Under the Radar:
Emerging Social Realities for a New Era—Part I
When I was barely ten years old I put on a mask and snorkel and peered beneath the glassy surface of a huge tide pool off Palos Verdes peninsula, California. A new world, previously hidden, amazed my senses. New dimensions of vivid colors, strange creatures never seen before, societies of plants and marine life protected by glistening reefs opened before me. Different laws of gravity, light, space and motion seemed to rule, and granted me a new freedom in this shimmering, watery medium.
In our current era, when the murky waters of pessimism, corruption and relentless crises seem to drown our spirits, we need to dive beneath the surface to immerse ourselves in another and brighter reality. This bright reality is the community of people serving the pressing needs of people and the environment. They are creative and optimistic innovators collaborating to solve problems that are oppressing and threatening our existence. The organizations and collaborative networks created by this ever-growing community are transformative and give hope.
The malignant opposition to a new and healthy society and environment is using any means available to debilitate the new, life-giving energies that are working to restore a sane vitality to our culture. They often camouflage their efforts by pretending to have values that promote the health, well-being and security of people and the planet. However, their state of consciousness and motives are incompatible with the laws that govern the new emerging reality. They will soon become isolated and ineffective. Like cancer cells, the forces opposing a better future will die as more and more people begin living the needed change, thereby producing an environment where laws of health and respect for nature dominate.
Unless one makes the effort to swim beneath the surface of the known world; to explore the awe-inspiring tide pools of innovation and new, emerging communities, one will not be able to imagine the ocean of possibilities beyond. Optimism in the communities of change-makers is often tempered by the prospect that the malignancy pervading our planetary and social organisms has spread too far to be reversed. This is the battle. Nevertheless, in this battle are formed joyful alliances. We have visionary groups and groups of visionaries on every front forming images of a new, happier, more secure and prosperous world—and then actually creating it! Perhaps it is still under the radar of popular perceptions, but nevertheless it is actually manifesting the new social, and economic institutions for the future and becoming more and more visible and viable.
Even if not enough to reverse the currents of the destructive tide, the movement is growing in so many communities that it demonstrates a new social reality, and inspires others with the values it represents. Those values are based on building relationships promoting the common good: cooperation, sharing, nurturing, connecting to and caring about each other, living a constructive and harmless life. With this comes an awareness of the common spirit that pervades all humans, as well as other lives on our planet and develops a sense of kinship and responsibility.
If such positive signs of the times are lacking in one’s life, one needs to explore the new world that exists under the radar of the culture advertised by the out-dated flood of news and media. This enables one to observe a reality that is happier in spirit, relevant to current needs and inspiring of confidence. Meeting people who are working for beneficial goals creates joy in living, opens new possibilities, and evokes one’s own latent potentials. Just as the dimensions of another vibrant world lie just below the surface in a tidal pool, so too, does an alternative, clear, beautiful and sustainable society exist beneath the stagnant, murky pool of current events. This reality enables one to perceive a new and better era and to participate in it.
