New Clear Vision

Playing Hardball with the Fossil Fuel Industry

by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

Bittersweet sadness filled me as I read an excerpt at Women’s E-News from Eve Ensler’s new memoir, In the Body of the World, about her long, determined, agonizing battle with uterine cancer.

Her TED talk, “Suddenly, My Body” is one that I have returned to watch several times over, and have recommended to many friends as a pulsating, powerful performance that makes perfectly clear what many of us are coming to realize: that there is no separation between our bodies and the world around us.

Not only is it true, as Joanna Macy and Brian Swimme tell us, that we are the most recent emanations of the stardust that created the life on our planet eons ago, it is also true that our fragile bodies are porous and open, made of the air, earth and water that we move through each day.

If we poison our environment, we poison ourselves. (more…)

Reclaiming the Future for Young People … and Us All

by Robert C. Koehler

Are the bad ideas dead yet? You know, the ones that have been hollowing out the country’s soul for the last 30 years.

In Atlanta, they just indicted 35 teachers, principals and administrators, including a former superintendent, for routinely altering their students’ standardized test results — and in all likelihood this massive fraud is an aberration only because the cheaters got caught.

Everything is at stake in these tests, so perhaps it’s dawning on us that fraud — by adults — is inevitable, but there’s a bigger issue here that continues to escape public outrage: The tests are stupid. They measure virtually nothing that matters, but monopolize the classroom politically. Teachers, under enormous pressure, are forced to teach to the tests rather than, you know, teach critical thinking or creative expression; and education is reduced to something rote, linear, and boring. (more…)

Building Peace Is Building the Future…

by Robert C. Koehler

We’ve lost a war without being able to surrender — and thus divest ourselves of the consciousness that got us into it. We are unable to look honestly at what we did and why, and determine not to do it again.

My friend Catherine Menninger sent me a note the other day that began: “The days are long past when the poison of DU (depleted uranium) was our shared preoccupation. Now an even deeper poison, a soul poison, is seeping into the body politic and beyond. It is touching us all.”

Ten years later, an enormous question looms: How do we get the poison out of our system? I think that’s what atonement means.

In a lengthy report on the Iraq war, David Swanson has placed it “among the world’s worst events,” a profoundly serious allegation that makes it far more than a “mistake.” (more…)

‘I Am Because You Are’

by Robert C. Koehler

Their grief is too profound and too public. Their words have to be taken seriously — allowed to mix with the politics and the self-interest and the fear, those generic trivializers of the national conversation.

“This is a Promise we make to our precious children. Because each child, every human life is filled with promise, and though we continue to be filled with unbearable pain we choose love, belief, and hope instead of anger.”

The website is called the Sandy Hook Promise. It advances no particular agenda, except to proclaim . . . the value of life. And in so doing, the site’s organizers — residents of Newtown, Conn., wounded by the tragedy — quietly insist that this matters, not abstractly but politically. (more…)

Can We Imagine a Better Future?

by Priscilla Stuckey

A blog reader named Ray contacted me a while back to say that he shares a deep concern about climate change. In fact, he’s publishing a novel about it on his website. In his book the Arctic polar ice cap melts quickly (as we can already see) and causes more abrupt global warming than we expect. The rapid climate change leads to a collapse in agriculture, there is a surge of terrorism, and right-wing extremists stage a coup against the US government.

He was curious what I might think about his book.

I had to confess my discontent. I don’t enjoy dystopian fiction. And that’s putting it mildly. I usually don’t subject myself to it. These days, it’s getting hard to avoid, since dystopian visions always surge in popularity during a time of crisis. People sense that the world as they know it is dying, and they are frightened beyond belief — and I mean this quite literally. (more…)

Reflections on Two Years (and Counting) of New Clear Vision

With the passage of another year, we are provided with an opportunity to reflect on what was and project toward what might be. Undoubtedly, for most of the planet’s inhabitants, 2012 will be remembered as a year where the stakes got higher and the cause for alarm grew louder.

Around the world, we are seeing mass movements for change, yet also mass complacency as the issues before us grow more complex and the elite decision-makers more remote in their processes and politics.

Here at New Clear Vision, we try to help make sense of these tidings by bringing forth incisive analysis of the news of the day, all wrapped with our usual penchant for highlighting solution-oriented perspectives and cultivating a sense of grounded optimism for the future. We are under no illusions that the road ahead will be easy, nor that hopefulness alone will somehow turn things around. Rather, we take the view that positive change is more likely to occur when people are motivated toward something instead of being in retreat or apathy. (more…)

An Open Letter to the Children

by Randall Amster

Dear Children,

I know that this world must often seem confusing to you. It’s noisy, dirty, and filled with adults scurrying about their busy lives without noticing you all that much sometimes. It’s filled with rules and people telling you what to do, mostly without asking what you want to do. It’s also a world where adults teach you about all of the dangers around you, but not as much about the wonderful, beautiful things.

You see, things weren’t quite like this when we were kids. We had our rules and dangers, to be sure, but nothing like the ones you face today. Back then (which is not really that long ago) people talked to each other more, neighbors knew one another, and schools were less like factories and more like playgrounds. There were less televisions, computers, and phones calling for our attention, and there were more open spaces to play like kids are supposed to do. (more…)