“THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA”, by Hazel Henderson

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Hazel Henderson© 2022

Mid the horrors of suffering of innocent Ukrainian children, and as one who personally experienced my childhood in air raid shelters, sirens, whistling of exploding bombs in the Battle of Britain, now is the time, as in this new book The Dawn of a New Era of Wellbeing” by Ervin Laszlo, to amplify all our visions of positive futures for our human family, celebrating love over fear and peace over violence. Value-creation for our common future has nothing to do with GDP, as Daisaku Ikeda, leader of the millions of peace-loving Buddhists of Soka Gakkai International, my co-author of “Planetary Citizenship” points out in his latest 2021 Peace Proposal “Value Creation in a Time of Crisis”.

Our global mass media continues manipulating our experience with greater technical powers of persuasion —-steering our interpretations, challenging our very identities.  We all live in “Mediocracies and their Attention Economies“, viewing the current mad outburst of toxic masculinity, primitive blood-letting which has now ended the former global liberal democratic multi-literalism—those agreements and treaties which buttressed our prosperity and lives since World War II. As US President Biden reminded us, democracy is fragile and we must exercise our rights to full participation in self-governance and overcome in our own society, the inequality, racial and gender divisions and acknowledge that we are the only nation of immigrants, still a beacon for many, and yet our successes also caused genocidal harm to this continent’s original native peoples.

This new era that humanity has now entered has been called the Age of the Anthropocene, where we now dominate the fate of other species and disrupted the temperate climate on which we have thrived.  It will determine whether we are a species fit to survive or join the 6th Great Extinction we helped cause. Will we learn that we are one species, totally- interdependent with all other species on this planet we have endangered by our inadequate collective cognition?  Our dependence of fossil fuels, nuclear power, and digging in the Earth, now requires us to look up at our Sun, and use our available knowledge and technologies to accelerate the evolutionary transition I described in “The Politics of the Solar Age” in 1981.

What we are experiencing is no horror movie or conspiracy peddled for profit by Hollywood and social media giants and their outrage-inducing algorithmic lies. The real blood of children and the agony of their mothers and families must be faced squarely and requires re-thinking our belief systems still based on early tribal lives competing for territory as hunter-gathers, killing or being killed by other tribes, animals, and the raw untamed power of nature.

To survive in this new era, our future must be radically different from our past in fundamental ways.  We must overcome centuries of dominant patriarchies to release the suppressed life-giving creativity of women to re-design peaceful futures together with the support of their loving sons and younger brothers. This peaceful, collective leadership is embodied in the 45-year-old Volodymyr Zelenskyy facing down the fake masculinity of the Russian KGB and their mob-rule of Vladimir Putin.

Media editors and content curators on the air and online must now shed their narrow coverage favoring elites and their categories, conventional news stories (if it bleeds, it leads) adding to their conventional news sources the many new interpretations of events, history, and ignored realities and alternative paths to our future.  Markets and money must become honest, crony capitalism mistaking money for real wealth and its form of globalization must never again be steered by faulty, price-based metrics, as I describe in “Fixing the Money Meme”  and “Economists Learning From Futurists”.  Prices are still a function of human ignorance, ignoring many social costs as we show in “Ending Externalities: Toward Full-Spectrum Accounting“ (2014).

We must purge ourselves of notions and cruelties described in “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontent”, (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson and how they enforce racism, sexism and polarization. Only recognizing the dignity of all people and respect for our life-affirming potential, framed by cooperation at all levels, can save us from extinction. Media editors can show humanity’s progress toward maturity, wider awareness of our true condition on Earth with all life forms, powered by the free photons daily from our Mother Star: The Sun.  My “Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age” (2014) has tracked the evolutionary changes annually since 2009 in our “Green Transition Scoreboard®” and now confirmed by thousands of voluntary scientists who compile the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). Media editors avoided climate science at the behest of their power and profit-seeking media empire owners, from Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg.

We must no longer keep re-playing the old movies and stories, or shock jocks glorifying our worst behavior. Instead, we can set old records straight and celebrate the positive ethical progress that humans have achieved, beginning by focusing on our earliest acceptance of our mutual interdependence: The Golden Rule: do as you would be done by. For centuries, sages and spiritual visionaries from Confucius to Buddha, Jesus, Muhammed, and most of the world’s indigenous peoples and most religious traditions have lived by the Golden Rule.

Fast-forward to the year 1215 in England’s Magna Carta, still the basis of many state constitutions, which proclaimed The Writ of Habeas Corpus which affirms that all humans own their own bodies, now including our brains and personal information.  By1946 the newly formed United Nations, with the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  In 2000, at the Peace Palace in The Hague the Earth Charter’s 16 Principles of Human Responsibilities www.earthcharter.org was launched. In 2015 the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by 193 member nations and are beginning to replace GDP.

As philosopher Barbara Marx Hubbard, author of Conscious Evolution (1998) and other books always reminded us: we are a young species on this planet, tested as we strive to reach maturity and wisdom required for our survival. So, let’s keep up our courage and honor the love and bravery of Ukrainians and all those people who protest Putin’s barbarity, in all countries including those in Russia.  Our media diets can be balanced beyond the necessary scenes of carnage and destruction to which we must bear witness. Here are some positive, viable, and needed alternative futures for our common good:

All who care about such futures, please add to this list, and help circulate these lessons renewing our love and faith in a life-affirming common future!

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