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Punctuations:
Futurist John
L. Petersen See Change in the Air
 Comment
03/03/2010 05:15 PM CST
(TAI) --
We're sorry to
be a bit late in publishing this issue of Punctuations. I was doing some
business this last week in Europe and something got into my computer. Among
other things it tried to log onto my PayPal account and told Microsoft that my
version of their operating system was fraudulent. I'm writing this on the plane
coming home, hoping that being disconnected from the web will isolate me from
cyberspace long enough that I can get this written before something worse
happens . . . and I get a chance to fix my problems at home. It appears that
when you're out of your home country sometimes it takes some doing to convince
your regular banks, etc. that it's really you who is trying to access your
account from somewhere else. Should be fixed in a couple of days.
Been reading here on the airplane Carl Calleman's new book, "The Purposeful
Universe" (thanks, Bobbie). Quite a compelling argument that there is a very
defendable basis for direction and intelligence in the evolution of things on
this planet. Kind of a middle ground between Darwinism and Intelligent design. I
like it.
They handed out a Wall Street Journal on this flight. The front page was about
the Haiti earthquake, of course, but other headlines announced that US banks
were about to give away $145 billion in bonuses, Ukraine was on the verge of
bankruptcy, and that the future of the Euro was uncertain. This was after
reading about a recent
talk by Ron Paul
suggesting that the US has literally lost its sanity, and the
latest missive from Tom Kenyon and the Hathors suggesting that we are in for
increasing changes this year driven by significant new cosmic energy
transmissions coming from the sun and our galaxy. The magnetic poles of the
earth are again beginning to rapidly change, they say, and all of this causes
some issues like erratic sleep. Read this after having spent a week with only
one night that I wasn't up wide awake for two-three hours in the middle of the
night. I thought it was jet lag . . . but I've never had that problem before and
the melatonin didn't seem to work.
They suggest, by the way, that the most effective approach for dealing with the
uncertainty and change that we are about to experience is to have an attitude of
gratitude - to be happy.
Throughout all of this I've been thinking about those people we particularly
value. We need some new ideas about those we revere - our heroes. I'm not
talking about celebrities here, like someone who hits a lot of homeruns. Rather
it's about individuals who are extraordinary in what they do in facilitating
this most important of all global shifts. In a sense, they would be the best
examples of the New Human that we would all ascribe to become.
Currently, Nobel prizes value innovation and intellectual achievement, and we
certainly give a great deal of value - and many medals - to those who are very
destructive in pursuing the defense of our society and country. (I know, I have
some of them.) In the US, the president gives away the Medal of Freedom to those
who excel in their areas of expertise and contribute to the well being of the
country. Prizes are only a few of the ways in which we acknowledge those who
excel within our present system of values.
What I'm suggesting here is a somewhat subtle shift that recognizes that there
are a new set of emergent global and human imperatives that are critically
needed to shape a new world that is quite different from this one. During this
transition, there need to be publically acknowledged exemplars that help to move
us away from spotlighting nation states and professions (which are intrinsically
exclusionary in their definition and perspective) to a far more inclusive,
pan-human view. The Nobel Peace Prize attempts to do this, I suppose, but we all
know about the problems there.
I guess I'm wondering whose stories we will write about in the next history
books and pass along to our kids that tell about those special people who saw
themselves and this reality in multi-dimensional terms and operated as though
they were citizens of the whole planet, rather than just one country or region.
How will we describe the characteristics of those extraordinarily important
individuals who lead the way into this new evolutionary era? What are the
personal traits of our next heroes?
I haven't had a chance to think about this as much as I would like to, but as I
look around to see who we look up to and acknowledge and hold up to our children
as the epitome of what we all value, it seems obvious to me that those metrics
will change very soon. We should keep an eye out for that.
JLP
Copyright (c) 2010 by John L. Petersen and The Arlington Institute.
Reproduced by STARstream Research / STARpod.org by permission
of Mr. Petersen -- All
rights reserved.
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