Do we fully understand the challenge - and opportunity - we face?

I think that, awaiting the New Millennium, we Americans lived a mixed dream: Our destiny would be all humanity's, a world of peace and prosperity - our reward for being inventive, generous, right-minded.  Meanwhile, we overlooked greed, hubris and conceit in our national psyche - and serious, impending threats.

Horrific terrorism brought reality.  Yet, terrorism now blinds us.

We see bin Laden's dark gambit to bring down civilization; but, in amateurish, narrow focus, our leaders are preoccupied, apparently oblivious that Earth today signals, in fact, irreversible catastrophes: Global warming. Nuclear war, accident- and sabotage-prone nuclear facilities. Population explosion. Wholesale destruction of ecosystems and species…  Unattended, any of these super-threats can accomplish Osama's intent of annihilation.

Why are we not heeding?  Because an ethos of heedlessness pervades Washington?  Because hovering behind the scenes are uncontrolled entities - PACs, multinational corporations, Enrons, campaign-finance scandals, energy task forces?  Such deviousness dumbs-down morality, thwarts statesmanship, compromises democracy.  We dream on - now in nightmare - and do not vaguely recognize the grave depth of our epochal 21^st Century.

What then has been our predictable, national strategy?  We press war unilaterally - united in our anger, knowing that defeat of terrorism is imperative.  Yet, we also know that war never can neutralize rancor among Moslems, Jews and Christians; between squalor and wealth, ancient and modern.  For how many decades patriotism and entrenched politics can keep an ill-defined war going, and whether it will bleed into endless tragedy, we cannot predict.

One thing is obvious: America is muddling downward just when we should anticipate an ascendancy of order and beauty.  We can foresee only war, possible loss of liberties and democracy at home, anarchy still breeding among hopeless people abroad - all balanced against Utopian dreams for civilization.  Will we ever retrieve our destiny?


A vast, national reappraisal is over-due; and actually, in fact, we can turn nightmare into opportunity if we address our terrible problems and crude policies with honest analysis.

Thus, seen clearly, the battlefield is at home.  We already devise tentative dispersions: Hidden Vice Presidents. Shadow governments. Corporations that scatter their databases across the nation; yet ultimately, our nuclear plants are imperiled; our populace vulnerable to physical sabotage and biological and chemical attack; our food, water and energy supplies open to devastation.  Moreover, since millions worldwide regard us with seething hostility, militarily we may never totally eradicate lurking, maniacal attacks from abroad.

So, truth is, in a continuing terrorist jihad we can afford absolutely no homeland mega-targets - governmental, industrial, cities or institutions - and a nearly unbelievably radical, massive and protracted defensive strategy becomes inevitable: We will discover that we must dismantle. Redesign better technology. Rebuild more safely, more spread-out.  In coming years we can be forced to thus reconstitute our complete technological, institutional and societal infrastructure. If such an epochal transfiguration seems incomprehensible, nonetheless it will develop either rationally or rampantly - and better sooner than later.


However, most importantly, this monumental challenge can mark a transcendent turning point.  I believe that it presents a most hopeful paradox: Distress, frenetic trauma, can become positive energy, opportunity.  As in the creative rebuilding after World War II, we can use our time of disarray to discard destructive tools and habits and adopt fresh, humane ones for a grand rejuvenation of civilization. With intelligence, sensitivity and vision, we can grasp resounding opportunity.

Yet, great statesmanship will be required.  Cleaning our own political house and achieving compassionate domestic and foreign policies will allow us to suggest reconstitution of others' flawed societal orders. Further, by promoting, for example, clean, renewable energy - solar, wind, geothermal, etc. - our threatening, worn-out oil and nuclear technologies and their politics which corrupt socially and environmentally worldwide can be replaced.  In fact, such programs can help to usher in a new, prosperous, world economy.  And fortunately, advances now unimaginable are possible with the help of simplified technologies paired with a growing wave of sophisticated, scientific developments and entrepreneurial ideas.  Populations can become self-sufficiently independent of energy tyranny and economic subservience.  Poverty can be abolished.  Urban congestion phased out in harmony with nature.  In addition, if we adopt exciting educational programs using new, interconnecting communications, a diverse, colorful world society can emerge - a culture of rejuvenating ideals, wisdom, craftsmanship and spirit.

