It’s not about the 99%. It’s about the 100%.
Old people march to support a high school anti-gun crusade. White people march for Black Lives Matter. Men join the Women’s Marches by the hundreds of thousands. Jews protect Muslims from discrimination; peaceniks keep Nazis from physical harm. We’re all in this together.
Our basic dilemma is how to change global culture to keep our greed and violence from making the planet unlivable. No group can solve this problem by itself.
We have to talk about how humanity is going to survive this mess we’ve made. Our whole civilization has to change. It’s not impossible; it’s happened before, many times. But things have to be very different if we’re going to make it.
The ocean is going to rise up and take over our coastal cities. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. The frozen North is melting already. Glaciers are disappearing. People on every shoreline will have to move to higher ground.
Already billions of people have no access to clean drinking water. Already fish are vanishing from the sea. Bees are in trouble, so we’re all in trouble. If we just fight over water and land and food we will kill ourselves off. This is quite possible. But we are still evolving and we might be on the brink of something entirely new.
Right now, a very few people own most of the world’s wealth. Billions of people have nothing, no matter how hard they work. The rich keep getting richer, and the rest struggle. But the rich do not have their own planet to live on if we destroy this one. They can’t survive without the rest of us. Humanity needs to make the best use of every resource to keep us alive while we redesign our civilization. It’s not about rich and poor, it’s about all of us.
The battle for human survival requires us to see past the imaginary boundaries that have separated us into warring factions. What matters is not what color or age or gender or class or nationality we are. What matters is that we’re human, and we want our grandchildren to be able to live. No person of good will should be excluded from this fight. We need every person who is willing to find ways to center life on compassion instead of greed.
So before you dismiss someone because you disagree on a single issue, think again. It’s not enough to be right. We have to win. And winning – the survival of the species – will mean finding allies where we might have expected enemies.
We must not let anything keep us apart. Though our differences can be fascinating, we are far more alike than we are different. This is a fight we can only win if we join together. Humanity is an organism that is just becoming conscious. We might be part of different internal organs, but most crucially, each of us is a cell in the vast body of our species. We need one another, because we are one.