What Happened to 'Play Nice?'

These two quotes from very different thought processes…

"We must always remember that passions change as life experience and learning brings us to new places in our lives and minds. Change is the only constant. Maybe that's why the expression is to "follow your passion. The dang thing never stands still.” C. Lacombe

“No one who is good at building houses has an emotional problem with hammers. Place your emotional problems where they belong, and focus on seeing money as a tool.” Seth Godin

… led me to this conclusion. Writing is not my passion; writing for me is a tool.

 I like my tools to be the best because I want to be able to concentrate my efforts on performing my tasks and achieving my results/goals and not on trying to figure out how to make a crappy tool do a good job.

It’s the same reason I have expensive knives that I keep sharp. Speaking of sharp, my mind needs to be that too.

My passions lie with preserving natural environments and processes in the wild and fostering inclusive civilization – sociology and ecological preservation.

I don’t want to see The World Without Us; I want to see a world where humans recognize they are part of nature. 

I want humans to quit defecating in their own backyards, smelling up the place with their gases and pissing into their own water supply – so to speak.

I also want humans to start playing nice, sharing and being fair like Mom and Dad taught us. 

We could also stand to remember that when we were 10 and another kid fell off the swing and cracked their head, we helped them. We didn’t say, “I’m still on my swing. I held on so I didn’t fall. There is no reason why I should give up my hard earned hold on this swing just because someone else fell off.”

Right, we also didn’t then lobby our local government to install nets under all the swings for public safety - but I digress.

My observations in life about human interactions, with themselves, other people, other species and the physical world that is our life support system, seem to confirm that a large majority of humans don’t understand that the concept of We Are One is not just metaphysical.

If we lose the bees, we starve. If we go too far with air pollution, we can’t breathe. If we over pollute the waters; we starve and thirst. Many people say they know this; it is an obvious fact. But the knowledge is not enough. Humans need to transmute knowledge into understanding and act accordingly.

We are already seeing the effects of polluted water, air and soil on humans from birth to senior citizens. We see changes in the natural environment around us too, but keep looking at these phenomena in isolation from each other instead of systemic cumulative effects.

We also engage in blame; single issue, polarized arguments and stay the course action plans on matters proven to create or exacerbate serious existing problems.

A whole bunch of people feel powerless to effect change and a whole bunch more probably are

Cambodian workers keep
weeds at bay.

powerless due to the extent of human generated social, political and environmental malfunction present in the modern day world.

Not everyone is able to throw their weight into the effort to redirect humanity’s trajectory. 

So, if you can do anything, please do.