Flipping the Script

Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of how life would be if things were different. Different as in better. I visit places where rivers run free and wildlife thrives, or where food is produced in ways that respect the workers and the land. I wander in a country where violence seems so unlikely I realize how much it’s a constant background threat in public life and my psyche in the USA. I spend time with friends in countries where access to housing, education, and healthcare underwrites their idealistic choices and confidence.

Or I talk to people who found in a disaster that they themselves and the community around them could be more connected, more generous, more heroic than they ever imagined. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,” the anthropologist David Graeber once said, and the climate crisis is an invitation to make almost everything differently.