Writing for the ‘many’ from the point of view of the ‘one’ presents the problem that I can’t make any blanket statements and at the same time know they are ‘true.’  I therefore suspect that living in a culture that was formed by people who had something to gain by leaving some place to travel to some place else, also had an ability to both carry their attachments within themselves and to break their physical and emotional attachment links when necessary.

Those that felt they had to leave possibly carried a grief with them at their corresponding losses for the rest of their lives.  People could not do the coming and going that we often take for granted today with our improved transportation opportunities.  In addition to those who traveled here by choice, many others came because they were kidnapped and stolen. torn from their attachments to home and kin and forced into slavery, military conscription, or forced to work for another with low wages and no hope of reprieve.

Even so, we find ourselves today living in a nation whose dominant value was the pioneering and adventurous spirit as it brought people to this new land and allowed them to settle its vast areas after they got here.  I am not a political person but I imagine that not only democracy, but also materialism, capitalism and consumerism became intimately intertwined with the value structure of our nation in part because our brains contained some particular genetic underpinnings that had the effect of making us as a nation a people with high reward motivation and high risk taking behavior.  We were geared to think ‘something new’ and had the genetic backing to accomplish what we wanted in the ‘new world.’

Looking back into our human history we know that our species spent millions of years evolving in Africa where our needs were met to the point we could eventually ‘hatch’ and leave it when climatic changes and growing population required that action of us.  Interestingly enough, parenting experts refer to the stage of an infant’s life when it begins to arch its back while sitting on its caregiver’s lap so it can force-slide itself off the lap into the ‘new world’ it wants to discover, the HATCHING stage.  It’s as definable a stage in human development as is the stage that women know of as the quickening when a mother feels her unborn infant’s movements within her womb for the first time.

So it’s not too far of a stretch for me to suggest that we follow these patterns from past into future individually as well as collectively.  Our species hatched out of Africa and migrated and traveled from that home to another, and then another, etc.  The National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html

is discovering the exact steps our species took as we moved and settled around the globe.  They are able to tell us now where and when we stopped along the way and stayed put, and where we passed through as we journeyed on.  For example, they found a man in Afghanistan whose father’s specific DNA code first appeared in that same place 40,000 years ago.  I can assure you, it wasn’t in my ancestor’s genetic code to stay in a single place 4 years, let alone 40,000!  (But even our family found itself at the end of an era I call the ‘land rush-land grab’ connected to our species’ movements around the globe, as we received probably one of the very last full titles to land granted under the US government’s Homesteading Act.)

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Each in their own way, succeeding generations of Americans have been able to satisfy what might well be our genetic ‘calling’ for more, different and better, if by no other avenue in recent history, then at least by remaining mobile enough to relocate our housing and jobs (and often our relationships), and by purchasing new and different ‘stuff’ that we have bought bought bought and consumed consumed consumed.

Taken in that light our current economic downturn simply reflects that we have reached the material end of our pioneering, enterprising, ancestral movements.  We followed a particular pathway to its end and did so with fairly smooth transitions between kinds of things we were going after.  NOW WHAT?

I suspect that we will have to pursue a new occupation as a people.  We will have to begin to take care of what we have before there’s nothing left to take care of.  We have run around in circles exercising our consumption behavior until we have very nearly filled the land space, consumed the planet’s forests and resources, poisoned our water or sucked it dry, changed our climate, made great strides in destroying the natural habitat of many species and thus also in destroying those species, broken apart our relationships, communities, families and broken our bodies by damaging  our health.  We have acted like spoiled children with no parent to guide us.

Now we are running out of a capitalistic materialist’s most prized possession — MONEY!  So now what do we do?  It is time for us to put our energy into taking care of our planet, ourselves, our children, our neighbors — of all species the world over.  It is time for us to reinstate our attachments to life rather than to the pursuit of material objects.

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I see ABUSE as always being about an imbalance of resources.  This pattern is ancient history.  We like to think that we are no longer captives of our genetic codes?  Not so.  All the given parameters of what keeps a species intact and alive is contained in its genetic memory.  Just because many of us have specific genetic combinations that were often of such vital use to a growing species does not mean that they are destined to lead the way — physically — forever.

Now we have to access a different array of abilities contained within the human gene pool and use our abilities in new and different ways.  We are a flexible and adaptive species.  It’s a new arena of discovery because the human race has reached the STOP sign of unending pursuit of MORE.

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Raising the standard of living and the quality of life for the many people of our world living in threat of starvation and death from a wide array of causes that the rest of us are not thinking about because we don’t HAVE to, does not mean that pathway to accomplishing these improvements will happen because of a MORE MORE MORE mentality.  I believe it will happen when all the HAVES make the transition to a new way of being in the world based, rather, on SHARE SHARE SHARE.

We are going to be forced to take care of the problems in this world.  We are running out of rope, and might just have enough left to hang ourselves with if we aren’t careful.  Our species has always known how to take care of business so that offspring could survive and we could ‘go on being’.  But those of us on the risk taking end of the genetic spectrum have about used up our usefulness.  We might not give up our ‘control’ of the business of taking care of the world willingly, but I suspect we will do it.

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There is an equally vast genetic pool of useful information contained within our species about ways of being in the world that are wisely preservation based, and we need to allow those people to direct the flow of traffic in a world of increasing billions of inhabitants.  They might take care of business in a different way than the rest of us are accustomed to, but if they have the answers we need to take care of the world’s problems, it’s time to listen to them and let them take what to the rest of us might appear to be — a new course of action.

Consumption and conservation are not enemies of one another.  They are part of the cycle of balance in life.  We can no longer continue to have one while ignoring the other.

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This post is dedicatecd to the polar bears.  Having grown up in Alaska, they are dear to my heart.  How much damage is ENOUGH already!

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This on the press today:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090422/ap_on_bi_ge/us_world_economy