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| Tatiana Blokhina, Autumn in Bolkhov. Elektrostal Artists exhibition, 2012. |
There is nothing new about imagining the world as a village. But today that image really struck me.
It came as I saw the photos and videos coming from Venezuela, with earthquake survivors' faces filling the frames with their personal accounts of disaster. That story on my news feed was followed immediately by the U.S. president blaming vandals for the National Mall's Reflecting Pool scandal, and his vice president and secretary of state spinning their awkward interpretations of war and not-war and maybe-again-war with Iran.
All that was soon followed by accounts of Europe's record-breaking heatwaves. (But nothing about South Asia.)
Speaking just for myself, maybe it takes witnessing disasters—earthquakes, famines, scenes of rubble-filled streets and their desperate inhabitants—to bring the world into human scale. But then, seen in that immediate scale, how do I regard the world's potentates and their conceits? Suddenly Trump, Putin, and other would-be global bigshots can be seen shrunk down to their true scale, not the puffed-up versions they want us to admire or fear. What right do they have—do we grant them—to pollute our village and put our neighbors and ourselves in danger?
I still don't advocate caricaturizing or demonizing them. But let's expose their imperial pretensions, whether they're peddling white Christian nationalism or the equally toxic Russian World ... or whatever actual demon is telling them and us that all our problems would go away if we saw our village neighbors as faceless "others."
We're going through a time when the vision of a global village may seem hopelessly idealistic. But ... is it nevertheless a valid vision? Or, if we surrender it in favor of a more cynical view, what keeps us from ending up behaving as apologists for the supposed realism of raw power, aided by increasingly clever tools of persuasion and disinformation?
Some of us are wonderful at bringing visions to life, whether through imaginative policy studies or through creative arts. Others are more suited to analyzing and exposing the forces which seek to pull down such visions in favor of passivity and mutual suspicion. Still others have the gift of keeping practitioners of these two different approaches in loving contact with each other, so that none of us find ourselves abandoned to disillusionment or resignation.
That's where I hope trustworthy faith communities can find a unique and urgent role.
Have you found such a home? Tell me about it!
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| Aleksandr Ilichev, North South East West, Elektrostal Palette exhibition, 2012. |
Related:
On cynicism, benefit of the doubt (part one).
Bill Jolliff with Jacob Jolliff, Love All Around This World, as presented to our students in Elektrostal, Russia. (Jacob's Web site.)
Living without lying, part one, part two.
Not to add to our anxieties, but ... why does physicist Carlo Rovelli think we're nearing nuclear apocalypse?
Ellen O'Connell Whittet notices that literacy might be declining but bookstores are booming.
For those of us who wonder if it's really God speaking, Becky Ankeny considers "how Jesus treats people."
Speaking of writing with vision, here's Nancy Thomas on being "Clothed with Joy."
Denmark's Michelle Birkballe and friends cover Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home."
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