We're failing capitalism

We all know that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick... But there's equally strong evidence that a kind of junk values has taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.

- Johann Hari, in conversation with Sam Harris

We're Failing Capitalism: Part 4 of 5
I used to personify capitalism as an entity with intentionality (malicious intentionality, in fact). But capitalism is just a collection of ideas, and we've adulterated some of the best parts. In this next segment of the series, we'll be looking at a handful of specific ways in which we're failing capitalism.

The five parts to the series are:

1. The source of the world's problems?
2. Some of capitalism's successes
3. The winning formula
4. We're failing capitalism
5. The way things are. Or not.

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Capitalism (with its partner, science) has played an instrumental role in making this one of the safest, healthiest, and most comfortable periods in human history for the average person. However, the canaries have started dying; this prosperity has been built on such an unsustainable foundation that global socio-environmental dilemmas are imminent.

Source.

Capitalism is an easy scapegoat - it appears that those who seem to have benefited most from this seemingly exploitative and unsustainable system are perfect poster children for greed and decadence. Just as easy as it is for some to call the poor lazy, we can blame capitalism for all of our societal and environmental issues. In this context, the dissolution of capitalism then looks like quite the panacea.

Source.

But maybe capitalism isn't to blame for all our problems. In fact, perhaps capitalism isn't to blame at all. What if it's just how we do capitalism that's problematic?

We're failing capitalism with:

• Negative externalities
• Exploitation of people and the environment
• Inequality
• Disassociation between consumption and production

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Externalities - social and environmental debt

One of the most important rules of capitalism is to pay back debts to those who invested. As discussed in part 3 of this series, The Winning Formula, capitalism could not have succeeded if debts were not repaid. Investors have always financed the expedition (research and development), prototyping, production, and more with the expectation and trust that their investments would be returned (and with profit).

Unfortunately, social and environmental debt never make it into ledgers - they are externalities. An externality is "a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved" (Oxford dictionary).

Source.

So one of the foundational principles of capitalism, trust in the return on investment through the repayment of debts and dividends, is fundamentally not honored through the existence of social and environmental externalities. How? Because social and environmental debt will have to be repaid. We increasingly pay for carbon pollution with superstorm cleanup; we pay for worker exploitation with the various growing costs of inequality, such as war, aid programs, refugee projects, etc; we pay for superbug threats with suffering and higher health care costs.

The escalating evidence of the impacts of climate change, pollution, resource depletion, antibiotic resistance, and species extinction are highlighting that we can no longer view environmental debt as an externality to never be repaid. We will have to repay that debt, and the longer we delay, the more interest accrues.

Interesting note: those who say we can't afford to deal with those issues now are ignoring that the price goes up the longer we avoid dealing with them. We will pay for it - when is up to us.

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Everyone is supposed to benefit

During the 19th century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. 

- Slavery's Capitalism 

I'm grateful for the many successes of capitalism. From my current vantage point, my previous willingness to join a movement to overthrow capitalism was a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

What makes it so evident that there are problems with capitalism is that regardless of overall metrics, many people aren't benefiting. In previous posts in this series, I only mentioned the exploitation of people as part of the path that led our society to where we are today.

Source.

I think it would be immoral/unethical to ignore those past and current transgressions against mostly brown and black people as evidence that this system is flawed and it needs fixing. Slavery and sweatshops are two examples of pretty effective ways to optimize profits at the expense of the well-being of millions of people, and this is just one of many practices that demonstrate we're failing capitalism.

I think that it's not okay to shrug off the exploitation on which our current prosperity was and continues to be built. We don't need to feel guilt or shame, but we should let it lead us in a more equitable and ethical direction.

...if the aggregate goal of human striving isn’t merely to maximize aggregate profit but to achieve a measure of happiness and sustainability for the vast majority, well then, perhaps we have a problem. Several problems in fact. 

- Igor Greenwald, writing for Forbes 

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 Maybe the system is doing well, but it might not feel like it

The concentration of income in the hands of the rich might not just mean a more unequal society, economists believe. It might mean less stable economic expansions and sluggish growth.

- Annie Lowry, writing for NYT 

Our more subtle failure in implementing capitalism lies in the fact that despite whatever metrics we use to show that the system is doing well, many people don't experience benefiting from the system. Consider the perspective of many U.S. working class people that our system is so inequitable and flawed that their vote for president in 2016 was a vote to "break the system." Their experience is valid.