Through such wise design, we - or must it be our children? - can move the world from despair to peace.  Will America waste this moment in shortsighted, divisive, tactical reactions?  Or, will we clear our heads, unify for the New Millennium and build strategically within a brighter, humane dimension?

In the Nineteen-thirties, I saw a film based upon an H.G. Wells novel, "The Shape of Things to Come".  The "Final War" had started in 1940 and ended by 1960.  Although pestilence had reduced civilization to hovels of people oppressed by local warlords, technology was revived (ironically, in the Persian Gulf) by a visionary, master scientist who sent fleets of huge planes to subdue the tyrants with "sleep bombs".  Civilization was rebuilt in marvelous cities of glass towers. 

A few years after seeing that film, in combat in Germany I wound a lurching jeep through the rubble streets, the vast moonscape of bombed-out Hanover.  And today, as I view the rubble of the Trade Center Twin Towers, there I see again the horrendous images from a war over half a century ago.  On television, I see present-day Afghanis wretchedly subsisting in shattered cities ruled by warlords and I envision people I saw in caves along the Seine River in France in 1945.  What does it mean?  I ponder the form the World's and our own renewal has taken from oppression, poverty and war in the past fifty years:

As for that parallel universe, the Utopian fantasy of the Wells film, I cannot recall how humanity was transformed, nor how it might relate to today's reality.  Had labor been eliminated by robots and automated factories?  Was a self-sufficient populace democratically independent and free of exploitation?  Were they freshly aware of the beautiful diversity of our human heritage?  Did they live in colorful racial harmony?  Did they revive ancient dances, games and sports?  (Sports now are big business and "spectator activity" - an oxymoron.)

So, if such visionary fantasy foretells real-life possibilities, then the most important question is did art, philosophy and faith finally flourish with a renewed awe of life in a rejuvenated environment?  Translated to our times, we must ask, what is the real shape of our world today?  Have we realized any Utopian dreams?  Europe revived with help from our far-sighted Marshall Plan and we have rebuilt from both the Great Depression and World War II, but how have the World and we fared with contemporary political and social habits and modern technology?

History:  War technology changed after WWII.  My own life possibly was saved by our nation dropping the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.  My outfit, just returned from Europe, was to cross the Pacific as part of a suicidal assault on the Japanese mainland.  But at what price the saving of war casualties?  All of humanity soon was, and still is, threatened with thousands of nuclear warheads.  Soon, nuclear plants, too, were built (happily proclaimed to give us "electricity too cheap to meter") and all of these dangerous, fissionable monstrosities now deteriorate.  The reactors' aging wastes accumulate and are difficult to store, impossible to protect.  Further, in a murky future of deteriorating societal changes spanning future eons of radiation life, weapons and plants alike might come under control of incompetent or corrupting operators.  And there are other, present-day dangers: Simple, daily "human error". Lax security policies. Sabotage.  If we add our decades-long military-industrial development, we see that civilization is besieged by a gigantic technological force, a force and infrastructure of super-developed science mainly driven by faceless, corporate entities pursuing only one, amoral economic imperative - monetary profits for a few.

