Photo: "Do not forget to live," © Alexey Ivanov, iStockphoto
"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."
Albert Einstein
That wonderful quote, and others from luminaries like Churchill and Gandhi, are on an interesting website, RaisingAwareness.org.
I thought of it this morning while reading Bob Herbert's "Reviving The Dream" in the New York Times on the increasingly rabid right wing reaction - as in reactionary - to the Obama Administration's efforts to fix the problems that the Bush Administration got the world into. Mr. Herbert:
The right-wingers were crafty: You smother the dream by crippling the programs that support it, by starving the government of money to pay for them, by funneling the government’s revenues to the rich through tax cuts and other benefits, by looting the government the way gangsters loot legitimate businesses and then pleading poverty when it comes time to fund the services required by the people.
The dream he's talking about is of course the American one, the idea that normal people, working honestly, could make a decent living. Honest. Decent. Normal. It seems so far away, like a Norman Rockwell painting. Like an "I like Ike" button.
So, back to Einstein: "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." Trust the people who dug us this hole to propose solutions that would make it deeper. Obama, the man with the ladder, is trying his best to pull us out of it.
So I end my first "I forgot to post it" note, hence the nice picture above. This week I'll be rummaging through my notes and doing a bunch of quick posts. So you'll see Alexey Ivanov's photo every so often.