What lies behind us or what lies before us are small matters when compared to what lies inside us.Ralph Waldo Emerson

Inner Life Directions

Expanding Reality

Danielle Levy

  • Dropped Wallets and the Good Within People

    I first saw the story in the NYT and then on NPR and The Verge and other publications. I am sure you saw or heard it somewhere because it was one of these stories the media feels it has to cover. Originally published in the journal Science it dealt with an experiment that over 200 economists thought would go contrary than it did, would not reveal people’s capacity for honesty. Some 17000 wallets usually with money in them were dropped in places like banks and post offices in over 40 countries by people posing as tourists. What they found is that people did try to return the wallets, in much larger percentages than imagined. The name and email of the purported owners were included and efforts were obviously made to contact the owners.  To note was that the names were changed according to the country. What’s more the greater the amount of money in the wallet the more likely the wallets were returned.

    We have come to have a negative, if not cynical view of human nature, which of course can at least in part be substantiated by the amount of violence, greed, cruelty and meanness in the world.  But to someone like me, someone thoroughly steeped in the existence and potential for good of our inner transcendent self, this finding only confirms what I’ve long known.  I as so many have witnessed the manifestations of this good, this part of us that goes by many names, including spirit or Maslow’s positive instinctual core.

    It’s time we change our view of human nature, not with naiveté but with the knowledge that given certain circumstances, the good does prevail.

  • Abolitionists and the Prison System

    In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new kind of abolitionists. They want to abolish prisons and those aspects of the government that make prisons possible including having police departments. Of course all abolitionists are not alike and some have more rigid expectations while others seem to have more realizable goals. And neither is it a recent phenomenon. It may date back to the 60’s with the ideas of Angela Davis and with the work of trail blazers like Ruth Wilson Gilmore. What gave this movement flight however was CNN host Van Jones suggesting several years ago that the prison population should be cut by half. Then he was criticized but things have sufficiently changed he is now hailed. What is new is that many committed to reform the criminal justice system have endorsed some of the abolitionists’ ideas. Closing Riker’s Island prison in New York City for example was once thought ridiculous, but it no longer is. Besides incarceration, probation is also being looked at including the possible use of ATM-like machines through which people could check in without having to report to a probation officer. Other ideas that seem to have traction are what crimes should be prosecuted as well as the seeking of out of court remedies. Still another idea filtering through to a more general acceptance is that the system as it is creates harm seriously mitigating whatever public safety it yields. Those who work toward criminal justice reform from within the system can be frustrated by die-hard abolitionists who would want to not only abolish the whole structure but redirect the monies spent on it.  But an outsider like me can be indebted to both for instigating long overdue reforms and looking to continue reforming a system that is no longer serving the society, and much less the human beings caught within it.

  • Antibiotics, Rivers and PFAs

    There’s a new warning about PFAs, the group of more than 4700 chemicals used for industrial and food production and known to be harmful to health including cancer. In nearly half the meat and fish tested levels could be as high as twice the recommended levels, and therefore dangerous. They were also found in extremely high levels in items such as chocolate cake. PFAs are used in things like non-stick cookware, packaging, Styrofoam and their wide use means that they are now in the blood of just about all Americans and responsible for  contaminating the drinking water of at least 16 million people.

    In another study, this one global, studying the rivers of the world, high levels of antibiotics were found. In every continent, the rivers tested exceed the levels safe for humans.  Rivers affect soil, their waters leak affecting things like sewage treatment plants which directly or indirectly affect humans. This at a time when there is already a crisis about antibiotics resistance, something that can have wide repercussions in the treatment of many illnesses. And further such high antibiotic levels in rivers such as the Thames and the Danube, affect all the organisms and creatures living within them.

    It’s a distressing, troubling picture in an era when the current US  administration is not addressing these issues and developing countries do not have the technological and financial means to undertake measures such as the removal the antibiotics from their rivers. But because knowledge is still power, an issue of this magnitude must come to the foreground and we must each do what we can.

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