Day 30
Last night I attended a fundraising concert for the Canadian Youth Delegation who is looking for ways to finance its participation in the International UN Conference on climate change that will be held next month in Cancun. My cousin Marie-Marguerite, one of the organisers of the event and a Canadian youth delegate, is 26 years old and an environmental activist.
The evening began with her brother’s band called “A Bunch of Guys” (what a great name!) As I was listening to them interpret cover songs from Bob Marley and the Beatles, I thought of how individualistic our society has become as compared to the 60’s and 70’s. I was also wondering if, maybe, these young activists are planting seeds of hope for the return of social awareness and action.
I’m the first one to speak in the first person! I want to be happy. I am looking for inner peace. I will think of I so that I could feel better. We, as a society, have been thinking so much in terms of our own success and happiness, that we have forgotten that we are social beings who need to work collectively in order to attain a deeper sense of well-being. We are not individual creatures living independently from one another. We are all interconnected and our actions can have repercussions on other people’s lives and on our collective future.
The environmental disaster in which we are engulfed now is the result of individualistic ambition and greed. It is time for us to face up to the collective challenges that lie ahead. I’m not suggesting we should all go to the streets and spend our time protesting, as they did in the 60’s. But individual happiness cannot be separated from collective well-being. So, whether it is by volunteering, donating money, being active politically or simply by making more ecological choices, every one needs to perform actions that will positively impact society in order to get a deeper sense of felicity.
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