monsters in our midst

For years I’ve been moaning and groaning about the world around me. Truthfully, it’s been closer to abject bitching and complaining about the faults in our foundations. I’ve always seen myself as some sort of “social contract observer,” surveying the damage from decades of neglect, crisis, and war. Now that the opioid epidemic is here, literally taking 115 souls a day in the US alone (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018), a sense of “Global Triage” is emerging in my words.

In more recent months, working with some of our communities most vulnerable I have learned a life-changing lesson – transformation does not catalyze from mere complaints, vague prescriptions, or some top-down authority… we simply can’t command our way out of the mess in our midst anymore. Something far more significant is going to be needed – something radical.

This then is the purpose of my blog, “Beasts Like Me” – to search the globe for emerging solutions to our present crisis… and, in the process, to also find the daring innovators of change.

But first… a word from Mr. Huxley:

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with artificial paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

Aldous Huxley, 1952