Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It has been an awful and amazing two weeks – a time of reckoning that is long overdue, a time of coming together that, despite the tragic circumstances, has been enlivening. What is so remarkable is that the Black Lives Matter protests have been nested within a larger, unprecedented trauma, the pandemic.
When it comes to America’s racial sins, past and present, a lot of us see people in one region of the country as guiltier than the rest. Host John Biewen spoke with some white Southern friends about that tendency.
Our biology equips us to understand not only what is, but also what could and what should be. We are ethical creatures; we are nature debating, rationalizing, and thinking with itself.
This emerging mosaic of alternatives for social-ecological transformation provides fertile ground for the development of ideas, practices and actions leading to a good life for all.
Is there anything crazier than the people in our towns, who are sworn to protect and serve, instead coldly taking the lives of our neighbors? Given this moment in American history marked by outrage, sadness, and massive protest, we discuss the need to address institutional racism and white privilege.
We need to change the narrative now, embrace a new story truer to circumstance — a storyline in which we heroically face adversity together, creating abundance out of crisis together, moving with agility through chaos toward new community values that will sustain us in the unsettled years ahead.
Rethink Food is working to help restaurants stay open while feeding the communities hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Brooklyn-based nonprofit, which recovers excess food from restaurants and grocery stores, launched several emergency programs to create jobs and distribute meals to people in need.
Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen heard next to nothing about the town’s most important historical event. In 1862, Mankato was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history – the hanging of 38 Dakota warriors – following one of the major wars between Plains Indians and settlers. In this documentary, originally produced for This American Life, John goes back to Minnesota to explore what happened, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it afterwards.
So you see, even a conservative libertarian from Texas Hill Country can turn toward the light. All it takes is a commitment to boycott Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and a refusal to look away.
Because there are many lessons to learn, one for every day of the rest of our lives, and for that reason we should look at today, and tomorrow, and the day after as opportunities to learn, to grow, to find each other, and to make change.
We are called to an evolutionary leap – from divisiveness to connectedness, from separation to co-creation, from enmity and hate (or complacent apathy) to caring, love in action. We are all part of one human race, and the clock is ticking. It is either now or never.
“All men are created equal.” Those words, from the Declaration of Independence, are central to the story that Americans tell about ourselves and our history. But what did those words mean to the man who actually wrote them?
