Twenty years ago on 9/11, in our rush to act like an empire, we forgot something.  

We forgot our other family.

I know, nobody forgets their family.  You can’t do that.  But we did.

It didn’t take a week that fateful year until the USA was acting like whole great swaths of humanity were enemies and terrorists.  Anything but another family.

In a previous post I said I hope we will stop and think about empire. 

Today I hope we will feel the warm reality of our other family.

Humanity, the whole sweet damn mess of us, is our other family, and no amount of forgetting or wishing it otherwise can change it.  Here we are, interconnected, surviving or dying together. 

So let’s do something different for the next twenty years   Let’s live as if our other family, humanity, is real and it matters.   

If we let ourselves feel it, we all have inklings of a larger family.  From our biological family we branch out to friends, neighbors, strangers, opponents, and enemies, but we all need each other and our fate is bound together, so let’s have the heart, imagination and creativity to bind our energy and our outlook together.

Stay with me in future days to explore the possibilities of our other family as a better way than empire.    

John K. Stoner 9/12/21