To get the drift, here is the introductory paragraph to MS NBC's web site: "Washington, June 30 - In back yards across the United States, the 4th of July is one of the biggest meat-eating days of the year. More than 200 million AmericansÑthree-quarters of the populationÑwill attend or host a barbecue over the long weekend. And while some might be grilling vegetables or fish, most will chow down mass amounts of burgers, dogs, wings and ribs. And few have any awareness of the ethical and environmental consequences of being a dedicated carnivore."
What is noteworthy, of course, is not so much the all too familiar content, but its presence on a major news service. The piece also says, among other things: "Rising affluence has allowed people throughout the world to alter their diets to include more meat. Over the last decade, per capita consumption of beef, pork and chicken has doubled in the world's poorer nationsÑthough it is still just one-third the level in industrial nations."
Which brings us to our theme, "Éthe unbearable slowness of change." Here we have a story about the persistence, even the strengthening, of an apparently worldwide cultural habit; a sort of backsliding anti-change; and simultaneously, the very bearer of the news publishes on a global electronic web, itself a manifestation of radical change.
Grand Canyon of life
What happens in the world is analogous to hiking down into the Grand Canyon. We are awestruck by the enormity of scale in space and time. Our knowledge about geological time deepens our experience; yet from the minuscule place we occupy on the trail, nothing around us seems to be changing except our perspective as we slowly descend into the gorge.
So it is, that for each and every one of us, the life which is our personal trail in the "canyon" of history may well be experienced from day to day as inexorably resistant to change.
Somehow, change either assaults us or invigorates us. Somehow, we either become champions of change, for better or worse, or the defenders of the status quo. What complicates things is that the PC (politically correct) stance is often a mirror of the conventionally conservative stance. In both perspectives, language must be frozen, and a party line must be adhered to.
For example, in a PC world, one may not consider the possibility that choice (about gender, about the life of the fetus) may arise out of another context than that of the rights of the individual to "self" expression; or that what we call "Self" is completely embedded in accountability to a world of other selves; to the evolution of the universe.
Consciousness, another term often used glibly to justify some particular agenda, is in reality a quality whose defining action is "paying attention" in the midst of enormously complex phenomena. When you are "paying attention", there is no possibility of boredom. You may become extremely impatient, you may find the pace of change "unbearably" slow, but you will be at the cutting edge of possibility.
Boredom
It is the bored people among us who are the symptom of a self-perpetuating problem. They are people whose spirits have been beaten into submission since childhood by cultural conditioning and the failure of their schools to "lead forth" (i.e., to educate). And they are the people who suffer most in times of cultural paradigm shifts, or who may react blindly in fear.
Just incidentally, it is the current descent of education into job training and "partnership with industry" which is undermining the possibility for genuine educational reform; for returning education to its mind expanding roots.
More anti-change. Getting worse before it can get better.
And what about patience?
The present instant contains the entirety of our experience in the world, and it never ends. For those suffering in boredom, or those suffering extreme anxiety, that instant, ironically, demands instant relief. Even those who in the present instant seek a source for great peace or great achievement, sooner or later experience insufferable impatience.
Because when we look around, and suddenly get how the world is put together, how one small deficit for "me," here, may be connected seamlessly to some horrendous large scale deficit somewhere beyond our horizon, the admonition to patience begins to wear thin.
Collective "patience" is the meal ticket of the entertainment industry and the Big Scandal. Enter O.J. Enter Monica. Nero fiddles. Kosovo burns.
Perhaps those who most feel the angst of "The Unbearable Slowness of Change" have the best chance for becoming instruments of change in our time. Everyone else seems to take fate on the chin, give up, or, much worse, revel in the darker side of human nature.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1998
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited