Everything's coming up challenge
Let's engage sweetly and bravely.
Climate change is primary for obvious reasons for every single creature on earth. Take a rocket's eye view of this globe - one of trillions - and notice that the universe doesn't care whether the inhabitants are indispensable or not. Only we do.
It is turning out so so quickly that AI, remember it is artificial, has a similar reach and must be addressed at the power level as well as the operational one. In fact all things have to be addressed at the power level now when it is so incredibly obvious that our balance of government functioning and everyday life lies very much at the even actual heart of how we live on the planet. Climate is us.
At this moment in the semi-western world, a really crazy example of unbalanced power is found in the Israeli government where even a multiplicity of organized views allows a kind of dictator to run the new state, basically on extremely divided ways of looking and feeling and visions. Those ways of looking are themselves so very based so very often in ways that are heavily influenced by emotion ensconced in priorities, decisions and procedures. So how do we deal with that?
We in the US are nearing an end of the social roles that 40% of our population wants to retain for ingrained and often improper power purposes. And frankly that is just plain lazy. And selfish. And ignorant. So self-serving as to extinguish any sense of how society actually works for everyone, not just one's own class, sex, race, gender, whatever whatever. Old and outdated roles are puny, underneath the presented image of strength, purity etc, and good for only what their images themselves seem to produce. Which are lies in the face of inherent equality
We must deal with the very notion of excess where so many believe that excess happiness is for everybody with little or no understanding of context, blowback, or operational knowledge. Need I say that does not work?
And let's address the notion of superiority in the human population. Religiosity, class, race, sex. The notions that have gone with these huge and seemingly intractable ideas over the long run are all up for recycling. Darwin got that concept of strength and superiority from the animal world only. We must stop fighting for what is going to pass anyway, and leave our animal instincts in the places they belong with the minds we are given and by which we endow our own salvation. There, I said it. Wrestle with that one. ;-)) Emotional self-responsibility has become a necessity for any participation in social and civic doings.
While I say all this from a woman / mother / lesbian / grandmother experienced perspective as well as a 18-wheel truck driver / photographer/ myotherapist / triathlete / anthrophile
mixture /++ , there is absolutely no reason on earth why my experience, feelings, attitude, reason can and should be discounted or uncounted in any way at all. “Women hold up half the sky, and they hold up the men who hold up the other half." - the collected together wisdom of Chinese women of 94 years ago and feminists of the '60s and on.
I don't do gentleman-talk, that old cloistered pretendability pat on the back stuff that I figured out a very long time ago was an image presentation im/posing respectability upon itself, for what it's worth. Power cannot accrete unto itself as our FF's knew and promoted. Where fully, I mean fully, informed power gets its status and reality, many truths must inform it. Dems have been particularly good at wrestling with this somewhat successfully, and Reps have tried to slow down the process while still tending to override it with unequal power; one might call it the Tory party of government these days, bringing it forward - just not wanting to let go of that king and court thing and still knowing that these changes must happen. Looks like everybody has to be brave enough to look at all this without the emotional flummery.
How can we make reasonable conversation available to our youngest folks? Starting at home for instance. As in the town meeting I am about to attend, everybody has to at least hear each other and I mean really hear where the common good outruns any particular ego/ignorance in whatever particular form. Evidence is evidence is evidence.
The human engines running all the time are both the heart and the mind in whatever balance or distortion.
An enormous human challenge has to do with that distortion. Recalling many a Star Trek episode involving Spock, the question has been put before a wide audience and in fact with large input from Jewish writers and thinkers whose backgrounds collectively have daily dealing with that balance going back 3500 years.
Now very much with us since October 7th is the deeply enormous task of finding some sort of at least operational balance where all parties come through with a decent and accessible way of life.