{"id":837,"date":"2010-01-01T12:45:41","date_gmt":"2010-01-01T17:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/hungerrumblings\/?p=837"},"modified":"2010-01-01T12:45:41","modified_gmt":"2010-01-01T17:45:41","slug":"introducing-the-long-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worldhunger\/introducing-the-long-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the Long Now"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" title=\"The 10,000 Year Clock \" src=\"http:\/\/media.longnow.org\/files\/2\/ClockAllWht1_00BFI-230px.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"230\" height=\"321\" \/>At midnight last night, my brother, father, and I set off sparklers by the light of the blue moon. \u00a0Like a few million other people in our time zone, we counted down the minutes and then the seconds until the new year began.<\/p>\n<p>New Year\u2019s Eve used to be the only time of year we really thought in seconds. But as everything in our life speeds up\u2014as work days extend to 24\/7, as we tap our fingers impatiently for the few seconds it takes to download an email or a web page, as deadlines shorten to yesterday and demands on our present escalate\u2014the seconds and minutes of our present moment are overwhelming our ability to think about the future. Just when we need to get to work creating one that doesn\u2019t kill ourselves or our planet!<\/p>\n<p>Many times when Christians talk about the future, they think about life after death. About 25 years ago, I was standing behind an ironing board in front of a Walgreen\u2019s in Chicago, gathering signatures for an anti-nuclear petition. After listening to my heartfelt pitch, a young woman responded, \u201cAs Christians, shouldn\u2019t we be hoping the world will end, so that the reign of Christ can begin?\u201d In 1984, this left me speechless; now I would quote Bonhoeffer: \u201cIt may be that the day of judgment will dawn tomorrow; in that case, we shall gladly stop working for a better future. But not before.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One way to enrich our ability to engage the future might be to begin the new year by contemplating the long, long, LONG view of the future espoused by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.longnow.org\/\">Long Now Foundation<\/a>, formed to \u201cprovide counterpoint to today&#8217;s \u2018faster\/cheaper\u2019 mind set and promote \u2018slower\/better\u2019 thinking.\u201d Its proposed 10,000 Year Clock \u201cticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.\u201d \u201cThe point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time,\u201d says cofounder Stewart Brand. (Remember the Whole Earth Catalog?)<\/p>\n<p>A prototype of the 10,000 Year Clock in San Francisco (see the photo above) introduced me to the possibilities of seeing time as slow and spacious rather than fast and crowded. It seemed to fit nicely with Amitai Etzioni\u2019s call for a cultural megalogue \u201cabout the relationship between consumerism and human flourishing,\u201d which I got all excited about in this post. Changing our imagination of the future might change the way we value it, which in turn might change the way we live in our present, and help our society shift away from consumerism.<\/p>\n<p>For how we see time has a lot to do with how we consume. In the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/12\/13\/business\/13every.html?_r=1\"><em>New York Times<\/em>, Damon Darlin<\/a> recently noted that frugality\u2014poor, maligned, unfashionable frugality\u2014is actually the practice of an optimist. \u201cIf you expect good things in the future, you\u2019re inclined to save money for that event. If you are a pessimist, you might as well spend everything now.\u201d\u00a0 Change the word <em>money <\/em>to <em>environment<\/em>, and these sentences still ring true.<\/p>\n<p>Can you imagine how our day-to-day choices might impact the children of our children\u2019s children\u2019s children? My son is only 22. Being a grandmother is something I can hardly imagine. But if I start taking those distant progeny for granted, I might live differently.<\/p>\n<p>Ten thousand years\u2014are you ready?<\/p>\n<p>Anne Basye, &#8220;Sustaining Simplicity&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At midnight last night, my brother, father, and I set off sparklers by the light of the blue moon. \u00a0Like a few million other people in our time zone, we counted down the minutes and then the seconds until the new year began. New Year\u2019s Eve used to be the only time of year we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Introducing the Long Now - ELCA World Hunger<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worldhunger\/introducing-the-long-now\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Introducing the Long Now - ELCA World Hunger\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At midnight last night, my brother, father, and I set off sparklers by the light of the blue moon. \u00a0Like a few million other people in our time zone, we counted down the minutes and then the seconds until the new year began. 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