Halloween masks

We can often tell who is wearing the mask. If someone puts on a sheep mask and still waddles and quacks, you know he's a duck. 

Last week a mask of "innocence" was taken off Exxon Mobil. Knowingly contributing disastrous amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere for over 30 years and funding a movement to deny the basic science of human-caused climate change, this and other extraction companies don't have our best interests in mind. Most of us really do know this, but we pretend the mask is real. That the humans running these companies really do have hearts. That they wouldn't continue to drill if it weren't really safe. That the market will self-regulate and provide the solutions we need when we need them. 

Our Halloween masks aren't the scariest ones that we wear. When you become aware of your masks, take them off so we can be with you as you are. When you see others wearing masks, request that they take them off so we can be with them as they are. 

And most importantly, quit deluding yourselves with dangerous ideologies just because they're wearing a too obviously false Messiah mask molded with currency bills.

A super PAC worth my willingness

I "care" a lot. 

Initially this "caring" showed up as an anxiety that there's a grim future out there for my kids and that I'm powerless to change it. I hung out in anxiety for about six months. 

Then I got that my fear was solely the result of a negative fantasy of the future, and that the fear helps me avoid being responsible for doing something, an excuse to avoid being uncomfortable. 

This week while talking with students I referenced climate change denier Ted Cruz and the super PAC donation of $15 million by a couple billionaire brothers who frack in Texas.* I said that if I were offered $15 million to deny climate change that I would do it too. I don't really know if I would. Probably. Maybe not?

It's now not out of fear that I am taking actions for the future. I may screw up as a dad and yell too much or boss too much or guilt too much sometimes, but I will squeeze myself through whatever ontological obstacles arise between me and giving everything I've got for a family, community, society, and world worthy of the purity of heart, mind, and body of these holy creatures I get to call my kids. My comfort isn't worth selling out on that. 

I "care" a lot. But caring doesn't create a brighter future. Actions do that. 

*  http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/25/politics/ted-cruz-wilks-brothers/. Fracking, an example of extreme extraction due to its immediate impact on the environment and human water supplies, is a "cleaner" option than oil because natural gas emits half the CO2 of other fossil fuels. However, fracking is no transition fuel because it unavoidably releases waste methane into the atmosphere, which is a more potent green house gas than CO2.

Why I want to write

Instead of writing tonight I'm going to distract myself for 20 minutes on Netflix and then go to bed. I don't know what to write.

But I know why I want to write tonight.  

I want to write tonight to connect a bigger, necessary movement with your life. I want to piece words together in a way that leaves you impacted: moved by the scars our way of life leaves on us, our families' future, the rest of life on the planet; inspired to act to fulfill on a vision for a different kind of future. 

But I dont know what to say to cause that. If you were more poor, or if you were more directly impacted, like if you lived in the Niger delta, in southern Louisiana, downriver from the Alberta tar sands, in smog-filled Beijing, or downriver from open pit mines in West Virginia, it might not take as much effort. 

Here, where we are, our lives are less connected to the plight of our own and other species. At least on the surface. We are, of course, still deeply impacted, much more than we've been educated to acknowledge. 

We in middle class America can relate much more with Carl Sagan's pale blue dot than with poor brown people. The pale blue dot is where we hike, what we see from airplane seats, what we watch on Discovery. 

But it's also what we breathe, it's what we drink, it's what we eat, it's where we live. I'd rather all of us have clean air, clean water, and poison-free food than cheap air fares and high tech gadgets (and I love cheap tickets and Apple products). 

So I'm going to watch a show now and hope that inspiring, effective words come more easily tomorrow. 

A resurrection into heaven

I don't believe there's a heaven we can reawaken into after our bodies die. But I do believe in death and rebirth and that there's a heaven waiting for us.

If we give up our lives for the sake of what's right, they will be saved, we will be born again. The heaven we're called to is always in our midst. Right here, right now.*

A friend Nate** gave a sermon on the resurrections we go through during our lives, the death of old ways of being and our birth into new ways of being. An angry father becoming a father with compassion and patience. A self-focused kid becoming a generous friend. Ontological transformations of individuals...and societies.

That's all this takes.

We only need be willing to give up the view we've been born into, that this is the way, this is the only way, this is the ordained way. There's another way.

I had a great talk with my dad today, and I told him that I'm now seeing that there's another future really possible for us, one worth fighting for, and that we're the ones to get us there. It's not the likely future given our trajectory, and it's a bright one, a good one.

I told him I don't know what that future looks like, and he called me on it. Sure you know what it looks like, at least mostly, he said. And he's right.

Clean air, clean water. All people healthy and satisfied. Communities thriving together. Life respected and free. People treating each other as they'd like to be treated.

What if the heaven we've learned about isn't a place, but instead a state of being? What if the arrival time isn't after physical death, but as soon as we're willing?

It just takes a resurrection, and that begins with a willingness to see that this destructive life we live is not the only way.

* Matthew 16:25 and Luke 17:21.
** Here's a source of writings, art, and blog posts by Nate and his friends called the Ecotheo Review, "Enlivening faith and ecological communities through writing, arts, and education."

We are the someone

I was posting another environmentalist article to Facebook tonight, hoping to open more eyes to our global dilemma. And again I felt that lost feeling from not really knowing what to do next. 

Having two little boys at home, I love that they need me. My wife and I have trained ourselves and them to have confidence to figure things out, but I still love to be needed, and I love fulfilling their needs. 

The scientists and engineers we hope will solve the problems for us, the politicians we hope will sustain us through transition, the teachers who always had the solution to the tough problems, the God who has given us free will and skills to survive, the mommy and daddy who were always there for us before, none of them are coming. 

No one is coming. 

We are the someone we've been waiting for. We are smart enough, creative enough, thoughtful and generous and compassionate enough, and if anyone gets us out of this, it's us. 

For years I've been feeling stuck, like I'm at the edge of a canyon with my kids, about to be pushed off the cliff by industrialization. And I know there's a new world just across the canyon, obscured by a hazy lack of creative vision, but there. And I have been desperately looking around for a bridge that should just be there. 

There's no bridge to the other side. We've got to build it. 

This blog is an organization of my training and skill building. We are going to build a bridge.