Income inequality, in the U.S. anyway, is at nearly unfathomable numbers. It's not only a demonstration of a failure for the majority of how we do capitalism, it also points to a weakening of the system itself.

Even though statistics rarely serve to change a person's behaviors, here's an interesting set of statistics published in early 2016 by Oxfam:

Source.

And here are a few more statistics brought up in a great conversation between Johann Hari and Sam Harris, #142 - Addiction, Depression, and a Meaningful life. The key idea here is that social crises in wealthier countries (like the opioid crisis in the U.S.) are the result of deeper existential pains experienced by average people in capitalist societies:

• More U.S. citizens die from opioids each year than who died in the Vietnam War
• 1 in 3 middle aged women are on chemical anti-depressants
• 1 in 10 13-yr old boys are on a stimulant drug
• 30% of children in the foster care system are on at least one psychiatric drug
• Suicide is significantly rising (24% increase between 1999 and 2014)

Johann Hari argues that, like the 18th century gin craze in England, the opioid crisis isn't the fault of opioids. Instead, it's the natural result of important social and psychological needs not being met by the status quo of survival in our society. (Source.)

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Dissociation

The problem with evil is that in real life it is not necessarily ugly. It can look very beautiful...That is why it is so difficult to resist Satan's temptations.

- Yuval Harari, 21 Lessons 

One of the expectations of capitalism is that it responds to the consumer. The market is supposed to shift in response to how people utilize their purchasing power. 

In actuality, however, the consumer has become so disassociated from the means of production that we mostly have no idea where our products come from, who worked to create them, how they got to us, what materials and processes went into them, and what will happen to them once we're done with it. 

This is a BIG deal for capitalism. When the product was manufactured across town from us by people we could see and meet, we could see the deforestation, taste it in the water, smell it in the air, and find ourselves incapable of ignoring those means of production. Our purchasing power could, theoretically, shift the market.

When the mining, processing, manufacturing, packaging, and shipping by people we can't picture occurs so far from our line of sight (half the world away for most of our products), our purchasing power is much less likely to reflect what our actual choice might have been in the matter. The invisible hand has no sight, taste, or hearing to true the system.

Capitalism depends on "level, transparent markets to work well." (Source.)

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In summary, I think that the main failings in our implementation of capitalism are the following:

• Negative externalities
• Exploitation of people and the environment
• Inequality
• Disassociation between consumption and production

I hope that this has been worthwhile reading for you - stay tuned for the conclusion of the series in part 5: The way things are. Or not. Please leave a comment if you have anything to say! 

The winning formula

What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.

- Yuval Harari, Sapiens    

We're Failing Capitalism: Part 3 of 5

This is the third part in a five-part series on how we're failing capitalism. In this post we'll look at the big ideas that makes capitalism tick.

The five parts to the series are:

1. The source of the world's problems?
2. Some of capitalism's successes
3. The winning formula
4. We're failing capitalism
5. The way things are. Or not.

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Bridges of shared values

The school where I taught during the last seven years had a politically conservative student body, generally. A student dressed up as failed Obamacare for halloween one year, numerous computers sported Trump stickers, and just about the only Hillary reference was "Hillary for Prison" on a handful of computers and t-shirts.

While I found that frustrating at times because my personal politics aren't aligned with those, I am very grateful to have been challenged in my thinking and to have grown to appreciate the humanity and logic of the opposing view. It's because I worked with and taught libertarians, non-Trump conservatives, and Trump supporters that I feel that I've come to a more sustainable perspective on many things, including capitalism. We don't need free market ideologues to become environmentalists to create a better future, but we may need to build bridges of shared values so that we can reach solutions faster together.

Capitalism's winning formula

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. 

- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams 

The following sections will detail out what we're looking at as Capitalism's winning formula. There are two important notes to point out up front:

• This discussion is NOT based on economics; it's based on the underlying human traits that make the economics possible. 
• While more modern examples of the following ideas are available, it has been much easier to present these ideas in a somewhat book report form on Yuval Harari's Sapiens. The majority of these details and ideas are his, and I am grateful for his clear and educational writing style.

Capitalism's winning formula:

1. Envision a rich future. 
2. Invest in exploratory research (science).
3. Invest in the production of something worthwhile that benefits the consumer.
4. Pay back your creditors.
5. End up richer.