Yet, humanity is not in the grip of just "high-tech" culture.  I clearly recall a clean, silent, electric auto when I was a youth, driven by the wife of our town's only millionaire; but I also remember vaguely the early days of Henry Ford's ubiquitous Model Ts, and our beginning reliance upon a filthy oil economy.  In 1930s New York City, the people of the city found themselves trapped in a nightmare of Robert Moses' marvelous but ever-expanding automobile boulevards and bridges.  His technology consumed the city, glutting it with automobiles, creating boxed-in ghettos that are decaying to this day.  When confronted with a humanity he despised, he said sarcastically, "Let them go to the Rockies".  Then, he extended his paradoxical dream across the nation.  Ultimately, Los Angeles' efficient electric tram system was bought-out by an automobile corporation, only to be "retired" in favor of its own diesel buses.  Of course, that city's notorious smog and impacted highways are now a nation-wide legacy.  Inescapable.  I recently visited my grandson who ironically has bought a contemporary home nearly two miles high in the Rockies.  The drive is beautiful.  Yet, the highway is crowded, dangerous.  The crystalline air, too thin to withstand abuse, is polluted from automobile fumes.

We are suffering from archaic technologies, but what of the rest of the World?  Fifty years ago, America aided Europe and was a symbol for renewal.  Today, to the Afghanis, Palestinians and many others, America is an exploiter of miseries.  As it shuns railways and clean, rapid mass transit, its relentless quest for oil to supply its antiquated infrastructure of automobiles, trucks and airplanes has become a conquest conducted by a powerful elite who oversee the installation, worldwide, of ruthless dictators.  Those elite are politicians, "statesmen" doing the bidding of multinational corporations and cartels.

And I realize: Multinational corporations and cartels are the most powerful forces now governing humanity - in many cases stronger than nations.  They push only their own aggressive agendas, promoting commercialism, consumerism and the ravaging of the Earth's resources (of which they claim ownership) with accompanying pollution.  Their forays often result in worldwide instability.  Yet, it is dangerous that they are ephemeral: They are organizational structures, phantom, immaterial entities - virtual machines for making profits.  Despite their very real plants, laborers and products, they exist operationally only on paper and as hired management, which engages in political intrigue and is shielded by protective property laws.*^{see footnote}  They represent investors - or worse, secondary traders - who may or may not keep themselves responsibly informed about the larger effects of their operations.

* Footnote:  Their boards, nevertheless, brazenly claim for the organization - a theoretical body - the constitutional rights of live, individual citizens.  They assert these claims when foisting their products on the public, as in the case of advertising "rights" exercised by tobacco companies; or, when molding the minds of the naive, as in the entertainment industry's pandering to the lowest common denominator in taste and morality; or in the promotion of gas-guzzling SUVs by the auto industry.

Commerce is necessary if billions of people are to trade services and goods and be prosperous; yet, monopoly stifles that.  Is the hidden, unaccountable power wielded by mega-business interests a benefit either to the world or to us?  One obvious answer is that the oil cartels' conquest of the Middle East has brought us many enemies, and now we suffer a manic, terrifying counter-action.

So, finally, I recall the ending of the film: a titanic struggle by an artist against the firing of a manned rocket to the Moon.  He protested that Earth had not resolved its own problems sufficiently to justify the hubris of conquering and "civilizing" a whole Cosmos.

After combat I became an artist, "creating insight"; a teacher, encouraging people to probe for insight; and, by default, a member of the so-called "Greatest Generation", now expected - especially, given our present, national trauma - to supply insight.

So, here is my humble best: (1) My generation - myself included - naïvely "generated" our present national population explosion. (2) My generation's leaders led our nation into calamities such as Vietnam and into blunders, such as the non-ending Persian Gulf War. (3) My generation super-developed mega-technologies based upon both filthy, Nineteenth Century fossil fuels and (4) fearsome Twentieth Century nuclear fission…first, warheads in obscene abundance, then dangerous nuclear power.  Was it all visionless expediency?

Therefore, in this serious confession (which might make one wonder about the term, "Greatest Generation") I shall pointedly reveal three, long-held, personal concerns.  They are overriding problems of our age that - regardless of terrorist threats - hover as calamities-in-the-making: (1) Super-politics based on power and greed which are disastrously exploiting and exacerbating all. (2) Mega-technologies which threaten Earth and humanity alike. (3) Rampant population growth, causing overwhelming ecological stress. 

