The furies of this day are tomorrow’s dust in the wind. Making this world safe for today’s children is making the world safe for the future’s adults. Overcoming the meta-trance that makes this world so unsafe today is more than a one generation project. If you are an adult today this deep cut into the issues of the day puts you in the position of the cathedral builder who made plans into a future beyond the builder’s life span. You must find gratification in the work itself as you do it and its promise to the future generations. The restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral offers hope for long plans, but even that magnificent work is dwarfed by the intense focus and investment needed in restoring the world’s sense of goodness.

Let’s randomly pick a child’s age and for this moment let us make it the age of seven years old. By that age most children at least have some of the tools to create a story that insulates, isolates, and slows the impact of safety trauma in/on that child’s body and spirit. Prior to the child’s language development, a break of safety spreads like ink on wet rice paper creating a flowing darkness without boundaries that is nearly impossible to erase and must be incorporated into an accommodated adulthood. What would it be like for the world, and if not the world, the nation, and if not the nation, the state, and if not the state, your community and if not your community at least you personally decided that every child under the age of seven deserved unconditional safety, and nurturance as a ‘Citizen-of-the-World’? This means no questions asked, and no quarter given. What if very decision made in the public sector began with these considerations and consequences: Are all these miniature Citizens of the World protected by the investments of time and resource about to be made and prior to all other investments? Have their needs been properly put to the front of every other project on the table? Since the status of Citizen-of-the-World would not recognize national boundaries, the child in Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, and anywhere else on the planet is your concern. There would be no stateless Citizens-of-the-World. The neglect of that child would become your nation’s sin. For as we can see clearly see in this moment that all those neglected abandoned children will become adults and their bitter harvest will haunt your children with their bitter decisions.

This Project on decision making is not a really a blog on politics because politics are so far down the road in terms of the problems that drive our world today. It is about digging down to the foundation of our own persons, communities, and societies and reinvesting in what actually turns of to be critically, humanly important. We, today’s decision makers, can only be the planters as other people will reap the harvest bitter or sweet. Let us send down the line a gift of sweetness.