Economic History of the World (from Sapiens)

None of this formula is possible without a willingness to envision, a willingness to explore, a willingness to trust, and a stable judicial system willing protect authentic contracts. The state provides the stable judicial system, but the rest is up to any of us.

Envisioning a richer future

In the late 1480s, Columbus requested that the Kind of Portugal finance an expedition westward across the Atlantic to discover a trade route to India. Columbus' vision was that such a route existed and that there would be a big return on the King's investment. The King said no - his advisors told him that he wasn't likely to get a good return on that investment. 

So Columbus went to the new King and Queen of newly formed Spain, and they also said no. Their advisors also thought that it would be a waste of money. A few years later, though, they agreed to finance his voyage. They didn't really expect him to even return, but the opportunity to potentially one-up Portugal made it worth a try. 

The age of imperialism thus gained serious momentum starting with a vision of a future that would pay back more than it would cost to get there.

Someone has to pay for it

The first English settlements in North America were established in the early 17th century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company, and the Massachusetts Company.

- Yuval Harari, Sapiens

Although in school I learned about different companies participating in the imperialist expansion of European nations during the age of exploration (like the East India Company), I've always had it in my mind that it was the governments of the nations themselves that did the financing. While this was sometimes true, as in the case of Columbus, it was much more common that exploration was privately funded with the hope of high returns.

Until the age of exploration, wealth was a fairly fixed thing - a nation either had it or took it from someone else who had it. Production increased globally throughout time, but this was due to demographic expansion; per capita increase did not really occur (Sapiens). People willing to risk financing (ad)ventures changed this.

Exploration (i.e., Science)

The discovery of America was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution. It not only taught Europeans to favor present observations over past traditions, but the desire to conquer America also obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at breakneck speed.

- Yuval Harari, Sapiens   

I often think of technology when I think of the Scientific Revolution. The development of scientific processes led to new technology, and technology was the magic that manifested control. But scientific knowledge itself can be fortifying and empowering, and scientific knowledge is a major key to capitalism's success.

In 1500, the average person living in China was wealthier than the average person living in Europe, and "in 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy" (Sapiens). China had the world’s largest fleet, both in size and number of ships, and China had explored the coastline of South Asia all the way to eastern Africa prior to Columbus' voyage. Admiral Zheng He explored oceans, but he never conquered or colonized.

Chinese ship compared to Columbus' (source)

Now consider that Columbus' contemporary, Vasco de Gama, circumnavigated Africa around 1500 to reach a direct route to India. By 1850, the British had control of India, using about 180,000 linguists, scientists, troops, diplomats, business people, and families to subjugate 300,000,000 Indians. How was it possible for 180,000 foreigners not much better equipped technologically than the locals, to colonize and rule nearly 2000 times their own number?

The British empire knew India better than most Indians.

Expeditions were financed to develop the fields of linguistics, botany, geography, and history. "Without such knowledge, it is unlikely that a ridiculously small number of Britons could have succeeded in governing, oppressing, and exploiting so many hundreds of millions of Indians for two centuries" (Sapiens). And exploit they did. Just one example: 10 million Bengalis, a third of the population India's richest province, died as a direct result of British policies.

I report this one of very many available stories to not only implicate science in the exploitations of imperialism, but to also highlight the foundational role that science plays in capitalism. Countries were providing the protection for these expeditions in the form of military participation, but joint stock companies were providing the capital.

The key factor was that the plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a similar mindset. Both scientist and conqueror began by admitting ignorance - they both said, 'I don't know what's out there.'

- Yuval Harari, Sapiens    

Trust

Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. It's founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present resources. A host of new and wonderful opportunities open up if we can build things in the present using future income.

- Yuval Harari, Sapiens   

Funding in the age of exploration, just like funding now, depends on trust. Trust that the returns will be greater than the investment. Trust in the vision of a richer, brighter future. Trust in the systems that ensure integrity.

One of the most controversial, ideological, and powerful perspectives provided by Adam Smith on capitalism also relies on trust: "by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself."

[The rich] are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, my emphasis

And to provide a final example of the need for trust in the capitalist system, consider Smith's take on the rule of law. Just as the Dutch won the trust of financial systems by repaying loans on time and by enforcing private property rights, Smith argued that justice and the rule of law were necessary to ensure the proper functioning of the economic system. The rule of law was a system that we could trust to ensure contracts were honored.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, please comment. I hope you'll visit again to read more!