Terrorists allow us little time for composure, so their present, tactical challenge presents probably the most horrific roulette spin of human history . . . If, as seems possible, terrorism and our own war against it lead to the destabilization of all society . . . If our attention and energies are drained . . . If we are diverted from challenging the impending Mega-Threats facing the World . . .

As to the present threat, no one has clear answers.  Wise leadership and a great deal of creative, perceptive imagination are in order.  For this reactive, tactical war, we must realize that terrorism is a regenerating state of mind.  It is inflamed anger and hatred bred in ignorance, poverty, oppression, hopelessness. And terrorism inevitably breeds in those places where democratic, economic self-sufficiency is not even a dream. We must know that whether or not our bombing and high-tech commando raids miraculously eliminate this generation of terrorists worldwide, others will follow endlessly, inevitably, unless humane, basic conditions become accessible to the whole world community, including our own, fragmented society.  We therefore need supersensitive strategy beyond mere reactive tactics.

We must consider and plan, then, for the more distant but proximate future.

We can choose to look beyond - toward a strategic peace:
History overtakes us: Our technology, which now is obviously as vulnerable as it is sophisticated-but-out-of-scale-with-humanity, has been turned against our own glass towers in the apocalyptic deaths of thousands of loved ones.  Our leaders contemplate "infinite justice".  Osama bin Laden promises the same.  In a strange and convoluted Mobius loop dream, we are challenged to rebuild a civilization not yet defeated. 

It seems that few people have even thought of the "shape of the future" after the next fifty years.  Nonetheless, we cannot sit still for our own demise.  So we must fight a "war" of some sort while praying that our leaders can be wise and restrained enough that they not spread global virulence against us.

However, when viewing our world at the far end of this action, we can be certain that our present, expedient measures will have moved us little - if at all - toward a world we desire and our children deserve.  Annihilating terrorists will not change the habits of the powerful from trampling the weak and building within the hearts of the helpless more hatred, gestating ever more terrorists.  For, not only has war technology changed, but also warfare.  Today, our high-tech war machines are taxed by primitive-but-sophisticated tribesmen who fight modern wars for medieval reasons and with ancient passion.  It is no longer a cliche' to say that our fight must be for the hearts of people.  Any longer-range war must be fought for the good of humanity and never for the perpetuation of debilitating political and economic power grabs such as have marked our history.  We must build a totally new strategy - not just for war but for a cohesive, nurturing civilization. 

DEVISE TACTICS FOR WAR, BUT STRATEGIZE FOR HUMANITY
Are our leaders capable of the clear visionary thinking - the massive reconsideration - necessary strategically to turn the present cataclysm to the good?  In the past fifty years we have had too many political leaders of mediocre vision; for the next fifty we need visionaries who project human life on Earth in terms of hope and promise rather than just bigger-and-better mega-technology and economic hegemony.  Our President, just before the attack, displayed great arrogance in our name toward a world anxious about global survival.  He threatened the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; ignored the World Conference on Racism; rejected the Kyoto Initiative, designed to slow global warming.  He will not long prevail politically if we fight terrorists with a secret agenda of extending oil pipelines, or for any other rapacious purpose.  In fact lacking any promising, imaginative future vision, our nation, itself, will sustain no positive presence in the World.

Can we act?  There are obvious possibilities upon which we can insist.  Diplomatically, we can have a foreign policy that looks outwardly and beneficently at the entire World - one promising democracy and self-sufficiency for all.  It is historical fact that America has installed ruthless dictators and fought wars to protect our oil interests.  A decade ago such foreign policy considerations led us into the Gulf War and not so coincidentally to bin Laden's present, passionate hatred; and U.S.-backed dictators have stirred radicalized indignation worldwide.  However, a generous, regenerative attitude such as we instituted toward Europe after WWII might convince the Third World of our concern, compassion and goodwill.  This is vital regarding the Afghani people if they are to be our supporters in any war against the Taliban.  It also is essential for Palestinians and Israelis alike to believe that we support area-wide peace and redevelopment.

