the world we want

What would the world look like if it was actually built on compassion and cooperation, instead of greed and competition?

And why isn’t it?

Why are we all bound to a system that serves us so disproportionately, often runs counter to our values, and suppresses some of our best thinking and abilities? Why is so much suffering in this world tolerated, and somehow accepted as normal?

I believe that the human spirit is essentially good, positive, loving, compassionate, creative. How is it that the world runs on a model that is, ultimately, counter to the human spirit?

How we get by in this corporate-run world is a strategy of how and what we sell of ourselves, and how good we are at that, instead of how we creatively engage with our environment and community in a shared effort to survive and thrive.

We find whatever we can about ourselves that can be used as a commodity. The ways we sell ourselves are often at odds, too, with our actual capabilities and dreams and aptitudes.

We are often forced to settle for satisfying the compassionate, creative parts of us – the best parts of us – in side gigs or charities or hobbies or not at all. For others, those best parts are submerged under addiction, depression, crime, or poverty.

Everyone is forced to participate in this system orchestrated by greed. We are forced to fund the misery of wars and give the lives of people over to them for no good reason. Children are starved, tear gassed, warehoused with tax dollars we spent time earning eight to five. We dutifully, unthinkingly serve as corporate bottom lines while those corporations run roughshod over the earth – our earth.

It’s time for a new model.

It’s encouraging to see the gilets jaunes protests in France – An impending fuel hike may be the spark, but the bottom line is oppression – and they’re just not having it.

The Occupy movement here in the US also signaled discontent with a system that’s not working for so, so many.

Around the globe, it is clear there is unrest, dissatisfaction with the way the world is run right now.

It’s time to change how the world works. It’s time to fully become the amazing, compassionate, creative people we are – to finally claim ourselves for ourselves, together. We have to somehow work towards a new model.

I’m not sure I know exactly what the new model looks like, but it’s no reason to wait. We cannot afford it. We need to move toward the world we all want – one filled with good, creative people working together, not for profit dollars and soaring stocks, but towards the highest and best for us and the earth.