if one’s highest adopted value is survival, either of the individual or the species, then that self-conscious creature cannot help being self-centered. This was and is the deepest and the most universal characteristic of all life, but only human life is consciously aware of it. That is part of what it means to be human. When ancient people sought to understand the radical self-centeredness of human life, they interpreted that behavior, not as part of our biology which it surely is, but as a flaw in our nature, the result of a “fall.” Because human beings know themselves to be self-centered, they assumed that there must have been a time when they were “at one” with the world of nature and with God, so they sought to recover that original bliss. Occasionally, they would experience that rare quality of transcending survival’s drive in life in the discovery of transcending love. They could even give up their survival quest and give themselves away in love for another. Husbands and wives, parents and children sometimes know that reality. So the mythmakers explained this understanding of life as an original perfection or oneness from which, they suggested, we had fallen into the universality of “sin” expressed in the self-centeredness of our survival-driven nature. That was when “Original Sin” was assumed to be the mark of all humanity. So human beings began to develop primal myths of lost original perfection lived in a mythical, pre-historic place called the Garden of Eden, where we were “at one” with God, with each other and with the world of nature, but which now was gone. We could not return to Eden, since all life had to be lived “East of Eden.” So indelible was this self-centered survival aspect of life that we felt we had to be rescued from it by a power not limited by our human condition. Ultimately the Jesus experience was explained in these terms. Jesus, we said, came from another realm. He shared in our humanity though he was not bound by it, we asserted. He was our “savior” who did for us what we could not do for ourselves. He broke the power of self-centeredness and restored us to our original state of being one with God. When we sought to explain just how he did this the story got more and more barbaric. Jesus, it appears, did this by absorbing the punishment from an angry God in order to overcome the effects of “the fall.” He thus paid the price our sin required and thus restored us to an original oneness with God. Jesus was a divine invader sent by God to rescue a fallen humanity. What is wrong with that understanding? Everything, not the least of which is, that none of it is true. There never was an original perfection. We have evolved from primitive single cells into complex, self-conscious life. There was no fall. One cannot fall from a perfection one has never possessed, nor can we be rescued from a fall that never happened or “restored” to a status that we have never known. “Original Sin” is thus both a distortion of reality and a lie. It is an idea based on bad anthropology. Good theology can never be built on bad anthropology. “Atonement Theology” is based on an understanding of human life that is simply wrong, Unless Christianity dismisses “Atonement Theology,” there is no way that it will continue to live. Can we, however, rid ourselves of these destructive concepts and still be Christian? Can we dismiss the brainwashing of the ages and begin to see Jesus, not as the rescuer of the fallen, but as the expander of the potential of our humanity? Can we drop the idea of “redemption” and substitute for it the idea of being made whole, being given the power to step beyond survival into a new consciousness? Can we tell the Jesus story in this dramatically different way? To do this means that the traditional understandings of God like the Incarnation and even the Trinity must be reformulated, since both are based on the definition of human life as fallen. These fourth century doctrines do not define God, as we have been taught, they only define our understanding of God and are based on ideas that we no longer believe to be true. The dualistic boundary, which we have arbitrarily created between the human and the divine, must also go. The human is not the opposite of the divine it is the doorway into the divine. When one becomes fully human, one crosses the boundary into the divine. The two are on a spectrum just like the spectrum between male and female, between life and consciousness. Finally, the idea of salvation won for us on the cross must go. Salvation has come to mean lifting us out of something broken and into a new state. The task of the Christ becomes, therefore, not to save us. It is to call us, to love us and to empower us to become so deeply and fully human that we might escape our boundaries as self-conscious creatures and evolve into the realm of universal consciousness. There we will begin to recognize our oneness with all things living and, perhaps, even our oneness with the Source of life itself, which we call by the name God. Then we will recognize that the purpose of Christianity is not to save us from our sins, but to enlarge and enhance what it means to be human. Jesus will become for us, not our redeemer but our life-giver, our guide into the depths of our humanity. The choice before us is clear, but it is not easy. Perhaps that is what it means to walk by faith. ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Dr. Bennie Calloway of Kingdom Truth Apostolic Church, Valdosta, Georgia, writes: Question: What biblical commentaries do you suggest that would be most beneficial for sermon preparation in contemporary teaching for the 21st century? Answer: Dear Bennie, Thanks for your letter. The question you ask, however, will not lead you to the conclusion you seek. I applaud your desire to find proper resources for “sermon preparation in contemporary preaching in the 21st century.” That is certainly needed, but the idea that you can find this in a Bible commentary or even in a series of Bible commentaries, is not the answer. The problem that you are seeking to address is far more complex than that. I also do not think that preaching alone will ever address the problem you state as your goal. First of all, there is no single commentary on the Bible that is worth the paper on which it is printed any more that there is a single volume guide to the practice of medicine that a doctor might follow. The Bible, not including the Apocrypha, consists of 66 books written over a period of 1000 years, roughly from 1000 BCE to 140 CE, by a wide variety of authors living in a wide variety of human situations. Not one of them by itself will carry ultimate truth. Before I wrote my book on John’s gospel, which was published in 2012 under the title The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, I read every major commentary on that gospel written or translated into English from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The names of those authors were listed in my bibliography. I learned from all of them. I agreed totally with none of them. In my book I blended insights from many authors to find my own conclusions. The 19th century commentaries revealed a world view that no longer exists, but that did not invalidate some of the insights. The 21st century commentaries also quite frequently did not address the issues of the modern world. I think you and all who preach regularly need to engage the best scholarship available to you. It is a lifetime process not a Sunday by Sunday process. You must also be conversant with history, science and with the inevitable process of change that life brings. I do not believe that Sunday worship services are the proper place to accomplish this task. People do not have the proper setting in worship to process the things that you would be saying. They cannot in that setting disagree with you verbally, they cannot ask questions, they cannot object. This means ultimately that they cannot really learn in that setting. Churches need to offer their people a format for learning. In my opinion this will be a classroom setting, in which questions and challenges are welcomed and in which things can be explained over and over again, ideas repeated and consensus built. A worship service with a preacher behind an elevated pulpit speaking to worshippers sitting below is not that kind of place. If we do not recognize how deeply the world has changed since the Bible was written, we will never achieve the goal of communicating Christianity in our world. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo removed from us the idea that we live in the center of a three-tiered universe and that God was a being who dwelt above the sky. The traditional theistic view of God died in that advance of knowledge, but most people in church do not yet recognize it and we still pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” The work of Charles Darwin ended forever the idea that there was an original perfection from which we have fallen and that, in turn, ended forever our pious talk about original sin and how God overcame it in the death of Jesus. Bible commentaries do not tend to address issues about changing perceptions of the world so without the study of the world, they are very inadequate resources. There is finally the problem that so many parts of the church are so firmly attached to traditional ideas of God that for you to challenge those ideas from the pulpit would result only in the destruction of that congregation. People grow only when issues are explained, when they can process new ideas over a period of time, when they can ask questions and even when they can disagree. New ideas need to be presented in a classroom setting and for this kind of learning, a Bible commentary to assist your preaching will be of very little assistance to you. In conclusion, I think you have the right goal, but the wrong tactic to arrive at that goal. That is also the problem I see reflected in almost every part of the church. That is why the task before the Christian Church today is so hard and why success using the patterns of the past is so limited. For starters, Bennie, choose one gospel and stick with it until you have mastered it. I admire your desire to do your task more professionally. My best to you in your ministry. John Shelby Spong Announcements Do you or someone you know speak French or Spanish? Share and Visit these sites: Bishop Spong in French: protestantsdanslaville.org Bishop Spong in Spanish: johnshelbyspong.es

