Q & A

An ad agency in town is putting together an anthology called American Dreamers. A variety of people invited to respond to 3 questions. I was invited.

The questions for you are:

1) With the future seeming more and more pessimistic, what  is your dream for the future and how will it make things brighter?

2) What social changes excite you the most and make you hopeful for tomorrow?

3) What steps can we be taking now to change the future?

So I replied as follows:

 1. My dream for the future centers on EDUCATION, esp K-12. We would teach a generation how to THINK CLEARLY, and I believe the basis of this is a sound education in the sciences and math. The arts can be emphasized later. Our failure here has been to end up with an electorate that doesn't know what evidence is or why one thing should be believed and not another. The late great Oregon senator Wayne Morse once remarked that the best foreign policy is an educated citizenry because only then does democracy work. He was right. And at the moment we don't have one.

2. The social change that excites me the most are the social consequences of the digital revolution, that now people around the world can connect instantaneously, that voices that never had audience before now become heard around the world. I am hopeful that the world's peoples will have voice to counter the increasing power of the international corporate elite. I am hopeful that many Americans lend their voices to this cause.

3. Here are two steps that would change the future, one short range and essential, the other longer range and political. 1. Treat and respond to Global Warming as the threat to planetary life that it is. Nothing else matters if life as we know it disappears. We need leadership to declare a Planetary Emergency. 2. America must own up to its past political sins: from genocide against American Indians to greedy and arrogant wars (named or not) of global empire, we have caused many of the world's present problems. We need to admit it, own up to it, and institutionalize both, in an annual Day of National Mourning.