« How Subtly the Multi Earth Paradigm Forms in Us »

When I was born in 1940 in an Iowa farmhouse, I was born into a rural family in the early stages of recovery from the Great Depression. As we rented land to farm and lived simply, we had just enough. But I was also born into a country vigorously committed to Multi Earth ways. At age five or six I was playing with sugar rationing stamps leftover from World War II, unaware that my country was asserting itself into world dominance at that time. Soon, the Cold War was underway. In that conflict, two Multi Earth systems, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, faced off in several decades of geopolitical chess.

In school, when I studied “world history,” it was, truthfully speaking, not the history of the world at all. It was the history of Western Civilization. We ignored the history of much of the Far East and also the southern hemisphere. We studied those large regions only in so far as Europe and the U.S. were interested in them. Intentional or not, that view of “world history” built in me the consciousness that the West mattered most and that my country was the leader of the West. Unconscious of it at the time, that schooling nonetheless gave shape to my worldview.

Though neither my parents nor many others in my extended family had gone to high school, my sisters and I did. I continued on and went to college and graduate school, following the path of education that led me into middle class America. In the process, I came to accept that capitalism was superior to socialism, that my country generally was the more moral among global powers, and that America did democracy like my civics book said. It never occurred to me that my path had also taken me into the epitome of Multi Earth living.

What subtilties galvanized the Multi Earth paradigm in you?