We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

The Pursuit of Happiness

Click here to access article by Gary Steven Corseri from Brave New World.

As a grownup Corseri, who is one of my favorite contemporary writers, finds that the much of the ideology he was taught as an innocent youth is not valid for living in today's world. Instead, after much life experience and contemplation, he has found other sources of inspiration that ruling class culture has mostly ignored. He warns that in this time of crisis we all must do this for our own survival:
Now in this burgeoning new millennium our old republic has lost its intellectual and moral moorings, jolting from crisis to crisis. In Jefferson’s time we were all about separating ourselves from our “Mother Country,” and we have been on a rampage ever since to define ourselves as “exceptional,” with a “manifest destiny.” And we have ransacked the planet to prove it! But, if we are to survive this century, we best learn how to reconnect—with ourselves, our global neighbors, Nature.