Some of capitalism's successes

I expected the newly elected Labour government to withhold British support for this foul war [Vietnam]...and when this expectation was disappointed I began, along with many, many of my contemporaries, to experience a furious disillusionment with "conventional" politics. 

- Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22

We're Failing Capitalism: Part 2 of 5

This is the second part in a five-part series on how we're failing capitalism. Although I've been quite willing in the past to blame capitalism for the world's problems, in this post we'll look at some of the measurable successes of humanity's application of capitalism. The five parts to the series are:

1. The source of the world's problems?
2. Some of capitalism's successes
3. The winning formula
4. We're failing capitalism
5. The way things are. Or not.

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Aligning values

I was raised Catholic, went to Church every Sunday of my youth, and I prayed a lot, off and on again, as a kid and young man. I read an illustrated Bible as a 3rd and 4th grader, and I think I was pretty engaged during religion class in my Catholic elementary school.

Somewhere I read or heard that the best prayer we can say to God is a prayer to become a better person. So in 6th or 7th grade, when I started to notice that I was kind of a bully, I made that prayer a mantra. I remember saying it in my head as I walked across Cooks Lane to play touch football at recess. I said it to myself as I fell asleep at night and when I woke up in the morning.

In early college I met a pretty cool Civil Engineering grad student named Luke, from Korea, who, with his wife Maria, led 1-on-1 bible studies with students. I really enjoyed those conversations. He would pick a verse from the new testament, bring in some old testament, and I really liked the practical considerations of some of Jesus' teachings. To this day I aim to live by some of those teachings as a useful philosophy, despite my current atheism.

Hypocrisy

When Bush was appointed President by the Supreme Court in 2000, his administration's environmental and economic policies weren't surprising. But for 20-year-old me, the seeming hypocrisy of a "born-again Christian" was a bit surprising, and I felt frustrated and a bit disillusioned. 

However, the administration's economic, immoral, and duplicitous push for the war against Iraq was another level. When 58% of the seemingly better party, the Democrats, also voted to authorize military action against Iraq, I was looking for another solution. The International Socialists were there with an answer that seemed to work with my personal values (until it didn't).

Capitalism's successes

Since then, I've been mostly unwilling to concede that capitalism has had any of the positive impacts for which people often acknowledge it. Social, educational, environmental, and health problems, as well as exploitations of all kinds, have been capitalism's fault; there's no room for success against all that. Yet....

What follows is a very brief overview of some AMAZING global statistics from the last 200 years. Any one of these charts should be enough of a glaring success for humanity that it knock me off my chair if I'm paying attention. Seriously - the significance of these improvements to global health and wealth is staggering from a human wellness perspective, and capitalism is in large part to thank for these results.

In the following bullets, if a statement lacks a reference, it has come from Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world - and things are better than you think. I highly recommend that you spend just 10 minutes playing with the graphs on gapminder.org - they're certainly a source of hope and excitement for me, and they're fun. Also, you can click on the charts below to make them bigger.

*** The authors of Factfulness and the creators of gapminder.org have committed themselves to educating the world on its current state, not as our teachers taught it to us decades ago. A lot has happened in the last few decades. ***

I agree with the author of Factfulness that it's important to be two-minded about these numbers: while they demonstrate positive impacts that are worthy of praise, the world's still got problems that need solving.

Disclaimer - these results are not solely due to capitalism's impact on the world. Some people, including a former me, would even claim that these results are in spite of capitalism, not because of it. As we'll see in the final post in this series, I think that capitalism's successful impact in these areas is in spite of us, not the other way around.

Health

• All countries in the world have a higher life expectancy than the highest life expectancy in 1800. Just 200 years ago, all countries had a life expectancy of 40 years or less; today, only 7 countries have life expectancies below 60 years old (and they're still above 50!).

Source.

• In 1980, around 20% of all kids in the world received vaccinations. In 2016, 86% of all kids in the world received vaccinations.

Source.

• Global child mortality was 18.2% in 1960. In 2015, it was 4.3%.

Source.

Wealth

• 200 years ago, 85% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today, around 10% of the world's population (800 million people) lives in extreme poverty.

