Originally published on the CGS blog on May 20, 2015.
We live in narrow times—a time of Mitzrayim.*
On one side, violence spreads like cancer. ISIL, Ukraine, Sudan, DRC, and too much more. Some of the violence is old. Some is new. But it eats at the slow-growing embryo of our oneness.
On the other side, the climate that sustains humanity is in slow-motion collapse. Melting Arctic ice packs slow the Gulf Stream; destabilization of Antarctic glaciers adds to rising sea levels, record high temperatures, ocean acidification, mass extinctions, and too much more.
We live between these threats.
Some of us wear blinders, look towards neither side and focus on what we can control—our families, our work, our daily lives. Some of look to one side or the other and shout warnings like prophets of old.
Others work to find a way—step by step—to carefully thread this narrow maze in which we find ourselves.
Our technology is both cause and solution. We live in cultures ranging from the Stone Age to the Information Age.
We create the means to travel fast and far, which binds us together into a growing global organism, yet fouls the air and transmits global pandemics.
We design powerful weapons to protect us from the “other:” Smart bombs used in dumb wars and mass killers that leave us less secure and questioning our morality.
We build a digital nervous system that allows us truly to live in a world as each other’s eyes and ears with cloud memories and massive knowledge at our finger tips—but leaves our inner selves, our identities, open to theft.
We learn how to feed and heal our billions of bodies. So our population continues to grow. We have become a fetus consuming and fouling the egg which still shelters us.
So much has happened in so short a time.
If humanity’s 200,000 years was a day, then in less than the last two minutes we have:
- expanded our numbers—from less than a billion to over seven billion and counting
- shortened the time to circumnavigate our world from years to hours
- decreased the time to spread a message across the earth from decades to seconds
Never before have there been so many mouths to feed and smiles to receive.
Never before has the gap between rich and poor—the haves and have nots—been so wide.
Never before have we said “Never Again” and sought the means to make it a reality.
We traverse a narrow place—and this generation’s task is to point the way to the other side.
To draw the map.
To begin a journey.
To life.
To birth.
To the step beyond.
* The name for “Egypt” in Hebrew is “Mitzrayim” which is from the Hebrew word “metzar” meaning “narrow,” or “constriction.” Egypt was the ultimate place of constriction. No slave had ever escaped from there, let alone an entire nation.