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"Mountain of Care" reflection by Charles Moore
by Terry Bergdall via OE 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

When I heard this talk in 1974, it was an enormous inspiration to me. Forty years later, I can still vividly recall much of it point by point by point. Through the good work of Sally Fenton and Jean Long at the Global Archives, and the assistance of Tim Wegner, here is a link whereby you can read Charles's spin in total. I can think of no better way to contribute to his Memorial on Saturday than by sharing this. http://wiki.wedgeblade.net/pub/Main/CharlesMoore/mt-care-all.pdf Grace and Peace, Terry

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Re: [Oe List ...] Charles Moore Memorial
by George Holcombe via OE 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

We spoke briefly with Pat Moore last night. She and her two sons, Guy and Steve will be at the memorial service on Saturday. In speaking with William Renfro, son in law to Barbara, the service will have opportunity for statements about Charles to be made. At this point we know that Sarah Buss, Mary Hampton, the McCabes and Holcombes will be there. Renfro suggested we stand as a group while one of us makes a comment. If others are planning to be there please let me know. We are planning to give a printed copy of our remarks (ICA & OE list serves) about Charles to Pat and Barbara. I have assembled (first run) the comments from our list serves. Please read and edit your comments if needed. If other comments have been made that I missed, or if you wish to add one, please forward it to me. Make it quick because I will try to make a final copy and dress it up a bit Saturday morning. The comments I have so far are attached in MSWord document form. I can also send it in Mac Pages or PDF. The Service will be at 2:00 PM, Faith Presbyterian Church, 1314 E Oltorf St, Austin, TX, this Saturday, July 12. George Holcombe 14900 Yellowleaf Tr. Austin TX 78728 Mobile 512/252-2756 grholcombe(a)gmail.com "Whatever the problem, community is the answer. There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about." Margaret Wheatley

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Charles Moore
by R.Salvatore Caruso via OE 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

>>> Dear colleagues: >>> >>> Like all of those who have responded here and those who have not, when I first read the news of Charles I was shocked,tears flowed, and a meditation on Charles began and continues mindfully in my consciousness. Charles has always been and continues to be part of my meditative council... >>> >>> Just one Charles story to add to those this event has given us for reflection as part of in our contemplative life. I think we were living in Oak Park in the late 60's and early 70's so we were with Charles & Pat a lot during that time. Recruiting courses and the LCX were front and center. Our regional cadre helped support these efforts. I remember one time during that stretch when we were presenting something relative to the LCX at a new church...We were there with Charles & Pat and others. As we were leaving the church, I turned to Charles and asked him how he felt the meeting went ( I must have been a little invested in the outcome). He said: "Did you hear the singing, great harmony, beautiful!". That's all he said. It's then I learned how to read a group. It's not what they say but what is their emotional response. This simple lesson was adapted into my business screen at the time and later as a facilitator. He made a difference in my life...As human beings we tend to make decisions emotionally and then later or simultaneously rationalize them with our minds...What a profound life lesson.. >>> >>> During most of the month of June this year I was in Plum Village monastery( France) to participate in a Thich Nhat Hahn( Thay) led retreat that focused on the theme of: "What happens when we die/What happens when we are alive"? ( the Zen approach)...Thay is one of my spiritual teachers. He's a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk whose lifelong efforts to generate peace and reconciliation moved Martin Luther King,Jr. to nominate him for Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. >>> >>> While I was at this retreat Thay, in a dharma talk, shared his reflections on what he shared with MLK. During the 1965-66 period he was in communication with Martin on the war, Martin asked him to share his thinking on the self immolation that monks were taking to protest the war. Thay said it was not an act out of despair but a clear intention to bring attention to the horrible war that the people did not want. It was a way to express for the voiceless the horrors of war brought about by two super powers. He said this was an act on B 1/2 of those without a voice and compared these acts to Jesus' death ( act) on the cross. In the end he said it was an act of compassion. >>> >>> So where do I take this understanding as it applies to Charles's act? From all that I've read here on this list serve from Charles and others who were close to him ( I hadn't seen him in many years), his final act of living appears to be an offering on B 1/2 of all... A protest around the foundational social issues of our time...He continues now in all of us. His act is not one I would choose. I am involved in Mindfulness practices/training and Permaculture regenerative living systems here in Colorado, Nebraska and Mexico. While the vision I once held to save the world has been lost, I do now work where I am to be/do the necessary deed locally to leave behind a trail of demonstrations where mindful & regenerative living goes on for others to see and practice. This unfolds as we speak. >>> >>> I take away for myself that the unintended (or intended?) consequence of this profound act on community ( ours in particular) and others we are a part of: is to draw us together at a time when many of us continue to be engaged in social activism and spiritual transformation. It requires that I pay more attention to relationships and take care of strong emotions when they signal that healing is needed. >>> >>> Charles as you continue in the vast cosmos and in our hearts I say thank you for all you shared with us in your life and in your passing.. Continue on! > > Salvatore ( aka Ray) Caruso

