Dreams of a Livable Future
(Page 4 of 5)
May / June 2003
By Paul Hawken, Utne magazine
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I dream of having a U.N. arms control and inspection team coming to the United States to remove assault weapons from the hands of all National Rifle Association members. I dream of another U.N. team shutting down the 15,000 chemical plants in this country that are essentially biological weapons waiting to happen. I dream of my country living up to its legal treaty commitments and getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. I dream of a United States that actually has an energy plan; a climate plan, not a midterm election plan; a water plan to get rid of the pollutants in our riparian corridors and streams; a biodiversity plan; a plan to eliminate poverty and illiteracy; a plan that ensures that no child here or anywhere goes to bed hungry.
I once gave a talk at an elementary school to third graders, and I told them that there are a billion people in the world who want to work and can’t work. A girl raised her hand and said, “Is all the work done?”
I dream of getting my government back, a country of, by, and for the people. I dream of a country that is big enough to say it is wrong; that can be remorseful and say it’s sorry for the suffering it’s caused First Peoples, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and people in other lands that we have wronged; a country big and generous enough to build new schools in inner cities and act with decency in the world.
To quote Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano, “I dream about a time when the world will no longer be at war against the poor but against poverty; when the weapons industry will have no choice but to declare bankruptcy; when nobody will die of hunger, and the street children will not be treated as if they were trash because there will be no street children, because a black woman will be-come president of Brazil and another black woman president of the United States and an Indian woman president of Guatemala.”
These dreams are pipe dreams unless we act politically. As David Orr says, “We have great ideas; the right wing does politics. We are cozy in our niches; they are in power. We are titillated about being right; they are busy being in control.” I dream that we will become a political movement, not simply one called by the name of a color, but by the name of an ideal. What shall we call it?
Let’s not spend so much time on the big villains. It is not the Ken Lays or George Bushes we should be demonizing. We need to honor the saints in our midst, not the fools, the small heroes, not the big louts. Arundhati Roy writes that “we have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that’s what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us.”
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