Schism

Preview - Reasons For Hope - Introduction part 1

Reasons For Hope

Introduction

If you’re like most of us, you wake up in the morning, eat a quick breakfast and drive to work.  If you’re lucky, you work at a job that gives you a sense of satisfaction, with co-workers that lighten the load and provide a sense of community.  Hopefully, your boss makes things better instead of worse.  At lunch you might eat fast food that you know isn’t very good for you or maybe you try to have something light because you’re on a new diet or are trying to save a few dollars.

After finishing the day at work, you start the drive back home.  Traffic is probably heavy, with long delays that cause you to pull out your hair and curse at the other drivers.  The time in the car might be compounded by taking your kids to and from the activities that you hope will make them happier, smarter and stronger.  When you arrive home, you put together a dinner and eat, then try to relax for just a bit before going to sleep. 

And through all of it, from morning to bed, you feel tired.

Like most of us, you’re tired not just because of work or because something in your life feels out of balance.  You’re tired because throughout the day you have been bombarded, assaulted by an unending wave of bad news.  While you ate breakfast, the newspaper or radio told you stories of the latest political scandal or economic disaster brought on by some CEO that walked away with millions of dollars.  At work your friends gathered to discuss the latest terrorist bombing and threat that some country might develop nuclear weapons.  Driving home, you listened to a broadcast about a super-storm that destroyed part of the world or the suffering caused by a horrible drought.  And at home, the news stations were focused on the spread of drug resistant disease and the rising rates of heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

You’re tired because you hear, all the time, how bad things are in our world.  You might think about the good-old days and wonder where we went wrong, wonder how hatred and violence and disease could have spread so widely, so quickly.  You wonder about the economic hole that we’ve dug ourselves into.  You worry about your own health.

If you’re like most of us, you begin to worry that things are only getting worse.  You worry that there is no hope that things will get better, not for you, not for your children.

But that isn’t true.  What is true is that we are getting more compassionate, more knowledgeable about the world around us.  The problems we face are actually getting better instead of worse.  But it’s not your fault that you have been trapped into the conclusion that the future is very dim, because that is all you hear.

What you don’t know when you hear all this bad news is that you have been given much less than half the story.

To get the bigger picture, to hear more of the story, let’s step back.  Way back.  Take yourself back one thousand years to Cahokia, a city of approximately 20,000, then the largest city north of Central America.  Like today, you live in a neighborhood and probably work in a specialized field.  Sales, manufacturing and farming are common professions.  Your family lives close by and grandparents are often babysitters while the parents work.

But while much of life sounds similar, your house in Cahokia is made from a frame of timber with walls of woven grass.  Floors are bare dirt or are sparsely covered with rugs that are similar to the walls.  Anyone who has lived through a winter in the Midwestern United States will know just how poorly these shelters or clothing made of animal skins would prevent frostbite or keep your family safe from hypothermia.

Though the area surrounding your city is well farmed, all of the local game has been hunted to extinction and the land is not as fertile as it was years ago.  If you aren’t rich or part of the small ruling class, you are almost always hungry.  Your children might be so malnourished that their growth has been permanently stunted and they may suffer from severe anemia.  The water you drink is far from clean and carries diseases that periodically ravage the city.