by Lynda Schneekloth
Across the globe, the people are stirring—moving, resisting and creating. Whether the issue climate change or gun violence or civil rights, immigration or gay rights or clean water, food security or nuclear disarmament or war—the people are stirring.
Each of these issues seems disconnected and random, because there is no overall agenda. But note, this is the largest movement in human history, a movement without a name and with thousands of leaders, as noted by Paul Hawken in “Blessed Unrest.”
Each issue has discrete goals, but all are a collective rejection of the false promises of an industrialized, extractive-based lifestyle. People no longer believe in human superiority, technological salvation and an economy that benefits a few at the expense of the many and of the Earth itself. It is the deep acknowledgement of what the Occupy Movement articulated—we are the 99 percent.
And we are here. And we are now. We watch as the mythic structure of modernity caves upon itself and we hear the Earth screaming under our assault. The people have had enough.
We will not be pawns, we will not stand quietly at the bottom of the “trickle,” because we know there is abundance to be shared. We will not let anyone destroy the base of life on Earth or deny the dignity of each human life. “Black lives matter,” as do the lives of all humans, as well as our four-legged, winged, green and invisible kin. And so we take to the streets, to the courtrooms, to chambers of government, to the pulpit, to the coffee shops, to the village centers and urban squares in Ecuador, Mumbai, the Congo, New York, Durban and all over the world.
As Hawken said, “What I see are ordinary and some not-so-ordinary individuals willing to confront despair, power and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice and beauty to this world.”
Systems researcher professor Brad Werner of the University of California, San Diego, demonstrated it is only through “friction” in the form of a mass social movement against our current system that there is hope for the future. This movement, Naomi Klein said, will change everything, reinstitute democracy and restore a deep connection to the earth and all our kin. It appears to be time to step down from the pedestal of imaginary separation back to our roots, to the soil from whence we came.
Join us in the Great Turning. We’ve not much time and we need everyone. The people are too big to fail.
Lynda Schneekloth chairs the Niagara Group. This essay first appeared in the “Buffalo News.”