Our Children's Children

All Men are Brothers

The Foundation for Our Children’s Children

Our Children’s Children is a foundation to help the world think about the future. It is intended to bring about world peace, the unlearning of terrorism, the healing of the world, the protection of all life, and making this world a better place for our children’s children’s children and all the other life that we share the world with.

Ours is a strange, surreal time. We have more material prosperity than any collective set of people have ever had, more understanding of nature and science than at any other time, technologies that have more than ever made this one world, but a political system that has allowed mankind to dominate all other life forms and create problems that we will hand down for generation upon generation. We live increasingly in a world of bad air, bad water, the elimination of untold species, and amazing disregard for the less fortunate, the poor, the ill and those in our custody and care.

Our Children's Children was chosen as the name of our movement because in every land in every time, men and animals have always sought to safeguard, educate and create a better world for their children and offspring. Everywhere you see people sacrificing to do the best for their children—today we have a chance to do this on a worldwide basis.

In 1933, Pearl Buck translated Lo Guangzhong's The Water Margin / Men of the Marshes, which appeared in under the title All Men Are Brothers. I remember reading that book as a child and never wanting the story to end. Today we know more than ever that all men and women truly are brothers and sisters. The study of DNA has made it possible to trace back all mankind, black, red and white, African, Asian, European, American to a small number of ancestors. But even knowing this, we allow fratricide and genocide to exist.

In the 18^th Century Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote “"men are born free, but are everywhere in chains", and yet 2 ½ centuries later, there are people today who are denied their freedom and the ability to decide their own destiny. There are people who are denied their rights because of their sex and sexual orientation, their race, and the country of their origin. We must PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF ALL.

Today, we have the greatest means of communication that have ever existed. We have books, we have newspapers, we have radio, we have television, we have the Internet, and who knows what tomorrow will bring. What we do not have is the will to think about the future. We corrupt the use of our technologies and spawn violence. We are building an increasingly fragile society where a few have untold wealth and many, too many, have nothing.

We neglect our poor, our sick, our hungry, for all the poor, all the sick, and all the hungry are our children too. We give our children violent games and take them to violent movies and are surprised that they become violent in turn. Some of us grew up in times when there was little violence, when people left their doors unlocked and let their children out to play without worry. Today, we have locks upon locks, alarms and guns, and yet we are more and more afraid.

How do we change this world in we live. How do we create a better world for our children’s children’s children? We must UNLEARN VIOLENCE, UNLEARN TERRORISM, UNLEARN HATRED. The time has come to think about these things. All the great religions of the world teach love and respect and mercy, but yet we have religious wars. We need to PROMOTE TOLERANCE everywhere. The world is too small and too connected. We must RESPECT AND LOVE EACH OTHER.

We must learn to HEAL THE EARTH. In order to heat our homes and power our automobiles and trains, we have learned to plunder our natural resources. Now the cumulative effect of that has been to change the climate of the small globe upon which we all depend. We must CONSERVE OUR RESOURCES.

We must RESPECT ALL LIFE. Every religion urges its followers to take care of all the life on earth. Ancient tribes understood that they were connected to the rest of the life, and that in order for them to live, some other animals or plants would have to die. In their ceremonies, they prayed to the souls of those buffalos or deer that they killed or the crops that they harvested so that they and their children could survive. Today, we have lost the reverence for life. A hundred years ago, most of the people lived and worked on farms. They were in contact with the sources of their subsistence. Today, we believe that the natural world is fundamentally unclean and that meat somehow comes magically wrapped in plastic. We grow our cattle and our pigs in unsanitary conditions and then feed them massive amounts of antibiotics in order to keep them alive. In doing so, we create super microbes that may one day lay waste to our modern civilization as the Plague did to the medieval world.

What can we do? How can we change the direction of a monolith with some much momentum and inertia? How can we take back our politics? If we believe in democracy, how can we turn people’s attention away from the executive and back to the legislative branch? Among the Iroquois Nation, their councils were charged with making decisions that would be good until the 7^th generation. To do this, there were members of the council that were charged with representing the unborn generations. We can do no less. We must REPRESENT THE FUTURE GENERATIONS IN ALL OUR DECISIONS. The world may not turn out as we would like, but we must try.

If we try we can change the world. We must help the women of the world, because they more than group raise our children and our children’s children. As I watch my daughter’s with their children and indeed mothers everywhere, I see the way to change the world—we must help the mothers of the world raise and feed and clothe and educate their children and TEACH them LOVE and TOLERANCE and SECURITY and FREEDOM and PEACE. We must help the fathers of the world SUPPORT and DEFEND THEIR FAMILIES and all families for that matter. We must PROTECT and RESPECT OUR ELDERS. To do this we must CHANGE OUR PRIORITIES. That is what Our Children's Children is all about.