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Our Common Dis-Ease
Human beings are born helpless and incomplete. Our entire life we remain wanting—for being alive means having needs which create desires.
"If our stomach is empty, we'll feel hungry—i.e., we'll desire food. We can't help but desire food, it's part of being physically alive..." (Kaufman, 2001, p. 366)
To stay alive—our body constantly tries to fulfil its physiological need by balancing oxygen, water, food, activity, sleep, and maintaining the correct body temperature. Without the essentials our body can survive for only
- 3 - 4 minutes without air
- 3 - 4 days without water
- 2 - 8 weeks without food
Photo credit: The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger
Our Needs Exploited
Under the disguise of what's in the best interest for us, "our" nation, "our" salvation, profiteers-, states-, and churchmen exploit our common needs and desires. Serving their own ends—acquiring power and wealth—they deprive most people of the essentials for life and their freedom.
No excuses—we have the material resources to rectify this!
- "in 2006 the world [1]spent $1.2 trillion on arms
- while food wasted in a single country could cost $100 billion ...
Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find $30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?" (Diouf, 2008 | direct link)
Our Needs Nurtured
Can primates abilities to restrain destructive urges and reconcile conflicts serve as models for us?
"There are rhesus monkeys who starve themselves rather than deliver painful shocks to others;[2]... Female bonobos step in between their males not only to stop fights, but to sow the seeds of long-term resolutions, and even to climb trees to help wounded birds fly. In all these ways, primates show the capacity most basic to moral development: the ability to put oneself in another's shoes. The sense of justice, the feeling of sympathy, the urge to share, the capacity for gratitude all start right there." (Neiman, 2008, p. 258)
Why not use this model of nature and build on it with nurture?
Our Response-Ability
CHITTAUM Community members reflect on our conditioning and conditions, then suggest actions to help ourselves, our fellow beings, and our environment. In the ACTION Circles|Forum we discuss which actions to elect to integrate into our daily lives.
The CHITTAUM Community is a Take Action! community—we weave our new understanding into our way of being."There is a deep evolutionary expectation that, as humans interact with other human beings and their environment, certain developmental responses are triggered. Some are predetermined, and some are not... Life co-evolves with its environment, with nature and nurture each reflecting and embedding the other." (OnTheCommons.org | direct link)
Anybody HOME?
Thousands of years ago our human condition was compared to
"…that of a person shot with an arrow. It is both painful and urgent. But instead of getting immediate help for our affliction, we ask for details about the bow from which the arrow was shot...We ask about many things—inconsequential things—while overlooking our immediate problem." (Hagen, 1998, p. 11)
In the 1980s I had lost faith in myself and my species—Homo sapiens [Latin = Wise Human Being]—for as William James put it, "hardly an hour passed in which I did not wish that something might be otherwise." When a friend asked: "What next?" I remembered the Concise Oxford Dictionary listed under "what next?:" "No absurdity can outdo this..."
In 1985
"The ultimate absurdity is the 3-4 trillion dollars spent since World War II to create a nuclear arsenal which, if used, will mean global suicide." (Sivard, 1985, p. 5)
In 1985 "our" governments willingly spent $550 billion on weapons but were unwilling to spend $79 billion for:
- "safe water and sanitation for all;
- nutrients to supplement staple food to prevent mental & physical handicaps;
- development of small farm holdings to eliminate food shortages;
- new schools and teacher training in areas of greatest deficiencies;
- community-based health service in rural areas to improve health care outreach;
- community care for street people. Estimates for Latin America alone indicate that there may be as many as 40 million[3] street children, many abandoned, most suffering from malnutruion;
- community projects for job creation." (Sivard, 1985, p. 33)
In 2008
Dr. Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), in his speech at the UN Food Crisis Summit in Rome—called to defuse the current world food crisis, described our human condition as still both painful and urgent.
- "in 2006 the world spent $1.2 trillion on arms
- while food wasted in a single country could cost $100 billion and
- excess consumption by the world's obese amounted to $20 billion.
Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find $30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life? Dr. Diouf asked." (Diouf, 2008 | direct link)
How did this happen Wise Human Being?
A wise old saying suggests:
"Making it so, makes it so, making it not so, makes it not so."
For those parts of our painful condition for which we human beings can be response-able it is urgent that we realize Mahatma Gandhi's words:
"We must be the change we want to see in the world."
How can we transcend the current conditions in which we are all entangled?
We need to help immediately our fellow beings who are in these painful and urgent conditions and we need to avoid repeating this exploitation and neglect in the future. Where to start?
Theodore Roosevelt suggested:
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
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