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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Thursday, July 22, 2004
I wonder what Abraham Lincoln would do in the face of today's challenges. Or what Jefferson would do. What would they make of this nation they helped to create and sustain? Would they consider the dreams we have for the world today worthy of the sacrifices that were made to deliver us here?
As I write that I have to ask myself, "what dreams?" What dreams do we have for America that go beyond her own protection? What thing is worth protecting whose vision only extends out to its own protection? By asking this I don't mean we ought not protect her. I mean we ought to make her into something worth protecting once again.
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
One of our visitors sent this into me today. I had never seen it before and it inspired me:
""Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans."
- Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect who spearheaded the world's fair of 1893.
I remember when we began the AIDSRides and some people wanted to focus group the idea first. I knew if we focus-grouped it that would be the end of it. It would die right there. If we said in a focus group, "hey we're thinking about doing this bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles - would you do it if we go ahead?" the timidity of the context would have taken all power out of it and no one would have been inspired enough to say "yes." Instead we said, "We're going. Call us if you want to come." Eight years later 50,000 riders had said "yes" and they raised $100 million - more money more quickly than any AIDS event has ever raised. This is the power of big plans.
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Monday, July 19, 2004
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
I believe there exists a great mass of people out there who believe that we need a transformation of our nation and our society. Not just a change. Not just a different approach to Medicare, Not just a 3% variance in defense spending. Not changes in the window dressing. A fundamental transformation.
I believe there is a great mass of people waiting for the articulation of a vision that calls for the end of hunger and the end of AIDS within the next ten years. And an impossible campaign to eradicate cancer in the same timeframe. I believe there is a great mass of people who believe we should spend much more on schools and much less on weaponry, and that the best defense is kindness and compassion and decency. I believe there is a great mass of people who want to see the roads populated with electric cars and who believe in a deep respect for our mother the earth and our father the sky, and who are ready to take big risks - attempt grand social experiements - bold ones and daring ones. People who are tired of being either frightened or bored by everything that comes out of the system's mouth. People who are ready to create a new world society. People whose own common sense tells them that the world's direction is not off by 4 degrees, but that it is off by 180 degrees.
Why don't we hear from them? Because, like most of us, they believe their ideas are stupid or that they will be laughed at. Because they believe that the intellectuals who tell them that none of this is possible are smarter than they. Because they are carried off by the great winds of mediocrity and resignation blowing from the establishment. Because they listen too much to the learned experts and not enough to their hearts. Because they are embarassed by their hopes and their dreams. But their hopes and their dreams are there nonetheless. And they can be awakened. And if they are the transformation of the world will be an idea whose time has come, and nothing will be able to stop it.
We must not accept small electoral victories, including Presidential ones, as substitutes for the magnificent transformation that seeks to emerge on the earth, simply because they are the most we dare to dream of - the most we think we will ever get. Our forefathers sought to "create the world anew." They sought the full measure of their dreams. We ought not seek anything less.
These stirrings inside of us are the seeds of that idea. A seed is the possibility of a tree. It is not a guarantee of a tree. The sleeping giant in us is the possibility of transformation, but it is not a guarantee of transformation.
We can begin by making ourselves known. By having the audacity to utter the blasphemies in our hearts - "I want AIDS ended on an impossible timeline and I think that is the real answer to the threat of terrorism," "I want the United States to end world hunger within the next five years, and to make that our top priority, even if it means we have to cut our defense budget by a third," "I don't want to wait twenty years for my electric car," "I believe this nation should dedicate itself to providing health care and education to every citizen of the world, including our own," "I believe in the power of a dream above and beyond the power of the sword or anything else."
People may think we are crazy. Do we have the courage not to care what people think? The courage it takes to say that one agrees with Michael Moore, or to bash the Right, pales in comparison to the courage it takes to say "I believe in impossible dreams, and I will not betray them, no matter how ridiculous they sound, and no matter how loudly you may laugh at them." If we were to utter our wildest dreams, we might well find that many on the Right agree with us.
The truth is, if we begin to utter these dreams, we will find that we are not alone in them - that there are in fact others - many others - who have all along believed the same thing, but felt too isolated ever to say it. If we remain silent, or timid, then others will remain silent as well, and we will all fall victim to the voice of mediocrity, which knows not silence or timidity. Imagine if mediocrity won by forfeit, because we didn't show up for the game.
Imagine if we lost the world of our dreams because we were all under the mistaken impression that we were each the only one who really wanted it.
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Sunday, July 18, 2004
Monday, July 19, 2004
Some friends recently visited Washington, D.C. Do you know that you can no longer get anywhere near the White House? You can't go gaze upon it from the wrought iron fence that surrounds it on Pennsylvania Avenue and contemplate all that has gone on inside of it anymore. Imagine Lincoln inside there during the Civil War. Kennedy making plans to go to the moon. Roosevelt crafting the New Deal. You could go stand at that fence and ponder 30 years ago when I was 13. I remember doing it. You can't go for tours anymore. You can't get anywhere near it. And you can't go into or near the Washington Monument.
Over the last thirty years since I stood at that fence and pondered we have spent nearly ten trillion dollars on weapons to make us safer. What have the trillions of dollars we have spent bought us? A prohibition on the people visiting the peoples' house? Surely this is the opposite of what we intended.
Are we not yet ready to conclude that the military context for our safety has failed us?
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Sunday, July 18, 2004
I often wondered if there were a heaven, and when I got there I would see all the people I loved who had died, what age would they be, and how would everyone reconcile that? For instance, my grandfather's great-grandfather last saw him when he was 6 years old, so he would expect to see my grandfather as a 6 year-old, but I last saw my grandfather as an 84 year-old. So would he be 84, so I would recognize him, or 6, so his great grandfather would? Similarly, if I died today, my friends now living would expect to see me as a 43 year-old when they finally get to the Pearly Gates, but my other grandfather, who died when I was 17, would expect to see me as a 17 year-old.
All of this argues for the truth that time is an illusion. It does not really exist. It is always now, we are all one, and there are an infinite number of parallel universes, so everyone who ever lived or ever will live lives in the now. I am all the ages I ever was or ever will be, as are all my ancestors and all of yours, and you too.
And now I'm going to go have an Orange Milano cookie. Right now.
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Saturday, July 17, 2004
The human body is made of of 75% water. We have all heard this. But what is water made of? Apparently it is a V-shaped molecule, made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But what are the atoms made up of? Apparently, mostly empty space, bounded on the outside by tiny electrons, which orbit around a tiny but massive nucleus. (I got all this off of a few websites, because I know nothing about it myself).
So we are mostly empty space. Matter is largely full of empty space.
All of this questioning was stimulated by a cool movie I saw entitled, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" What does it have to do with AIDS and the transformation of the world and all that stuff I usually write about? I don't know for sure, but my instincts tell me that physics and metaphysics and an appreciation of these deep mysteries are more lilely to lead us to the answers we seek than politics, law, and economics.
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