Beyond This Weather-Power Mess

We’re OK now.

(The Adcocks have power and light again.)

But we know that collectively we have to change.  How?

[See below for an invitation.]

Bitter truth about our world:

The people who make the Big Decisions mostly live and work and travel in air-conditioned environments, with salaries, pensions and health care enough to cushion them from any disasters that arise.

They don’t have a personal stake in making the decisions necessary to stop climate change and extreme weather, to help us all survive life’s catastrophes.

So what can we do?

(That’s not an ironic rhetorical question.  It’s sincere.)

Some real action steps:

1.  When a disaster like this hits, open the church for members and friends who want sanctuary—who’d like to face it together, sleeping overnight, singing, cooking meals together—modeling community together.

2.  Restore our Pastoral Care Guild or Ministry on Community (or whatever we should call it) to help educate and coordinate us all in helping our members and friends cope with challenges ranging from illness and disability to unemployment, loneliness, grief, trees crashing your car, etcetera.

3.  Start interfaith and neighborhood actions to collectively and directly address the challenges of, say, climate change.  For example (cf. Eugene Robinson in the 7/3 Washington Post), developing a project to install low-cost solar panels on homes that otherwise would go dark and boiling hot or freezing cold when extreme weather knocks out power.

4.  Do all this in ways that will build beloved community within and beyond our walls, making larger friendship and self-help networks, modeling equality in this brutally unequal world.

And now that invitation:

Email me and say you’re interested in one or more of these action steps.   With a few other folks (mostly old ladies), I commit to calling a gathering at our church to talk together about what we might do.  It might save our a---s.

With love,

Cynthia Adcock