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the news
by via OE 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

This is on an objective level. The only thing about Charles Moore’s death that has appeared in my local newspaper, the Austin American Statesman, was an obituary saying he died in Dallas, Texas and noting he had been pastor of Grace Methodist here in Austin. On June 30, the same paper, AAS, reported that a man in Tokyo set himself on fire in a crowded train station because “ he criticized a Cabinet proposal to extend Japan’s security role in Asia.” He was reported to be in serious condition. The Quaker Friend / friend I shared with, expressed surprise that the manner of Charles’ death was not in the news. He reminded me of the Quaker who immolated himself in the middle of the Vietnam war and of the fact that Secretary McNamara said that was one of the things that changed his mind about the war. I can think of numerous explanations as to why one of Charles’ last places of residence and service might not publish what they surely know. At the moment I will not speculate. I have been grateful to all of you for your shared reflections and love. mary

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How many lives?
by Sunny Walker via OE 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

Perhaps it's a little like Christmas and we're watching "It's a Wonderful Life." I only knew Charles Moore for a very intense 44-hours in April of 1971. He was the "first teacher" of my RS-1 in the basement of a rather obscure little Methodist church on the outskirts of Bartlesville, OK. And I am forever changed. And on it goes. We have been blessed, Sunny Sunny Walker SunWalker Enterprises 303-587-3017 (cell); 303-671-0704 (office) sunwalker(a)comcast.net Aurora, Colorado "What is it that you want to do with the one, wild, precious thing called your life?" ~Mary Oliver

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Fwd: GMCA July5
by David Zahrt via OE 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

*SAT Jul 05* I was given the breakfast prep assignment for a week. That means getting up at 4 AM. It was dark so I wore a headlamp. I had already set up the stoves and the tables the night before. I turned on the stoves to heat water and set out the coffee and tea prep, the lunch prep materials and the breakfast cereal. I must have gotten up early because Lala didn’t do Wake Up until 5:15. Ed Fallon has written a song about the March. There’s a line in the chorus that says…”get your lazy ass out of bed…” I rode John J’s bicycle to Karrer Park, on the east side of McCook, NE another 15 mile day. It was better on my tailbone but it required using a different set of muscles from riding the recumbent. The route was mostly flat so it was not a problem. I did some jounaling and set up the solar panel and the big tent. In the afternoon Chris, the CO coordinator, conducted a repeat of the ‘Discover the Best of What Is’ session we had done 2 days ago. There were 5 new participants. I found the process unhelpful. We spent and hour and ½ and I couldn’t identify how we would benefit from the end product or what we would do with it. During dinner the group made plans to visit the RR station first thing after breakfast tomorrow and demonstrate against the railroad hauling oil tankers. As I understood it, it was an attempt to join 350.org’s protest. I went to bed early because I had 4 AM breakfast/lunch set-up again. We hadn’t observed the sprinkler system for the park. At midnight the sprinklers went off. Our tent, the big tent, and many others, got wet. -- Peace, David -- Peace, David

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Jaime for Friday July 11
by via OE 08 Jul '14

