The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1924 – 2006,
 was a liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist with international stature. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ.  In his younger days he was a superb athlete, a highly talented pianist, a CIA agent, and later chaplain of Yale University, where the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy led him to become a leader in the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  

Have you thought about getting away, about being left alone and leaving others alone?  As the population of our planet increases and the amount of land upon which we can live remains unchanged—if not, in fact, decreases—this dream of many people becomes a fading, wistful thought.  

In the previous two parts, we have looked at positive solutions which make a shrinking world livable.  (Shrinking?  How?  More population, less land and scarcer resources.  Problems do not only sprout in such conditions, but, also, they flourish.)  One solution was to teach poor children in Venezuela to play musical instruments, while another solution was to give poor youth alternative heroes to terrorists.  

But in order to persuade the world to be cooperative, so that we make the best of our shrinking world, we Americans must set an example over and over again.  However, we fail and that makes the shrinking world more difficult to live in.  

A good example is our insisting that China and India , which have begun their industrial revolutions, quickly move to green economies.  Two problems with our “moral high ground” is that we Americans are not moving quickly toward a green economy and, at the beginning of our industrial revolution, we did not consider the greenness of our business practices and of our industrial machinery.  

Another example comes from our very poor use of taxpayer money.  A large sum of American money has been lost in Iraq ; yet, we expect accountability from other countries when we give them foreign aid.  

I recall when former Russian President Vladimir Putin was interviewed on “Sixty Minutes.”  When asked about the devolution of democracy in his country, he pointed to the 2000 American President election as an example of the imperfection of democracy in our country.  (And it is a wonder to me that there has not been more attention paid to the election bungling in Ohio , the swing state, in the 2004 President election.)  

Maybe, in our shrinking world, we need to get away from “G2G”, that is, government to government, relations and look to “P2P”, that is, people to people, relations in order to create a livable world.  This is not too different from part 3 of this essay in the May 29, 2008, E-News, where the involvement of many people is seen as part of the solution.

June 19, 2008