Source.

• The vast majority of the world lives within the same standards of living that the US and Western Europe experienced in the 1950s.

Source.

• In the early 1980s, China's poverty rate was around 80%. Less than 40 years later, it's around 2%.

You've got to play with the charts on the gapminder.org site.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, please comment. I hope you'll visit again to read more!

The source of the world's problems?

We're Failing Capitalism: Part 1 of 5

This is the first part in a five-part series on how we're failing capitalism. In this first part we'll be looking at how I came to view capitalism as the source of the world's problems. (I no longer see it this way.) The five parts to the series are:

1. The source of the world's problems?
2. Some of capitalism's successes
3. The winning formula
4. We're failing capitalism
5. The way things are. Or not.

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In 2002 the US began arguing for the need to invade Iraq, and this seemed wrong to me. I was studying at the University of Maryland, and posted on a bulletin board outside the Physics building was a flyer for "Peace Forum", a meeting to engage in conversations about the possible war.

I went to my first Peace Forum meeting one evening, and it felt good and inspiring to be around other people (there were about 20 total) who thought the war seemed unethical. I kept going back to Peace Forum. I'm mildly sad now thinking that at a school with over 30,000 students, only 20 people showed up to these meetings. But we weren't the only ones opposed to the war.

Here's a letter to the editor I wrote to the student newspaper, The Diamondback, in December of 2002 during my Peace Forum days (there shouldn't be a period at the end of the first sentence in the second paragraph):

I asked a fellow Peace Forum member one day about the "ISO" button on her jacket - the International Socialist Organization. I had heard of socialism, but I didn't really know what it was. So I went to a meeting. And I kept going back.

Source.

The meetings were educational, giving me a perspective on history and current events I had never before learned or been introduced to. We had discussions, guest presenters, workshops, teach-ins, and book loaning and swapping. I learned about revolutions from around the world that I didn't know had happened, about the struggles of people I never knew existed, and about ways to organize the education of others.

And the best part was that they had figured out the source of the world's problems: capitalism.

If only we got rid of capitalism and welcomed capitalism's natural successor: socialism. If only we could destroy the profit motive, people would have the space to be motivated by altruism, equality, health, and respect.

I officially joined the organization a month or so later. An overthrow of the US government had started to sound good:

Our organization participates in many different struggles for justice and liberation today, while working toward a future socialist society, free of all exploitation and oppression, and built on the principles of solidarity and democracy. (Source.)

It sounded good until I realized that our chapter leader wasn't talking about a peaceful revolution by changing hearts and minds. No, he was talking about an armed revolution. I thought that was silly then, and I think it's silly now, but also dangerous.

So I stopped going to meetings and workshops, and I stopped calling myself a socialist. I was no longer a card-carrying member of a socialist organization.

But Capitalism was for me still the source of the world's problems.

A cherry tree approach to consumption

Source.

Population size
Last year sometime, a colleague of mine excitedly said, "Okay, I think I know the source of our environmental problems: population size." He'd been talking with one of our science teachers who, at the time, thought the same and backed it up with numbers.

Consumption
Human population size isn't the problem, I told him. It's consumption. As the world's population tries to consume to the standard set by the U.S. and 'the West', the global ecosystem is weakening. On the contrary, Eaarth could sustain many more billions of people if all of us consumed much less than 'the West' currently consumes per person. Consumption means waste, and waste is bad.

It's a design problem
But then I read Cradle to Cradle and I came to believe that

Humanity doesn't have a consumption problem, 

we've got a design problem. 

Take the cherry tree:

Thousands of blossoms create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually fall onto the ground, take root, and grow. Who would look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and complain, How inefficient and wasteful! The tree makes copious blossoms and fruit without depleting its environment. Once they fall on the ground, their materials decompose and break down into nutrients that nourish microorganisms, insects, plants, animals, and soil. Although the tree actually makes more of its product than it needs for its own success in an ecosystem, this abundance has evolved (through millions of years of success and failure or, in business terms, R&D), to serve rich and varied purposes. In fact, the tree’s fecundity nourishes just about everything around it. 

- McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle  

No such thing as waste

In Nature, there's no such thing as waste, as demonstrated by the cherry tree. In human production, however, waste is perceived as an inevitable by-product. Engineers and economists seek to minimize waste, whether it's unused resources or toxic effluent.

