Visions for a positive future

Our country is in the worst economic situation of our lifetimes. We’re aware of climate change, urban blight, disparities among socio-economic classes, and explicit and implicit prejudices against persons who are attracted to the same sex. The problems in the U.S. and other western countries seem to be insurmountable.

Or are they?

If we look to an online magazine like Yes! we find others who, like us, want to envision a positive future. http://www.yesmagazine.org/

Look through their archives and find voices like your own. Below are introductory paragraphs of several articles that capture the essence of optimism. Their vision can help us to gain hope.

YES! Magazine Spring 2008: Climate Solutions
"The Greatest Danger," by Joanna Macy

If you’re really paying attention, it’s hard to escape a sense of outrage, fear, despair. Author, deep-ecologist, and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy says: Don’t even try.

How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands? Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy....

YES! Magazine Spring 2007: Is the U.S. Ready for Human Rights?

"Education, by Rights," by Liz Sullivan and Cecilia Blewer

Parents and educators propose an innovative approach to fixing New York’s public schools: rebuild the system using human rights. The El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice is a New York City high school that focuses on the holistic development of young people so that they can become informed and inspired leaders in the struggle for human rights. The curriculum reflects this focus, with an emphasis on community development projects, non-violence, and social change. The El Puente Academy was created in 1993 to reflect the values, practices, and culture of the community in which it is located. Under the leadership of Frances Lucerna, the founding principal, the school developed an integrated curriculum that teaches young people to use the knowledge and skills they learn in the classroom to achieve social justice and human rights in their own community.....

YES! Magazine Winter 2003: What Would Democracy Look Like?
"Put Some Heart Into It," by Linda Stout

What will it take to energize our work for change? Linda Stout, who spent years organizing poor people in the rural South, polled fellow organizers around the US and has this to say about what it will take to win. Many powerful movements for justice have brought us to where we are today: the women’s, labor, peace, civil rights, environmental, and other movements. All have had a major impact. All of our lives have been changed because of them....

YES! Magazine Summer 2003: Finding Courage
"Detroit Renaissance," by Shawn Rhea

When the big automobile companies left town, thousands of people moved away, businesses closed up, and neighborhoods were abandoned. But now a new Detroit is being born, founded in urban farms, local businesses, green spaces, youth engagement, the arts, greenhouses, fresh foods - a city with a place for everyone.

YES! Magazine Spring 2007: Is the U.S. Ready for Human Rights?
"Yes. We're Ready," by Larry Cox and Dorothy Thomas

Human rights are a powerful tool to break barriers, unite people in common cause, and show us the way to justice within and beyond our borders. Activists across the country are defining a new patriotism. Looking at the United States through the lens of human rights illuminates persistent inequities in U.S. society and offers an alternative view of how it can and should be changed. The United States has been rightly proud of its historical leadership in global human rights. As the country's conduct slips away from its aspirations, it is time to reclaim that leadership role by bringing human rights home. The movement for human rights in the United States promotes this alternative vision. It seeks a revolution of values in the United States that makes affirmation of human dignity and equality the center of domestic and foreign policy. ...

YES! Online: Beyond War: What Kind of America?
"From Empire to Earth Community," by David C. Korten

We can choose a path of patient and compassionate justice that respects life, the rights of the innocent, and the rule of law in a cooperative international effort to bring the guilty to justice, as we simultaneously work to bring justice to the world by creating a world that works for all

YES! Magazine Fall 2003: Government of the People Shall Not Perish
"Expanding the Circle," by Sarah Ruth van Gelder

Three women had been working for months with the national Bill of Rights Defense Committee to convince the Bainbridge Island City Council to take on the USA Patriot Act. No one knew whether the council would support a resolution that instructs city employees, including city police, to refuse to carry out portions of the Patriot Act that violate the Constitution. One after another, islanders came to the podium, all but one calling on the council to take a stand. Then members of the council had their turn. Some spoke about the resolution's technicalities and some about its principles. But the most dramatic moment came when an older council member with short grey hair began his remarks by saying he would speak for those who could not speak for themselves. As he fought back tears, he explained that his words were for those who had given their lives in battle to protect our freedoms. These, he said, are freedoms we should not so easily give up...