Making fertilizer

The Germans have a saying that I just absolutely love, Kleinvieh macht auch Mist, which literally means that even little animals produce manure. It's not what any particular contributor brings to the effort, in the end, it is the total of all efforts that matter. In that barren wasteland we call everyday life, it would be nice to think that we could get something blooming.

You see, the important thing is not whether any one of us individually does anything. That much should be clear by now. The strength of anything is in its numbers and the more of us who make the little steps, the larger the leap forwards that is possible.

If we were all getting ourselves sorted in the ways I've suggested, what we would notice is that there are increasingly more and more people like myself. We would begin to see that there are more of us with more in common than we thought. What we have in common, believe it or not, is something that transcends racial, gender, religious, political, or even fan affiliations. We would simply recognize that there are more real people around than we originally thought.

We're all plagued by the same frustrations. We're all faced with similar challenges. We're all uncertain of where things are going and what any one of us can do about it. We're all unhappy that nothing seems to work right. And I'm certain we're simply sick and tired about hearing about all the bullshit. OK, that is manure, but it's much more than we need.

What's really worth noticing here is that at bottom it really is more about "we" than "me". I know this isn't the first time I've brought this up, but we need to start putting things into a proper perspective. Politically, economically ... out there, in the "real" world, it might seem that it's the "me" that's important, but when we take a good hard look at it all, we realize it really isn't. What matters most is always closer to home.

So, why not take that as our starting point. My own way of changing the world is not in thinking any one thing in particular, rather I find it is in keeping the dialog going, in taking some time to rethink what I thought I knew and in bouncing these other ideas off still other folks that I'm talking to. The world I live in today is in so many ways not the world I lived in a year ago. And that's a good thing. That the world itself hasn't got a lot better ... well, that's something we still need to work on.

But even more important, and I believe, impressive, is that there are more of "us" than I thought, even if we don't agree on everything. We agree about what counts. Isn't that a start?