The Big Issue

The Big Issue

Can we love others as much as God loves us?

If you want to change the world - they say - start with yourself. 

What is the biggest issue facing mankind today? Mankind.

The populist politicians in Europe want to send back all the immigrants to where they came from. Unfortunately, where they came from no longer exists; or it's no longer sustainable, even for those who remain there. So we have homelessness and people living on the streets of even quite small towns. Those of you familiar with the scene in UK will know what I mean when I mention The Big Issue. It's the acceptable facing of begging : begging for a better deal.

But immigration isn't the biggest issue. Yes, migration is happening all around the world, on an unprecedented scale. Historically, migration has always followed wars. Sometimes whole peoples were taken captive and became slaves to serve the conquering nation. Think of the Hittites in the Bible, not to mention the Israelites - slaves in Egypt or exiles in Babylon. Has it ever occurred to you that many of the peoples of Eastern Europe have names which signify a servile condition? The Slavs, the Serbs – the very names speak of slavery and serfdom – the result of ethnic cleansing and people movement. But migration is just a side issue to an even bigger global problem: that's right: global warming; climate change.

Today the biggest engine of the movement of peoples is the change in climate, which fuels economic displacement as well as continuing to generate all the traditional types of religious and political enmities, often expressed in racial terms.

So of course, good-natured people are out on the streets in the prosperous city centers of the west, protesting in the strongest terms about the slow pace of bringing down carbon emissions; super-gluing themselves to diesel-fueled buses to make a point. And of course, they are right. We need to change our habits and our ways of doing things: give up polluting energy sources; find alternative raw materials; stop manufacturing plastics which resist recycling or bio-degradation: achieve carbon neutrality. All the slogans.

Not all the slogans are about changes in behavior however. There's still a strong undercurrent of tolerance for the way things are – even towards things that in truth are intolerable: tolerance for unbridled luxury; tolerance for keeping hidden the full extent of damage done to the environment by extracting rare materials, so that we can have the latest generation of smartphones, without feeling guilty; tolerance for all sorts of abuses on other human beings; tolerance for institutional dishonesty.

The global warming which has led to climate change on the unprecedented scale we see today is not a sudden outbreak. At its root are centuries, even millennia, of human selfishness and blind disregard for the warning signals. Since men began hunting edible species to the point of destruction, cutting down forests to clear the way for raising cash crops, the planet has been continuously abused and degraded. The children have been paying for the sins of the fathers. But we have to get to the root of the problem: the biggest issue of all: man's own worst enemy: mankind; ourselves. Recognizing the disconnect between what we want, consciously, which is positive, and what we actually do, unconsciously, which is so often destructive.

This isn't a call to swallow a collective suicide pill though. It's just a request to think bigger than mere carbon neutrality. We have to devise and apply a global test of conscience: and the test is this: how far are we, on balance, genuinely altruistic? Do we really think about what effect our actions may have on other people at every moment of our lives? Where do our choices rank on a scale of altruism?

The enthusiasts for climate reform are talking about becoming carbon neutral by 2025. But first, we have to become nuisance neutral: to cause less offense to others than they do to us. So my slogan is: let's become altruism positive on a global scale by 2026!!! Because if we don't, the world itself as we know it is going to be intolerable. Let's change the world by our own choices before it changes itself so much as to become unrecognizable even to the best of friends of the earth. (Alec)