LIFE * BALANCE * TRANSFORMATION * WAR
Where have all the leaders gone?
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/opinion/20krugman.html
This past weekend seemed to be all about the four themes above. Over a span of 20 odd years Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass created an amazing trilogy of films:
Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance
Powaqqatsi - Life in Transformation
Noyayqqatsi - Life in War
Karen and I caught Koyaanisqatsi on Friday night with The Philip Glass Ensemble playing the music live to a screening of the film. It's quite an extraordinary film and if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it. It felt quite prophetic and could have easily been made today, much less in 1983.
We then saw Terence Malick's "The New World" on Saturday and it continued the theme we had already been talking about of life thrown out of balance by the introduction of new technologies and the interaction between different cultures and how they so easily come into conflict with each other when there is a lack of understanding and respect for different ways of seeing the world.
We seem to be living in a paradoxical time in history. While there is much to be celebrated about modernity and the vast improvements to quality of life through new technologies, there also seems to be a question of balance that is out of whack.
Cultural identities are either being questioned or entrenched into dogmatic views or disappearing altogether. Climate change is transforming the places we see now as land that may someday be seashore (did you catch the 60 minutes piece last night - scary). Pre-emptive assaults are changing the nature of war, whether it be terrorist actions or imperial actions, and the reasons we choose to fight and what we fight over are coming down to narrow national interests that will have broad global consequences.
Life is out of balance. Life is being transformed. We can no longer define "war", as anything may qualify under the rubric of a "war" on global terror and victory or end of war cannot or will not be defined by our "leaders".
A lot to think about, and so few leaders to think them through.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/opinion/20krugman.html
This past weekend seemed to be all about the four themes above. Over a span of 20 odd years Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass created an amazing trilogy of films:
Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance
Powaqqatsi - Life in Transformation
Noyayqqatsi - Life in War
Karen and I caught Koyaanisqatsi on Friday night with The Philip Glass Ensemble playing the music live to a screening of the film. It's quite an extraordinary film and if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it. It felt quite prophetic and could have easily been made today, much less in 1983.
We then saw Terence Malick's "The New World" on Saturday and it continued the theme we had already been talking about of life thrown out of balance by the introduction of new technologies and the interaction between different cultures and how they so easily come into conflict with each other when there is a lack of understanding and respect for different ways of seeing the world.
We seem to be living in a paradoxical time in history. While there is much to be celebrated about modernity and the vast improvements to quality of life through new technologies, there also seems to be a question of balance that is out of whack.
Cultural identities are either being questioned or entrenched into dogmatic views or disappearing altogether. Climate change is transforming the places we see now as land that may someday be seashore (did you catch the 60 minutes piece last night - scary). Pre-emptive assaults are changing the nature of war, whether it be terrorist actions or imperial actions, and the reasons we choose to fight and what we fight over are coming down to narrow national interests that will have broad global consequences.
Life is out of balance. Life is being transformed. We can no longer define "war", as anything may qualify under the rubric of a "war" on global terror and victory or end of war cannot or will not be defined by our "leaders".
A lot to think about, and so few leaders to think them through.
posted by Paul Salinger at 2:08 PM
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