Prompts:

• What experiences, stories or moments in your life shed light on this moment?
• What do you want us to know or remember? What are you learning in this time?
• How is your thinking changing in this political moment?
• What do you wish more people would keep in mind in order to work together effectively?

Paul’s words

I’m glad and grateful for the opportunity to be part of this conversation. I’m feeling a little awkward talking with you as an elder. Not because I’m not older but because our generation may have little of use to say given the rapidly changing circumstances we are in.

I was born in 1948—within a year before and after my birth nearly a billion people liberated themselves from colonialism and claimed independence in India and China. During my childhood the colonial powers regrouped and devised new ways to invade, undermine and control the rest of the world through their military, economic, and political power while more and more countries achieved their independence.

I grew up in the McCarthy era, an era of fear, assimilation, the Cold War and public execution by the state of the Rosenbergs which complete traumatized an already traumatized Jewish community.

I came of age politically through participation in the anti-war effort and the end of the Civil Rights Movement as it played out on my conservative college campus.

I matured through participating in the feminist, queer, disability movements and international solidarity struggles.

I remember:

• Long histories of resistance and significant victories along the way
• There were no final victories
• We have limited personal and political power but what we do counts in many ways, it has impacts far beyond what we know about.

More and more of us realize that western civilization is collapsing because it is based on a fundamental separation between humans, and the planet and all the other non-human beings we live with. This civilization is based on violence and exploitation and is demonstrably unsustainable.

The US empire is collapsing for the same reasons and because of its tremendous concentration of wealth in a small group of predominantly white Christian men while 40% of the population (140,000,000) live in poverty.

Western civ is a mindset, a way of living, thinking, and being in the world which almost all of us have internalized. One of the ways we internalize it is to believe we don’t have to listen to the voices of those most impacted by oppression—those most vulnerable and under attack. It’s helped me a lot of center the voices of people who are poor, especially those who are Black and/or unhoused and/or indigenous and to ask myself, “is what I’m doing serving them, having an impact on their lives.” It’s so easy for those of us who are not poor/Black/and/or indigenous to work, live, and organize on issues we decide are important and yet have no beneficial impact on poor people in our communities. We end up talking to ourselves, each other and others very similar to us, ending up frustrated and disappointed that we cannot organize vast numbers of other people.

The current regime in Washington is a symptom, harbinger, an accelerator, but not the cause or the perpetrator of the catastrophe we are in. We don’t have the collective power to influence effectively much less stop the collapse. We can’t predict either the outcome or the course of the collapse. If we keep doing the things that we know don’t work, if we keep participating in systems that have always failed us, or don’t move beyond the thinking and living within western civ we have internalized, we prolong the collapse, feeding the very machine we want to be rid of.

I am rooting for the collapse of civilization and US empire. They are completely unsustainable and at the root of the violence and destruction in the world. I also am in deep mourning for the devastating genocides and ecocides and every particular loss of life we are experiencing. I expect it to get worse and I don’t say “until it gets better, or it will get better because we don’t know if it will. I do know that, as Andres Malm and Wim Carton write in their book Overshoot, “There is, henceforth, no path to a liveable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business as usual.” Are you prepared for the complete destruction of business as usual? What will you have to do to live with and welcome it?>

I don’t have any suggestions for what we should do to fix things—and we are beyond the point of being to fix anything. But I do have some suggestions for what we need to pay attention to.

I think it is imperative that
we slow down,
grieve the losses of life, species, natural phenomenon and communities,
tell the truth about what is happening at the largest scale,
reconnect with the land and the natural world around us in a practical everyday way,
we need to hold each other and all life close,
we need to prepare ourselves to live simply, to live with uncertainty, chaos, and mystery, to live with humility, gratitude, joy, reverence and persistence.

Furthermore, I think we need to recognize and appreciate the mystery and sacredness of the world and how little we know of it. All cultures have stories of magic, of spirits, of unknown forces that interact with us whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. Millions of people have experienced encounters with UAPs, (unidentified anonymous phenomena) in the air, on the ground and under the sea. Millions more have experienced weird, out-of-the-ordinary and unexplainable interactions with non-human beings. Millions of people have direct experience with other levels of consciousness through spiritual practice, near-death experiences, through a medium or as chance encounters. What does it mean, what are the implications of our encounters with non-human beings?

All the information and wisdom I’ve ever received from humans and from non-human beings is that everything comes down to love, respect, and interdependence. We are not individuals, we are aspects of collectivities, parts of vast and mysterious realities we can only get glimpses of. We need to humbly lead with love—for ourselves, those around us, those far away, the earth and all the beings we share it with, and for all the vast forces we so little understand.

Thank you for listening.