STANDING NAKED IN THE ARENA

A quick life-or-death test.

What was the world like in 340 BC...457 AD...1348 AD....1863 AD...1942 AD? The answer: Very much like it is here in 2010. Only back then we didn't hold in our hands he power to control things the way we do today.

The dates are another grinding lesson in human history that insists on being learned. In those years years, Egypt was in crisis...Rome was collapsing...the Black Death was unchecked....the American Civil War was bleeding the nation... the Axis Powers had enslaved half the world. In each period, humanity stood naked without the tools to save itself.

Glowering at us here in 2010 is a brute irony the size of a planetary Tyrannosaurus Rex. For here in 2010 humanity holds in its hands the tools necessary to manage large parts of the universe itself. And yet the beasts of danger still prowl unchecked. From Wall Street to the streets of Gaza, from the halls of Congress to the mountains of Afghanistan, from the crime-stained alleys of our cities to the bloody borders of our states.

If peoples past hunkered behind shuttered windows in a state of paralyzed fear, peoples today hunker in front of television screens in a state of numbed helplessness. Something has gone terribly wrong here...! For in our vast arsenal of modern technology we have cached stunning instruments of power that can tame the oceans and assault the heavens. And yet, not a switch or a dial that will save us from our own savage hatreds, bestial greeds, and incalcuable pride.

We stand in the center of the arena without a weapon anywhere near the size of our threats. Except the only authentic weapon our species has ever had in this cold cosmos: The moral courage with which it was invested by the authority of its creation.