With great relief that this crazed ancient hippie returned in one piece, a group of family, friends, and neighbors gathered to wish me a warm welcome home from my bicycle trip across America, my pilgrimage for peace and environmental justice. I am very grateful to all those that followed my journey and offered moral support. Among the questions asked yesterday about my journey was, did I accomplish my goals?
Did I convert the people of this earth to endeavors solely focused on peace and love of the environment? There is no immediate chance of governments not waging war anytime soon. Nor of the people of this earth shutting off the carbon switch and capturing the existing excess atmospheric carbon dioxide and replanting it into the soil. Nor of us collectively changing the economic system that is driving these conditions that are now pressing human civilization towards extinction.
But neither did Pope Francis’ trip to America. He is the leader of one in seven people on this earth. He came to Washington DC with essentially the same messages of peace, economic justice, and of saving our collective home as he calls the effort to reduce the atmospheric carbon that is causing global climate change. While my mission was clear on its purpose, my concrete goals were not well defined when I left, they evolved as I rode. I set out to raise awareness with those that I met along the way. It became convenient for me to say, I was riding to DC to talk to my congressman. Folks everywhere got that. There is near universal frustration with how our government is functioning. On reflection I am surprised, considering the forty year effort to convince Americans that our self-governance project is a failure, that so many people still are engaged in democracy.
Nearly everyone, even the very cynical, holds a solution for our problems. That as a people we have very different ideas of what those solutions might be points to the success of those trying to destroy democracy. The right blames the rise of ISIS on Obama’s indecision and the left points to GW Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Yesterday a friend reached back a 100 years in history to the French and English carving up the Middle East for their profit just after the First World War, or as Pope Francis called it in his address to Congress ‘The Great War’ the pointless slaughter. This bit of land is where modern humans crossed out of Africa and interbred and fought with our near predecessors, who also had made that journey. From there they moved across our entire planet. We can go back in history to where the Middle East was called the Levant, or Phoenicia, or as in Genesis The Garden of Eden where Cain killed his brother Abel, the herder, and was sent away by god to then establish agriculture and thus modern civilization.
We have been given a gift by science to view different futures based on our choices of present actions. We no longer live in what we perceived as a static world. Our climate is changing. The relative peace of the planet, the product of a stable climate, is changing. In the past we could look at past actions of our neighbors and fight over wrongs and arrive at a relative sense of peace and justice imposed by the victor. That system of justice always to the advantage of the victor harbored the seeds of future conflicts. We now know that we must not look at past wrongs but at future possibilities to guide us towards an outcome where civilization might persist, where our progeny can continue.
I heard someone say recently, it is not the planet that is endangered by climate change. It is us, the people, whose continued existence on this earth that is at risk. Will our failure to forge peace in Syria and the birthplace of civilization be the cause of civilization’s demise?
Peace,
Dan Monte
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