I heard a metaphor yesterday, told by Tripp Fuller, a favorite podcaster of mine. Tripp has three kids, and he lives in the South, so his family invested in a small above-ground pool. Because anyone with kids these days knows that if you want them to get off electronics and do something outside in the heat of summer, they will only want to do it if they can be in water.
So his older kids and their friends discovered they could create a cool whirlpool effect by all swim-running as fast as they could in the same direction. But the thing about the whirlpool is that everyone gets carried along by it whether they want to or not. The only way to be in the pool during the whirlpool is to move in the same direction as everyone else, and keep speeding up. You can’t just stand on the side, or decide you want to go in a different direction without causing a collision. And when the inevitable collision happens, the kids point to the people who bumped into them as the problem. They don’t see the whirlpool, the system they created, as the problem.
Three days ago I was part of a meeting with new Montgomery County school superintendent Thomas Taylor. Action in Montgomery, often called AIM, is a broad-based power organization that UUCSS joined last spring. Two of AIM’s areas of state-wide focus are climate justice and universal pre-k. At first glance, education and climate might seem like two completely different issues. But they are linked.
You see, AIM has done testing in the apartment buildings that those of us who come in person to church pass by every week on New Hampshire Ave. And what they’ve found is that the air in apartments with gas appliances is much less healthy. So AIM is working with its sister organizations in Anne Arundel and Howard counties to build power and pressure state legislators to change building codes to incentivize landlords to make the switch to electric in their apartments. This will help not only the planet, but will likely also help improve attendance in area schools. Fewer kids breathing unhealthy air means fewer kids with respiratory illnesses to keep them out of school. Yes, climate and education are linked.
But then we talked with the superintendent about universal pre-k. Today, families who can afford it send their children to preschool at ages 3 and 4, and those kids enter kindergarten ahead of kids whose parents can’t afford preschool. But 80% of brain development happens before the age of five, and the most important years for learning in a child’s life are at ages 3 and 4.
Beginning public education at age 3 would result in less money needing to be invested in helping older kids catch up later, because there wouldn’t be much catching up to do. But the problems those older kids face right now, today, now are so pressing that Superintendent Taylor can’t divert funding needed to serve them to pay for an investment in the future. In this way, our public education system is a like whirlpool. If we go against the flow we will cause a collision, and most people will see only the collision, not the whirlpool as the problem.
I like this metaphor because I think it reveals the intractable nature of so many of the challenges humanity is facing today. A German Sociologist named Hartmut Rosa frames humanity’s greatest challenges another way. He points to the ways humans have spent centuries developing tools and mechanisms to bring more control over our lives. Earlier humans developed agriculture to gain control over the availability of food. We developed fire and later electricity to gain control over the cold and the darkness. We build motorways and airplanes to expand our reach and gain more control of distance. But each of these developments has come with a terrible price.
And now the systems and ways of life that have grown up around these tools and mechanisms have morphed into what Rosa calls “monsters of uncontrollability.” Think about it. Agricultural practices are stripping soil of vital nutrients and putting methane into the air. The fossil fuels that power our lives are running out, and by the time they do, our planet and its climate will never be the same. But stopping conventional agriculture overnight would cause an almost unfathomable collision.
From climate to the economy to education, the challenges we face as a species are all linked. Kimberlé Crenshaw would say the ways these challenges oppress people are intersectional. However we talk about it, the question is how do we stop the whirlpool? How do we build the new world we need while also living lives of meaning in the world as it is?How do we stop farming in ways that harm the planet while also still feeding everyone? How do we stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere while also not grinding industry and travel and all sorts of other things to a halt? How do we make universal preschool a priority for our children without underfunding services for the older kids?
I don’t have any easy answers to these questions. Living into a world with love, not profit, at the center will not be easy. But I have faith it can be done.
We can all choose to align our lives with our values, but none of the lifestyle changes we make as individuals are powerful enough to fix humanity’s problems. Not even close. Nor can we truly extract ourselves from the world to go and live a pure and perfect life. Because we can’t just stand on the side in the whirlpool without causing a collision. Or, as philosopher Theador Adorno put it, “There is no good life in a wrong society.”
For a faith tradition that places so much emphasis on the power of our choices, the limits of our individual agency can be hard to face. Yet, as UUA President Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt reminded us with today’s wisdom story, every problem offers an opportunity for good. And I think what we are being offered in this time with these challenges is the opportunity to stop feeling like we all carry the problems of the world on our shoulders alone. Because the truth is, we don’t. We have one another. We have community. We have the sacred circle of which we all are part. And it is only in community, through relationships forged in community, as part of that sacred circle, that humanity can build enough power to slow down, to stop the whirlpool.
Because, as anyone who has tried to argue politics with someone on the other side of the aisle can tell you, facts don’t usually change people’s minds. We could describe the whirlpool to people until our faces turn blue, but until they see the way it’s harming someone they care about, someone they have a relationship with, they can keep on ignoring it. Facts and data usually don’t change minds and they don’t alter behavior.
But stories can. And relationships built over time, across difference, relationships seasoned with shared joy and sorrow, challenge and accomplishment can. And it’s communities of faith like this one, communities like AIM that help us to firm relationships with people different from us from all over our wider communities, where those kinds of transformative relationships happen.
So this Climate Justice Revival weekend, as UUs across the country are rededicating themselves to caring for the planet, I hope you will remember the good news: None of us bears responsibility for the problems of the world alone. Even if we all become vegan, only eat locally grown food, switch our homes to solar power, buy electric cars, and limit our showers to just three minutes. Any and all of those things are worthy ways to live out our faith. And it’s also true that our choices as individuals won’t stop the whirlpool.
But there is a power at work within and among us, and it is a power alive in our connections with one another, in community. For in community we are not alone. In community we can face the problems that are here, even the problems we have been trying to ignore. community we can do more together than we ever could apart. In community, we find belonging, we find our home in the world, not just as it is now, but as we need it to become.
Amen.