2010s stretch before us

Dec. 31, 2009

Dear Julie,

It's difficult at almost any age to project into the future and imagine yourself and your situation 10 years from now. Ten years ago, purveyors of Armageddon predicted that computers would stop working at midnight 2000, sending the world into chaos. Nothing happened.

In the intervening 10 years America started two wars, elected a president of the United States who is half black and almost bankrupted itself,

Anyone who saw any of that coming is truly a seer.

We can't know what will happen in the next 10 years, but we can project how we as individuals and as a people want to live those years.

Twenty-first century imperialism creates the conflict in the new movie "Avatar." Scientists and warriors from a dying planet land on another planet's moon, Pandora, to extract a mineral that could solve their planet's energy crisis. This story has been told on Earth many times and in many places. Pandora's indigenous people, the Na'vi, live harmoniously with their world, just as Native Americans lived before they were pushed back, rounded up and placated with mining and casino licenses, their sacred knowledge ignored.

"I see you,' the Na'vi say when they encounter someone who understands how to live. There are people on Earth who do the same.

Trapped in our steel and chrome cubicles, we are sensing that living with the Earth is not only a better way to live, it is the necessary way to live.

Totalitarian regimes are in trouble. Communication technologies have undermined the control necessary to render a people powerless. Not that attempts to control our minds aren't occurring all the time. That's what television does best. But when the truth is communicated, those who would control others become powerless themselves.

We are all here because we want to be. What is it we want? To be rescued from ourselves? The answer is in a Hopi proverb: "We are the ones we've been waiting for."

The writer Oriah House calls the period between Christmas and New Year's Day a "luminal time" -- "a time in-between what was and what is to come," a time of not knowing, of being on the brink.

The 2010s stretch before us like the Milky Way, full of mystery and opportunities to learn and change. In our hearts we know that violence is never an answer, that compassion is the highest creed, that we are all brothers and sisters, that damaging any part of God's creation damages us all, and that nurturing any part of God's creation nurtures us all.

Those of us who have rung in new decades before say skip the shots and go right for the champagne. The 2010s party is about to begin.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.