return to top page I Too Have A Dream
by
John Papworth
Draft dated 29th July 2003
I HAVE A DREAM of a world of transformed values that has discovered the path of peace.
A WORLD where power and control of resources is so widely diffused into local neighbourhoods that no government can amass the resources for war.
A WORLD where we have learned to revere nature in all its glory and wonder, where trees, land, water and living creatures are held as sacred aspects of God's creation and where a reverence for the finite material limits of our stupendous planet is made the guideline of all getting and spending.
A WORLD where the scourges of war, famine, cruelty, injustice and pestilence have ceased because the living have learned to control the powers that promote them; have learned that power can never be safe in huge, centralised and inevitably corrupt government bureaucracies, under whatever labels it is exercised, and that the only safe power is local power in the hands of local elected servants under the surveillance and the bidding of their local neighbours.
A WORLD where the sun shines on smokeless cities; where the cities themselves are a honeycomb of small, self-governing parishes whose citizens, as champions of the age old dream of freedom, will brook no interference in the governance of their local affairs.
A WORLD where governments are stripped of all powers other than those essentially national rather than local, and where public services, including banking, money, insurance, transport, radio, TV, postal, police, planning, research and justice, are governed by the elected board members of the local communities they serve.
A WORLD that has learned to adapt the sanity of the organic principle of natural life to its political and economic processes to create a social life of innumerable vital cells of power which have broken free of the thraldom of vast, moronic, uncontrollable and ungovernable centralised parliaments or senates; a social life free from the baseness, the excesses and abuses which have come to imperil the whole adventure of civilisation.
A WORLD which ensures commerce ceases to dominate and debase our lives and is confined to those functions where it serves to enrich us with sufficiency rather than spiritually impoverish us with superfluity.
A WORLD that sees that ecological criminality, or economic brigandage, in the guise of enterprise questing only for material profit at the expense of spiritual gain, is no substitute for decent government; where the monster of commerce is tamed, where it ceases to be the master of our lives and becomes the servant of our destinies.
A WORLD of life based on community service rather than on the grab, snatch and greed of an endless quest for immediate material or sensual gratification.
A WORLD of people inspired by visions of goodness, greatness and glory in the limitless realms of creative living, where the great arts flourish as never before, where people are rooted with their families and friends in vibrant local communities which pulsate with the vigour of responsible, empowered ways of living.
A WORLD where the dark night of the soul, with the dominance of all its hatreds, fears, oppressions and suspicions, is relegated to history and where respect for the wealth of its family and community ties becomes the basis of a new age of wisdom and joy.
A WORLD where all men and women are free as they have never been free before; free to live the life abundant, free to revere truth, beauty and love as the mainspring of their lives and to give themselves wholly to all that enables decency, justice, mercy and sensibility to flourish.
A WORLD where the supreme good is of concern to enrich the planet for those who will come after us, so that future generations can inherit an ever wider base on which to build a life of such limitless grandeur that human ennoblement rises to the utmost reaches of inspired, creative striving.
John Papworth,
The Close, High Street, Purton, Wilts, SN5 4AE;
Tel: 01793 77 22 14;
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com
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