eThoughts : Our Problems: Global or Local?

Part of the series It’s All Been Said Before™ (© 2006), a division of Book-In-A-Drawer Publications.™

Once again this morning I awoke to the neighbor’s dogs on my property tearing up part of my new redwood deck trying to get at something underneath. The damage is about $150, but the owner knows and the owner has done nothing (telling me he’ll pen them, but then they’ll bark—like those are my choices).

Our problems are not just global, they are also local. Those local problems are the pattern of discourteous display and trespass in our homes and in our neighborhoods and in our communities. And they occur everyday. And these draculean behaviors are more at the heart of our problems than being taken over by another’s politics, whether masquerading as religion or whatever.

Often it is taking care of the little things that keep the big things from becoming big. And no, in going local, we don’t have to develop obsessive-compulsive disorders, running around like over-zealous hall monitors trying to catch people in trespass. There is far too much trespass being ignored in the name of civility—and that’s not practicing civility, that’s practicing ignorance. For example, if students in my classes start talking to each other, I stop talking. Then it becomes obvious where the action is. But that action is not the reason students come to class—so others look to those creating the disturbance and the trespassers become center stage. I don’t have to say a thing, the support is there and it is not only clear who’s engaged in the trespass, but what that trespass is.

It is not some namby-pamby (whatever that really is), bleeding heart, liberal glad-handing to suggest we look locally, as at ourselves and our community. To do so is not to forgive or ignore larger trespasses, such a local concern would actually increase the power of dealing with larger concerns by raising the standard of awareness where it actually begins—within ourselves. Raising the bar within ourselves, combined with others equally focused, will create a force that will be difficult to ignore or fragment. I suggest that’s a power to take to the global stage.