This essay,
2001 - One Year Later,
is the companion piece to
2001 - A Week Before.
If there ever was a year when people stopped taking the quality of life
on our planet for granted, it was 2001. If there ever was a year when
all countries realized their interdependence with one another, it was
2001. If there ever was a year when we all saw that our real wealth is
in each other and not on Wall Street, it was 2001.
The Good Lord (it is said) works in strange ways. And in many ways,
2001 was a strange year. Even so, I notice that ultimately I am the
arbiter of what is strange and what is not strange in my universe.
There was an experiment comparing rats' intelligence to humans'. A
piece of cheese was put at the end of one of four tunnels of a maze.
Rats and humans then navigated the maze to find the cheese. But once
the cheese was found, the experimenters moved it to the end of a
different tunnel.
The difference between rats and humans, they discovered, was that once
humans find cheese at the end of a tunnel, they remember it, then they
go down that same tunnel again forever, regardless of whether the
cheese is there again, or not. A rat, however, is only interested in
cheese. And to find it, a rat will try different tunnels. A rat will
do whatever it takes to get the cheese - including giving up that which
it already knows.
If I learned anything in 2001, it was secondarily that we as a global
community need to rework what we know about the viability of life for
everyone on our planet. Primarily, what I learned in 2001 is that it is
an act of generosity to give up our unholy righteousness in order to
create - from new - the context for a world that works for everyone.