Since the birth of my niece, my blogging seems to have suffered greatly. If you have emailed me and I have not replied, I apologize. What I thought would be a one or two week vacation, turned out to be a short hiatus. However, before moving on, I felt I should explain my absence.

Since the birth of my niece, the state of our world really hit me. We often cruise through life and often without a care in world. Then suddenly things change when holding an infant only one hour old. Growing up, my aunts and uncles have been very instrumental growing, and I only hope I too can do the same with my niece – be part mentor, part buddy, part sounding board and part baby sitter, with a role that’s somewhere between a parent and a friend.

During my time there, the fears I had for my niece are your normal fears anybody has raising a child in America. Although we like to think of ourselves as evolved, there are still many among us whose actions reveal attitudes about those they consider different from themselves. What kind of world will she grow up in? Will she have a brighter life? Or will we leave them a standard of living in decline?

To be honest, the world that she was born into is scary. The start of this new century has already begun with the tragic consequences of blank checks for people whose chief talent has been the emotional manipulation of the public for political purposes.

Despite this country electing America’s first Black male president, lately it’s been bad news on top of more bad news. Today, racism continues to be a serious problem in America. Racism is not only anti-spiritual and anti-humane but the toxins that all democracies are susceptible to, especially in stressful times.

While racism is not overt as before the post-civil rights era, fixed assumptions about certain groups of people remain intact. Even when a word doesn’t express a judgment on the surface, there’s one hiding just beneath the surface – consider the current hot-button words like terrorism and illegal immigrant. Immigrants have become synonymous to a wide range of social ills – unemployment, poor housing, low skills and criminality. As a result, some cities across the US – Houston and Arizona among other cities – local law enforcement have increased their practice of “racial profiling.”

Unfortunately, we continue to live in a world which we allow to be destroyed in the name of economic development and ever more so because of wars at global scale. Since 9/11, we are currently engaged in a couple of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of a “global war against terrorism.” And one week after her birth, under the premise of the “Right to defend oneself,” Israel decided to launch rockets into the Gaza Strip.

These wars bring enormous destruction upon others, more so upon innocent bystanders and in particular children. They do not merely destroy factories, houses, bridges but also institutionalize “war” as the primary choice to resolve conflicts over nonviolent solutions.

Children are affected by all the environments in which they live. The real question we should be asking, what are we teaching our children through these destructive actions? The fact is, the road we take often depends on what we think other people will choose. As of now, this has to a moral decline. As a consequence, this has led to society’s intolerance of those in authority over them and the inability to adhere to rules and regulations. It’s harder to stay honest if we see other people cheating. More importantly, it is harder to take responsibilities for the care for others if those responsibilities don’t seem to be shared.

We are entering uncharted terrain with this conjuncture of profound crises – the fall out from the global credit crisis that erupted in 2008 has taken and continues to take a toll in this country. Just recently, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate has jumped to 7.2 percent in December, the largest yearly loss since 1945. However, if you factor those who work part time because they cannot find full time employment, the hidden unemployment rate is 14.5 percent.

As the real economy moves into recession, people are being thrown into a deep sense of insecurity; misery and hardship will increase for many poorer people everywhere. In December, the American Bankruptcy Institute reported a total number of bankruptcies for the first nine months of 2008 (Jan. 1 – Sept. 30) was 841,496. The total of 292,291 bankruptcies filed during the third quarter of 2008 (July 1 – Sept. 30) was up 34% compared to the 218,909 cases filed over the same period in 2007. Of those, according to ABI report, the total number of consumer filings, with 280,787, up 33% in comparison to the number of filings during the same period of 2007.

There was also a sharp increase in the number of businesses filing for bankruptcy (29,960), eclipsing the total number of businesses (28,137) that filed for bankruptcy in 2007. The number of business filings recorded, with 11,504 (61% increase), compared to the 7,167 business filings in 2007. The number of businesses filling for Chapter 11 spiked to 2,485, up 76% over the 1,410 filings during the similar period in 2007.

As the real economy moves into recession, more than ever, people are mixed with emotions. Last week, a local Pennsylvania baker, Tanya Reid, asked for spiritual advice from Oprah Winfrey because she was struggling with her faith since the economic downturn might cost her bakery, which she and sank all their savings into, and her dreams. Tanya’s question stood out because it is the universal question that everyone would really like the answer to.

We’re all, to some extent, motivated by fear, particularly fear of what we can’t control. As an uncle, I realize that there’s a lot to be scared of, but I also recognize that, outside of advocating that my sister encase her child in plastic bubbles, there’s only so much we can control. If we live life paralyzed by fear, the dividing lines placed between the respect for the privacy for the individual child, the opportunity to find their own path, and the imposition of conditioning restraints, partly for society’s convenience, partly for their own safety will become blurred.

As much as her parents and I would love to protect her from the evils of the world, we do have to remember her well-being does not depend solely on her parents or her extended family. There are also the world and social norms. Parenting is the convergence of basic human concerns like love, resentment, food, and sleep; and natural evolutionary developments. What is considered acceptable behavior today may not be 50 years from now. This context is beyond our control, and we should not assume responsibility for what we cannot control.

What can we do as citizens? We can help bring about the change to make sure my niece and all other children will not inherit our wars and fights and burdens. The economy of community is abundance, sharing and helping, as opposed to the money economy of scarcity, which encourages competition and ever widens the gap between us and them. A crisis is an opportunity for change. If we choose to seize upon the opportunity, we have a chance create a different world by creating an abundance of milk of human kindness by changing our government policies and social norms.

I don’t know exactly what the future holds for little Nora, however, if there is a happy ending to the story of humanity, it will be because we envisioned and enacted a new story, with the rest of the community of life, on the pages of the living world.

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