08 Jul '14

This completes my "forwards" from the Saipan Tribune for a while. Jaime Consciousness andimage Kenneth Boulding in 1956 published The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, which began aconversation that I later joined after drinking deeply on the “earthrise”picture of ’68, deciding to be a citizen of the blue orb in the sky. My consciousness and an image merged into astory that determined behavior. Boulding’sinsight follows the following basic premise: We operate out of images. These images govern our behavior. Images are created by messages. Images can change. Changed images create change behavior. I mention these five points again to remind me of theirrelevance, still. It illuminates thebehavior change that earthrise brought, just like a friend’s pat speech. She says, “I only have three things to say: reuse, reduce, recycle.” From consciousness and image spin a lively story. Sometimes though, the effect is not too lively. When I was in grade 11, I took a psychological test. A counselor briefed me on the result. Her message: you are over-achieving. Idid not exactly know what that meant but at the time, I was alarmed that if Icontinued the academic path I was in, I would turn cuckoo. Cuckoo was the image. I focused on sports, athletics, and sociallife instead after letting academic excellence fall by the hallway. A friend received scholarship from a sponsor to attend avocational High School. He consented butreceived a jesting message that his family did not consider him smart enough toattend liberal arts High School. Itlingered so he nursed a deep slight past his adult life, blaming his family forsubverting his academic direction. An older friend did not resemble any of her four siblings, abit darker and shorter. Her father jokedthat the day she was born at a Manila hospital during WWII, the electricityblacked out and she might have been inadvertently exchanged as a baby, thus,the dissimilarities. When she turned 40,the unintended cruelty of the joke came out in an emotional outburst thatclaimed her family never wanted her all along. A good friend from the Philippines signified to her adviser afterHigh School that she wanted to be a nurse. She felt she did not get a supportive response. So she shifted to pursue secretarialscience. The adviser commented that shewas not pretty enough to be a secretary and not smart enough to learnstenography. The adviser was notreceived to be jesting so my friend took her negative response to heart. Others rue today with the lament that she seemsstill trying to prove she was prettier and smarter than anyone else, or just aspretty and smart as the best of them. The above examples are personal at the individual level ofhow messages create images that determine behavior. In a larger scale, the image that has definedus in the last three hundred years as a specie is the way we are organized. We created nation-states, beginning with thebreakdown of the imperial entity after the Vatican blessed Spain and Portugal’ssplit of the known world, to the feudal states in Europe, and the colonies ofcompeting empires. After WWII the nation-states exploded in Asia and Africa butthe former colonizers agreed that the new nation-states would follow thesovereign lines of their former masters. Spanish occupiers (and their successors) neversubdued the Moro in Mindanao, yet they were included in the new politicalentity named after Spain’s Principe Felipe. The same arrangement did not sit well with the Tutsi and the Hutu inRwanda. The “nation-state” reels fromthat misjudgment! There are now global issues that require global solutions andas Simon Anholt in his TED talk on the Good Country Index said, we electleaders who we ask to lead by looking through “microscopes when they should belooking through telescopes.” We know ofglobal challenges but we are reluctant to jump into proposed practical globalresponses because we are reluctant to change as a specie. The reality of climate change, for instance,is not a Canada, China, or Chile issue; it is a worldwide issue that 7 billionpeople need to look at and decide how to deal with. Politicians in the Commonwealth respond to issues as ifpolitical entities can operate as islandsseparate from the realities of one planet. The issue of a besieged planet does not recognize nation-state. Only the image of one blue orb withoutboundaries impact the story of our lives. How to act in this instance, in our violent instincts,echoes Jean Anouilh’s Antigone: “You grab the wheel, you right the ship ... You shout an order, and if one man refuses to obey, you shoot straight into the mob. … The thing that drops when you shoot may be someone who poured you a drink the night before; but it has no name. And you, braced at the wheel, you have no name, either. Nothing has a name — except the ship, and the storm.” The ship and the storm. On one planet earth, the option to shoot is no longer required but we cannot affordto be less radical. Time to peek on thetelescope. j'aime la vie pinoypanda2031(a)aol.com yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!

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