We need Gandhi again, talking this time before congress. We need Mother Teresa in Gaza and Jimmy Carter outside Asheville. We need prophets again, we need Buddha again. Where are the Saints? What happened to people of character in positions of power?
We need leaders who resign when they know it’s for the better of the nation and we need a public that forgives.
We need the lyrical prose of early Dylan and the bluntness of Marvin Gaye and Gill Scott Heron. We need Doonesbury—the early stuff. We need Mad Magazine and leaders with self-effacing senses of humor. Late night hosts lambasted Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Clinton, George HW and George W Bush, Obama, and not only did they rarely complain, they often laughed along. We need the world to see we can make fun of each other without taking it personally.
We need to eradicate diseases—Cancer, Parkinson’s, MS, CP, trump AIDS.
We need to slow down, walk more without the noise, hear again the geese out in the fields, out on the marsh, notice again the nearly silent movement of water at the river at night, the moon hanging out there, the same moon seen by Buddha, Mohammed, Christ, the same moon seen by runaway slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp, and abolitionists on Martha’s Vineyard. The same moon we searched for above Spirit Lake when none of this worldly matter mattered at all; the one that rested out in Oregon’s Pacific.
The same moon seen by Galileo. Alexander the Great. Homer. Joe DiMaggio. Francis of Assisi.
There’s not nearly enough honesty anymore, too many sins of omission, too much unnecessary hurt. Among nations, among neighbors, among friends and lovers too afraid to be honest, too afraid to let go. The children of Gaza, of the Congo, of Sudan, of Appalachia, of the Bronx, of Medellin, need food, water, love, less bombing at night, fewer landmines, more milk.
This world is a disappointment. Humanity had the potential to create a world of sheer amazement with problems solved in collaborative unison; instead, engineers build larger weapons of mass destruction, more efficient guns; educated people in medicine and technology create nerve gases and annihilating bombs, they warn us about the potential apocolyptic nature of AI yet go on developing it anyway.
We should be required to walk along a river in silence, to sit and listen to the wind in the aspens, to spend more time in coffeeshops talking to strangers.
Do children even study Gandhi anymore? Martin Luther King? Schweitzer? Confucius? We need philosophy taught in sixth grade and ethics taught in first. We need to stop running against each other. We need more people to act like my mom did. She was kind and caring, and we could use more of her kind. Be like Mom.
We need a full moon and some chairs, and we need to sit around with wine and pass around a book of philosophical quotes and read and talk about them, and then pass around our favorite Far Side cartoons, and then go for a walk on the beach in silence where we can just be together and pretend the entire world is also out there walking in silence just up the sand a ways.