DEFINING THE THREATS
Our new generation faces an epic task.  Even before the horrendous terrorist event we could recite a long series of endemic, debilitating threats - none of which we were addressing well - all of which the Earth surely, inevitably will face: Global warming. Over-population. Disheveled, theft-prone nuclear arsenals and deteriorating nuclear plants. AIDS. Racism. Water shortages worldwide. Poverty and starvation, et al.  Finally, if the fourth terrorist plane was conceivably carrying germs or chemicals or heading for Three Mile Island, we now face an imminent danger both to our populace and our whole, technological infrastructure. A single nuclear reactor, whether melted down by terrorists or the "human error" of inept or subversive operators in a murky future, portends hundreds of thousands dead and vast parts of our country rendered unlivable for eons.

OBVIOUS TARGETS AND TACTICAL DEFENSE

HUMAN-SCALE, MAGNANIMOUS SOLUTIONS
Is massive dispersal and redesign impossible, too costly?  If we pair our dispersal with a wise, strategic objective, fresh, human-scale, close-to-home technology, there can be vast benefits besides highly increased safety from attack.  A great economic and social rejuvenation can follow.  A huge, long-range effort, recalling both our own New Deal recovery days and Europe's remarkable rebuilding after World War II, will create growth for our faltering economy.  With fresh industries, we will supply newly-simplified, elegant, 21^st Century technology worldwide.  With material needs being met at every level and dire poverty vanquished, the Earth's population will experience a refreshed, self-reliant vitality.  Society and environment will emerge transfigured.  Collateral rewards: everything dispersed with no centralized targets - and our bold, reorganizing tactics will have turned into an effective strategy for a better world.

All of this can become reality, because much now unimaginable is possible with the help of close-to-home infrastructure, scientific advances and fresh entrepreneurial ideas.  As Vice President Al Gore wrote in 1999, "More than at any other time in history, new discoveries are making it possible to renew our oldest aspirations - eradicating disease, guaranteeing freedom, giving every child a quality education, and lifting up our families.  In a world once limited by borders and geography, the only limits we face today are the limits of our own imagination."* *(Al Gore, introduction to the Tenth Annual Discover Awards, "Discover" magazine, July 1999, page 85.)

Among entrepreneurial ideas, for example, is the production and marketing of energy.  We are collectively and individually dependent upon raw energy.  Energy grows food, synthesizes materials, runs industries and businesses big and small.  Yet, it is a commodity which can be either essentially free to all or, presently the case, purchased expensively from cartels and cabals and at the added price of political intrigue, corruption of the environment, worldwide inequities and instability.  Most importantly, however, energy's total, vital productiveness, if free, could become a great gift of self-sufficiency to humanity.  How can it become relatively free?  Renewable energy in close-to-home, neighborhood solar parks, city-run wind farms, and passive solar heat from south-facing windows in homes, office buildings and other structures, would remove it from the "ownership" of cartels.  If energy self-sufficiency for cities, neighborhoods and individual citizens can become commonplace, the dominion of the powerbrokers who finesse us into wars will fade. Given relatively free energy, we will have created a cleaner environment, democratic, economic independence, and self-sufficiency for all.

Thus, democratic self-sufficiency through safe, relatively free and nonpolluting energy must evolve.  Sources and applications are numerous.  There is wind potential enough on the barren Texas plains for five times the state's present energy usage; and noonday sunshine yields 1.8 horsepower per square meter.  As our power base is being reconstituted, wind generators can be built and dispersed, not just in California, North Dakota and the Niagara frontier, but in every state and nation.  And solar collectors can be installed on most of the World's roofs to energize storage fuel cells powering pollution-free automobiles, hydroponic gardens, heat, light and appliances.  Also, geo-thermal, ocean-thermal, wave- and tidal-generators are passive technologies awaiting adoption.  All are simple systems, not over-stressed super-science; yet, sophisticated science also will contribute.  Although even the newly proposed "safe", pebble-bed nuclear power plants cannot answer storage, theft or sabotage problems, nonetheless, superconductors, microwave and laser technology all do hold promise.  Furthermore, a Manhattan Project-sized research and development effort might produce results on a Tomak fusion reactor running on heavy water, safe, and perhaps small enough for a neighborhood - and virtually non-polluting.  Add automation and computerized robotics, and civilization should be able to sustain itself generously beyond the Mega-Threats now encroaching upon us.