A cherry tree's response to consumption would be to eliminate the concept of waste, and "to design things - products, packaging, and systems - from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist" (Cradle to Cradle).

Re-imagining our system
In the U.S. where most rivers and streams "can't support healthy aquatic life" (source), what if we built facilities whose processes, products, and by-products nourished the ecosystem instead of degrading it?

What if being sustainable weren't our goal, 

and instead our goal were to flourish?

Changing paradigms is not naive
I know, I know, I know. It's hopelessly naive to think that we can transform our resource extraction, materials processing, product manufacturing, and transportation methods based on no-waste design models. I think so too.

However, the promise of a life of abundance, fulfillment, and comfort that a shift in our design paradigm would hold for us and our children's children's children's children is worth it.

What they won't care about in 80 years is how naive we thought our ideas were - especially if the ideas give hope that people in 80 years have easy access to water, healthy food, fulfilling relationships, beautiful shelter, and satisfying labor.

Imagine what a world of prosperity and health in the future will look like, and begin designing for it right now. . . This is going to take us all, and it is going to take forever. 

-  McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle 

Pointing forward

We were weary of the finger-pointing we witnessed in environmental activism, which we felt drained human dignity and, frankly, slowed down what could be magnificent progress in designing a healthier world.

- William McDonough and Michael Braungart, The Upcycle

My initial plan for this post was to describe how I've recently distinguished this past year as a somber time for me. At nearly any given moment I could've likely thought my way into feeling a number of ways:

• Sad that some of the things I care about (like human and environmental health, for example) will likely regress under the Trump administration.
• Angry that Trump gets to win when I judge him to be a self-righteous, self-ingratiating, arrogant, and duplicitous bully.
• Daunted that the best solution to what I deem are our problems is to improve education nationally.
• Frustrated that the only seemingly effective action I can take is to vote.
• Annoyed by my judgment that Trump's win was a win for ignorance and greed.

In response to all those feelings, I continually read my feeds from like-minded people who articulated the issues more clearly than I could even think them. I retweeted and shared and complained (and tried to show off how accurate my learned analyses were). 

I claimed that I would never call him "President Trump". Yes, I sanctimoniously asserted that Trump is not worthy of the title.

Well, he's our president, President Trump.

I couldn't bring myself to start that post because I didn't have a punchline in mind. I outlined all the parts, but I couldn't tie it up with a sufficient ending, a personal stepping stone into a more inspired future. All the punchlines I could think of were just more of the same - complaints, frustrations, cynicism poorly veiled in unconvincing optimism.

Recently I was visited at school by a former student who is now in his third year of college. We get together to talk a couple times each year, and we both really enjoy our conversations and e-mail correspondence. (He's inspired a few of the posts on this blog.) We talked about his classes and spiritual growth. When he asked me about my classes and spiritual growth, I said that this school year has been challenging for me and that it recently clicked that it's related to the past year in politics and my school being a pretty politically conservative place.

He asked a couple insightful questions that had me own my experience and my future more than I have been willing to in a while. He reminded me in the conversation of an insight from a course I took that straightens me up each time I remember it:

Whenever I feel stuck, frustrated, or angry, 
I'm avoiding being responsible.

I've been pointing my finger at others over the past year. It's Trump, it's his supporters, it's our education system, it's consumerism, it's racism, it's greed. I've been thinking that I'm stuck, that we're headed into a bleak future, and that my kids and people and life that I care about will ultimately suffer for it. All the while I neglected to foster a version of the unwritten future that actually inspires me.

Reacting is not creative. 
Resistance is not progress.

My willingness to point my finger at others is what left me in the seemingly uncomfortable, though quite safe and common, position of being at the effect of it all. What my friend had me see was that there's another person I can point to to claim responsibility: me. 

How he did it was to ask me what I'm doing to create the world I want. Through the dreary filter of 'This is wrong' I wasn't pointing forward to a world I want at all - I was only indignantly pointing at other people around me.

I wasn't pointing forward. Forward to a version of the world that inspires me. Forward to a world worth living for. Forward to a world I get to excitedly, passionately, gratifyingly give my life to.

Forward to a world where the children of all species are acknowledged, respected, and given the best possible chance at a healthy and fulfilling life.

"Everyone is interested in a cleaner, healthier world."

- WM and MB, The Upcycle