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Project yourself into the future
Various filmmakers, futurestates.tx
What will become of America in five, 25, or even 50 years from today? FUTURESTATES is a series of 11 fictional mini-features exploring possible future scenarios through the lens of today’s global realities. Immerse yourself in the visions of these independent prognosticators as they project a future of their own imagining.
By http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/about.php
The Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (/Hawaii Futures/), established by the Hawaii State Legislature in 01971, is one of the world’s most renowned institutions for futures research, consulting, and education. It has been instrumental in the training of two generations of futurists, in the development and spread of judicial foresight, and in bringing foresight and futures thinking to organizations, agenices, and businesses around the world. The Center, in its theories, methods, design and praxis strives to be THE LIVING EMBODIMENT OF FUTURES STUDIES.
(July 2010)
From despair to impassioned inspiration
Carolyn Baker, Speaking truth to power
An Italian proverb states that a person who lives by hope will die by despair. Americans for nearly three centuries have lived by hope, and as we know, our current president centered his campaign around it. It is as if since our inception as a nation we have, by whatever means necessary, warded off despair in favor of hope, and I believe that if we as a people were to abandon the shallow sense of hope we insist on maintaining, we would be driven to the depths of our despair regarding the current state of our planet.
About one year after Barack Obama became President, I noticed on one radical left website the words “the ‘hopium’ is wearing off.” While the majority of Americans believe that Obama is a better President than George W. Bush, Jr., it has now become painfully obvious that Obama’s leadership has offered little divergence from the policies of the Bush administration. In the throes of what can only be described honestly as the Second Great Depression, Americans suffering from a deluge of unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcies, loss of health insurance and retirement savings have not yet fully confronted their despair. They pretend that a return to unlimited growth and delirious consumerism is possible and even likely in the long term, but all the while, just beneath the surface of that chimera the demon of despair is growing increasingly restless and ominous.
Despair moves us to confront existential questions, and let’s remember that that big word isn’t just a philosophical term but directly refers to our existence. Existential questions are questions of meaning and purpose-questions about the human condition such as: Why do the innocent suffer? Why do those who commit brutal acts so often go unpunished? If there is a God, why do these things happen? Why am I here?…
…In reality, despair presents us with an opportunity to enhance our sense of meaning and purpose. As Greenspan states: “Despair is faith’s darker handmaiden. There is no faith without doubt and despair, just as there is no good without evil, no day without night. To be authentic, faith must be all-inclusive-encompassing Auschwitz as much as it encompasses paradise.” If you bristle at the word faith, feel free to replace it with meaning, purpose, inspiration, or some other word.
The human psyche is extremely comfortable in the territory of despair. For this reason, we need to trust our despair and allow it to guide us to the transformation that is waiting to happen within us. We also need to remember that we feel our despair in the context of a world that is withering and a species that is rushing headlong toward extinction. Our personal despair and the wider story of despair cannot be separated. This does not mean that we stay stuck in blame and abdicate personal responsibility where it should be claimed. What it does mean, however, is that suffering is both personal and collective, and that the latter is larger than our personal egos. It may be that despair is a catalyst not only for our personal transformation, but also that of our species.
Thus arises another opportunity to remind us all that service in the world is often an excellent antidote to despair. Service can give our lives meaning and help place our personal story in the context of the larger story of a civilization that has reached its growth limits and is currently in demise. However, we do not need to reach our limits of soul growth as individuals. In fact, the more we acknowledge our limitations of material growth, acquisition, and control, the more expansive our souls are likely to become, and service frequently enhances the process.
Yet another tool for soothing our despair is to follow the example of Wendell Berry in his beautiful poem which opens this article. In it he states that when despair for the world grows in him, he consciously enters nature and allows it to comfort him so that for a time, he can rest in the grace of the world and experience himself as free. Yet it is not only comfort he receives but the “peace of wild things.” But how can “wild” be synonymous with “peaceful”? Isn’t wild unpredictable and therefore anxiety-producing? Could this actually be one of the most important antidotes to despair: Wild, unpredictable, capricious, even dangerous? Is not part of our death-like despair the lack of wildness? Psychologist Bill Plotkin states in Nature And The Human Soul that “Something in us is truly wild and wants to stay that way through our entire life. It is the source of our deepest creativity and freedom.”…
(11 July 2010)
Getting Theah from Heah on the Great and Glorious Fourth
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
Some years ago, I had the occasion of being at a dinner party on the fourth of July with a bunch of graduate students, and we realized that among 11 of us, we came from 9 different countries. After commenting on this and the date and discussing American fireworks laws for a while, we began to compare what we’d been taught in our home countries in school about the history of both our own nations, and about the world. It was a deeply enlightening, often funny conversation.
One of the funniest and most worriesome parts of the evening occurred when the other American and I compared notes. I had grown up in grubby urban mill cities in New England, while he was the child of Caribbean immigrants who moved to rural west Texas when he was very young. As we compared notes, the laughing consensus emerged that he and I had effectively also grown up in two different countries. A woman from India quite seriously observed that a Texan public school education and a New England one seemed to have the same fundamentally different – and mutually hostile – versions of history that she and the two sisters from Pakistan had experienced, growing up on either side of the border of Kashmir. This was an exaggeration, but not as much as I wished it was.
Things got more serious, though, when we began to talk about nationalism, and the way it shaped our experience and understanding of the world. All of us had received nationalist versions of our histories, we knew. All of us were highly educated, mostly in fields that involved considerable study of history and politics. And yet when we started seriously talking about how we had been trained to see ourselves and our place in the world – we were all a little uncomfortable, I think at admitting what we’d been taught about our own countries and about each other’s. I had thought (or rather not thought much about it) that we Americans and the British woman at the table would be uniquely ashamed of our history. In fact, the sense that we’d imbibed something false ran through all of us.
At the same time, all of us thrilled to certain moments in our past, and when asked to tell the stories – because most of us had not grown up with them, you could here the way they still grasped our imaginations. I mentioned the classic American patriotic poems “Barbara Frietchie” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and when called upon to recite by those who had never heard them, found that my Texan friend and I had more in common than you’d think – we both couldn’t help ourselves – the poems are a kind of pedantry, sentimental and factually problematic but neither of us could resist them, either.
Both my Texan friend and I knew the truth – that while Barbara Fritchie was a real person and an ardent Unionist, the story was apocryphal. We both knew that William Dawes, not Paul Revere was the one who made the whole of the ride. Neither of us even thought they were very good poems. We both cared about the truth of history. But we also cared about the stories of history, and felt that there was something true for each of us in the Patriotism they invoked – and every single one of the other people at that table had a story, or a poem or a song about which they could tell you exactly how the words weren’t really true – and about which they could not tell you what was true. But something was true in there…
(4 July 2010)
