A List to Keep in Mind

I keep checking kottke.org every day. This post brought me up short today.

It's called What Makes for a Healthy Society?, and it's excerpted from a book about how the indigenous peoples of the Bay Area in what is now California lived before Europeans arrived.

The part Kottke excerpted was this list, describing what the author thought was a healthy society:

• Sustainable relationship with the environment. In a healthy society, the present generation doesn’t strip-mine the soil, water, forest, minerals, etc., leaving the future impoverished and the beauty of the world degraded.
• Few outcasts. A healthy society will have relatively few outcasts — prisoners, homeless, unemployed, insane.
• Relative egalitarianism. The gap between those with the most wealth and power and those with the least should be moderate, and those with the least should feel protected, cared for, or rewarded in some other way.
• Widespread participation in the arts.
• Moderation or control of individual power.
• Economic security attained through networks of family, friendship, and social reciprocity rather than through the individual hoarding of goods.
• Love of place. The feeling that one lives with emotional attachment to an area that is uniquely beautiful, abundant in natural resources, and rich in personal meaning.
• Knowing one’s place in the world. A sense, perhaps embodied in spiritual practice, that the individual is an insignificant part of a larger, more abiding universe.
• Work is done willingly, or at least with a minimum of resentment.
• Lots of laughter. 

This is the inverse of what our government is trying to create in our country now. The rest of us need to keep a list like this in mind as what we are working for, rather than just "not what they are doing" as we go forward. I try.