POLICIES AND ACTIONS
In the societal domain, too, there are new initiatives.  Widespread psychological repercussions from the horrifying attack offered an example: When asked whether the Twin Towers should be rebuilt, the traumatized NY City Fire Chief poignantly answered, "Who would occupy them?"  His tortured pause hinted at an emptying of mega-buildings, if not mega-cities..  Do we perceive in this a reordering, a possible resizing of technology and society to truly human dimensions? Walking-distance shopping, entertainment and work. Friendly neighborhoods. A back-to-the-land movement where people might live in peace in dispersed, self-sufficient communities - perhaps old-fashioned - immune to concentrated attack.  Further, our hospitals, schools, businesses and institutions could be strategically fragmented into neighborhoods.

A nostalgic looking-back at more naturally vigorous, animated living habits could put us in touch with historic values.  The British, in WWII, were forced to send their children to makeshift schools in barns in the countryside to protect them from the terror of Hitler's V-2 rockets.  This led to a revolution in teaching: open classrooms and independent, personal projects for children traditionally instructed within an academic rigor mortis. Maybe for us an ethos will regenerate, finding simple rewards in simple virtues and helping us to survive our own moral decay.

A reader of an early draft of this writing commented that we must drop the Earth's population to 1 billion or less and limit the reproductive capacities of self-perpetuating martyrs.  We might accomplish this with a massive war of mutual annihilation  - nuclear a distinct possibility - with our people and environment decimated, theirs equally, and the entire World sacrificed to radiation, disease and starvation.  Or perhaps we can simply ignore global warming with the same results.  Or AIDS.  Or more imaginatively continue to allow tobacco companies to kill generations of youth - but this is too slow.  On-the-other-hand, if we avoid such mega-catastrophes, the World's masses finally might awaken to the miseries caused by overpopulation and self-regulate.  But as with everything else concerning the huge problems of our times, we can only try with whatever means - education? democratic discussion? the raising of living standards? - to bring sanity to madness.

Thus, the present, frighteningly traumatic time becomes a rare chance of universally sharpened awareness in which we collectively can aspire and shape our political and moral landscape.  We can save our natural heritage of democracy, revive our own environment and be a bold model for the World, offering it democratic rule and self-sufficiency.  Only then can we afford the hubris to attempt to reorient the rest of humanity.  Meanwhile, our younger generation will be forced (perhaps for the better) to live with intelligence and courage through our present calamitous problems.  If they are to command the World's complex, underlying, moral, economic, political and societal forces, they must know humanity, history, science, art.  Further, if liberating possibilities of renewal are sown in their minds, they will meet the challenge of building a beautiful, new civilization.  Then, they will deserve the title, "The Greatest Generation".

1. Implement meaningful disarmament treaties.


2. Dismantle both our nuclear power plants and our nuclear, biological and chemical arsenals, worldwide.


3. Give up carbon fuels - oil, coal, natural gas - in order to protect rather than ravish our Earth and its inhabitants.


4. Develop clean, close-to-home energy sources for democratic, economic and societal independence.


5. Reach out to poor and oppressed nations, groups and individuals - support democracy.


6. Limit population growth.


7. Build in small, self-sufficient units, not mega-units; take pride in elegant, simple tools, crafts and living.


8. Value small businesses and not equate corporate capitalism with democracy.


9. Cherish, protect and restore our natural environment, which gives us life.


10. Reclaim democratic power for the people from special interests through election law reform.