The Citizenry of All Things
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.
Westerners often forget this fact but non-Westerners never do.
~ Samuel P. Huntington
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Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity — the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done though the grass where I stood scarcely trembled.
As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decisions in the years since.”
~ Mary Oliver
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The major problems are systemic problems, they’re all interconnected and interdependent. And underlying most, if not all of these problems, is…
