Photo by Caleb Gregory on Unsplash
Let’s have better laws. But to really get somewhere, let’s be better people.
The Saners, a movement to prevent climate collapse and build a better, more humane civilization, aims to lead by example.
As individual people, and as a movement, we need to reach out to others and to recognize the common humanity of EVERYONE. We can and must object to and block evil actions, but never dismiss or be cruel to human beings.
All of us make mistakes and all of us sometimes do bad things. If we are good people, we learn to regret our mistakes. But even “bad people” are people. That’s why recognizing our common humanity, and being guided by love is the best, and indeed the only path to a better world.
Kindness can lessen anger and fear and hatred. Kindness can prevent suicide and murder. Kindness can make lonely people feel connected to the world. Kindness can make close-minded people become open to other possibilities.
Kindness is not merely a means. Kindness is itself an end. Kindness IS the world we want to live in, not just a way to get there.
Process Is Important, But Secondary
Hitler was elected. The process by which he became the leader of Germany was legal and, nominally, within the rules. Those rules were not, of themselves, evil. But they enabled and empowered terrible evil actions that killed millions.
We can’t depend on process. The form of government, the structure of an economy…we should not be dogmatic about that.
How many times have we heard MORAL arguments conflated with LEGAL arguments?
Remember: The Nuremberg Laws and the Jim Crow Laws were legal. So was the process by which they became laws. It was illegal for humanitarians to put out bottles of water in the Texas desert to prevent illegal border crossers from dying.
The correlation between legality and morality is a false equivalency. Sometimes the relationship is inverse.
Madison said that if men were angels, then governments (and by extension, laws) would be unnecessary. But I would say that moral progress and advancement is essential and that laws—even good laws—will never suffice.
What To Do About It
“My law is that we respect the common humanity in everyone.”
That is the creed of The Saners. Now, we are people and sometimes get angry and behave foolishly. We will and do make mistakes. But our creed must guide us. Most of the time, we need to do what’s right, set an example and make the creed explicit.
“My law is that we respect the common humanity in everyone.”
When someone is targeted for cruelty, we don’t need to get too caught up in the current target—we need to put the spotlight on the evil attitude and the evil behavior. We need to say “stop.” We need to say “you are better than that, you know deep down that it’s wrong to harm another person who—whatever you hate about them—is not too different from you.”
And we need to love our enemies—who are not our enemies because we have none; they are merely temporary opponents. We need to NOT obsess about revenge and justice, and focus on fixing the actual problems.
MAGA, for example, must be defeated. We can do this at the polls. But the people who support MAGA—as hateful as they seem now—are expressing the worst in human nature but they also contain the best in human nature. When their hateful movement is defeated, they will be free to change their attitude. People who venomously assert their “Christianity” by damning everyone who isn’t like them will be free—again—to “love one another” and to feed the hungry and heal the sick.
Republicans who worried about excessive spending and crime will be free to return to those views. Today, they are worshipping a man who added $7.8 trillion to the deficit and who commits felonies—and sexual abuse.
A decisive victory changes everything. Millions of Nazis disappeared overnight after the Allied victory in WWII. Once the leaders of MAGA are disempowered. the MAGA followers will need to look elsewhere for leaders.
Beyond Parties and Politicians
There is good in nearly every person. But we live under political systems awash in corporate money, most dangerously the money of Big Oil. And our economic system empowers 1% to virtually enslave 99%.
For this reason, to save the world from climate collapse and fix the vast inequality and exploitation, we need to harness people power. We need a movement. We need a movement that learns from past movements and uses a strategy that is up to the challenges we face.
Our group, The Saners, aims to be that movement. Our group believes that it is literally insane to knowingly ruin the planet we all live on—or to enable others to destroy it.
When we go to our work and do the work assigned to us, WE are helping clueless elites ruin the future for everyone—even the offspring of those elites. By thwarting climate abuse, and by refusing to engage in senseless labor producing mountains of crap and reducing the Earth to a dead planet, we help EVERYONE.
We all live on the same planet and the fate of the Earth is our common fate.
“My law is that we respect the common humanity in everyone.”
Add your first comment to this post