The Hands of a Worker

Do you have a place you call home ("home" being a term for the environment in which you were primarily nurtured as a child and/or the environment in which you have nurtured your own offspring)?

My home was not just the places where I lived with my parents but also television shows, movies, books and the people I met from other places. In other words, my home had tendrils that reached out beyond the physical environment I directly touched or saw. Very few of us had homes that didn't have these same kinds of tendrils. Thus, the interconnectivity we see in communication methods like the Internet is not new.

My wife and I have been discussing the trend in the Western world that takes people out of the traditional Judeo-Christian belief system and into a looser network of "soul nourishment" centers, moving away from the old hierarchical church/synagogue setup and into independent groups of people who gather for moral/ethical training. We've watched the general decline in the number of people claiming a specific label for their style of weekly meditation and wondered where the trend is heading. Are we freeing ourselves from one set of restrictions just to adopt another, or are we preparing ourselves for real freedom, where management and labor, rich and poor, and other groups of opposites can shed the label of opposites and come up with a set of human objectives on which we can all agree?

I saw an article on independent.ie about companies in India buying up large farms in Africa in order to efficiently grow and transport food back home. China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia were also cited in the article as having companies with hundreds of thousands of hectares in Africa used for home food production.

What do you call home? Do you think of yourself in terms of nationalist labels (Chinese, Indian, British, Canadian, American, Honduran, Brazilian, Lebanese, Russian, Lithuanian, etc.)? If so, perhaps you add a regional name to the label, also? Instead, what if you saw yourself as a citizen of Earth first?

Over the next couple of decades, current nation-states will cooperate in sending people to populate or spend long periods of time on other planetary bodies, including our moon and Mars. At some point in time, the first baby will be conceived "off-world," so to speak. That child will force us to define humans as either Earth-born or born off-world. At that point, the concept of Earth-based nation-states will lose meaning. No doubt, the first off-world children will be thought of as having heritages tied to former nation-states (you can bet the first nation-state to have a child conceived off-world will make a big deal of it) but subsequent generations of off-world children will call themselves moon babies or Martians. Some may even call space platforms their home.

When we Earthians see our descendants looking back down on us from another planetary body they call home, what will we feel? Many of us won't feel any different, consumed as we are by our daily lives.

I have a framed photo of a person whose hands are rough and calloused, the hands of a worker. The fingernails are closely cropped. The knuckles stand out. I can imagine the type of work those hands have produced. They may have laboured in soil, laboured in factory work and laboured in housework.

The first inhabitants of an offworld home will represent humanity in all its glory and accomplishments. They will depend on food produced on Earth, no matter where the food came from or where the labourers who prepared the food called home - they will simply be glad the food came from abundant fields on Earth, their home planet. They will be glad that humans came together for one common goal: to move our species to other parts of the solar system to increase the chance of our surviving cataclysmic changes on Earth.

At some point in time, our moral and ethical training will completely move in the direction of promoting survival/growth of humans as a solar system species, not as opposing religious/nation-state groups poised for battle on Earth. Along the way, we'll still have entrenched business owners and religious/nation-state leaders who want to buy and sell war as a concept, taking advantage of our emotions and turning us against one another (even I catch myself using phrases like "competitive advantage" to promote societal changes) - we are still primates, with all our primate genes intact.

Where do you call home? Earth is my home. You are my fellow housemates on this planet. I apologize to you for the times I don't recycle when I can or don't eat less meat than I should. I'm imperfect just like you so I keep you in mind when I don't use chemical fertilizers to artificially stimulate my yard and don't use a lawnmower to produce fields of grass in front of my house. This planet belongs to all of us and if you want any or all of us to survive a few thousand more years, think about your descendants who'll wonder from their Martian kitchens what's going on with their ancestors on Earth. It might even include using time on the computer wisely and spending some time outdoors - when you do, take time to look up because someday someone will be looking back at you from someplace they call home (similar to but not exactly like the way space station inhabitants look down on us now).