The original version of this post ran in January 2016.
Everything now is extreme. Political candidates and political division, mass uprisings, climate crises, extreme police brutality cases, insensitivity to race and gender, people who believe in science like it’s religion and science deniers…it all spins the head!
Wealth disparity may be the biggest extreme of all. Indeed this one extreme case may drive all the rest as “the rest of us” end up with increasingly short ends of the economic bargain.
Some believe we’re not at the bottom. How much worse does it need to get? I don’t know. It sure looks bad now.
Until I think about the extreme things people are doing to make the world a better place. We share stories about these people on the Copiosis Social Group on Facebook. There are enough good things happening around the world to write a book about. If you’re looking for rays of hope, our social page is a good place to go. For example, we share stories like these:
- There are at least five other organizations we know about directly, organizations creating new versions of human society. But far more than five are active world-wide. So many in fact, it seems to me we should have solved our problems already. Take a look at this huge list.
- How about this story of a veterinarian eating his lunch in a crate to comfort a scared dog named Graycie. Someone abandoned her. The vet is working to get her comfortable with people again so she will be adopted.
- There’s the story of 300 plumbers voluntarily installing water filters in Flint, for free. They installed water filters and new faucets in 1,100 homes in a single day. An international union and a trade group representing plumbing manufacturers donated the money, faucets and supplies to make it happen.
There are so many of these stories shared on our social page, I’m somewhat chagrined that we haven’t launched our NBR award accounts for such acts yet. One thing at a time. There is only so much volunteer organizations can do. But we’ll get to it.
It’s nice to know that even in a time of extremes, there are small, not-so-random acts of kindness still going on.