Your Voice Matters

Posted on May 20, 2013 by zoeweil
pile of colored straws

Image courtesy of jeff_golden/Flickr.

In a previous post, “Hold the Straw, and Other Tips for a Humane and Sustainable Life,” I wrote about my frustration every time I receive a straw in my glass of water at a restaurant. I just can’t understand why restaurants would choose to use a single-use, petroleum-based product that becomes trash in minutes, especially when they are wholly unnecessary and cost money, time, and effort. It just seems like such a lose-lose decision.

At one local restaurant where I eat periodically, they bring water with a straw so fast that I often don’t have time to request my water sans straw before it’s in front of me at the table. I’ve gotten into the habit of asking the server to please hold the straw before I’m even seated.

Recently, the server happened to be an environmental advocate herself, and not only did she hold the straw when I explained why I’d asked, she decided that she would hold the straw from now on with every table. And then she informed the kitchen of her decision.

I loved that. By using my voice, I created an immediate system change. So simple.

So use your voice. You’d be surprised at how quickly you can make a difference.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

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The Boston Marathon Bombing Cannot Change the Reality that Goodness Trumps Evil

Posted on April 16, 2013 by zoeweil
Young women consoling each other

Image courtesy Brit/Flickr.

It’s easy to feel despair in the wake of evil.

I read a post on Facebook after the Boston Marathon bombing from a person who wondered if she wanted to keep living after such a senseless, cruel, horrible act of violence. I sympathized. How do we cope with such insanity? How do we hold on to our belief in goodness?

Over the many hours that followed the bombings, practically all I read – on Facebook, through Twitter, and in the news – were outpourings of support and love and care for the victims and their families, and for the city of Boston itself. I read nothing that was cruel or heartless; nothing that supported the bombings; nothing that reveled in suffering.

No, millions of people are expressing love and compassion.

There is darkness in the world. There is cruelty and meanness and wanton violence and political violence. But they are ultimately small acts in the face of massive goodness – awful as they are when they happen. History shows a consistent and relentless shift toward greater democracy, greater understanding and tolerance, greater acceptance. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” and he was right.

Don’t we see this everywhere: Women voting and going to school; civil rights spreading across the globe; gays and lesbians receiving equal rights in many countries and states; animals receiving protections (albeit still far too limited) unheard of in previous centuries; global outcry against injustice, against exploitation, against environmental destruction?

Are our violent tendencies gone? Of course not. But we are not cheering at the Coliseum as slaves entertain thousands in fights to the death. Instead, we are crying by the millions as our fellow citizens are injured and killed by bombs detonated at a hallmark of our physical achievement: the Boston Marathon.

Let’s remember this: For every person who is evil, there are countless people who are deeply kind. For every murderer, there are people coming to the aid of strangers in droves. For every act of senseless violence, there are thousands of acts of meaningful goodness.

There is a way to speed the arc of the moral universe toward justice. It is through humane education: education of the mind so that we understand each other across borders and cultural boundaries; education of the heart so that we care enough to build a world of kindness toward all people, all species, and the earth itself; education of the hands so that we have the skills and the tools to solve our still very significant challenges, with our wisdom and compassion as our guides.

Let’s commit to this then, to humane education. Let’s make such acts as the bombing at the Boston Marathon, as the abuse of a child, the rape of a woman, the cruelty toward an animal the story of history.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

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It’s Not About You: Tips on Widening Your Perspective for a Better Life and World

Posted on April 11, 2013 by zoeweil

woman looking through binocularsFor my blog post today, I’m sharing a recent essay I wrote for Care2.com, an online community for people passionate about creating a better world. Here’s an excerpt from “It’s Not About You: Tips on Widening Your Perspective for a Better Life and World”:

It’s a given that we live in a globalized world.

We eat foods produced across the globe; we use electronics whose components come from dozens of places around the world; we can communicate instantaneously with anyone anywhere who has a computer with wifi or a cell phone.

With globalization has come awareness. We can quickly know about the conditions under which people live and work in other countries. We can find out about the plight of other species, or about pollution or deforestation. If the nightly news doesn’t report on these issues, we can discover them through our computers in minutes.

Knowing so much changes us. Or at least has the potential to change us. It enables us to be less tribal, provincial, and self-centered; to think of others outside our family, neighborhood, and even nation; to dwell as often on those we affect as on what affects us.

Read the complete essay.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

Continue the conversation! Leave your comment below, and “like” and share this post via your social media sites.

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Which is More Likely to Get Past Airport Security? A Real Hamburger or a Fake One?

Posted on April 8, 2013 by zoeweil

For my blog post today, I’m sharing a recent essay I wrote for Care2.com, an online community for people passionate about creating a better world. Here’s an excerpt from “Which is More Likely to Get Past Airport Security? A Real Hamburger or a Fake One?”:

I travel often for my work. I also travel with many props for my humane education programs. Periodically, my props elicit some alarm among the airport screeners, especially my fake cheeseburger nestled with my clothes in my suitcase. On my last trip, this concern about my cheeseburger resulted in every inch of my bag being checked for drug and explosive residues and the unpacking of almost everything in my suitcase to find the suspicious cheeseburger. (It should be noted that there is nothing illegal about traveling with a cheeseburger even if it were real, although admittedly it would be weird to have it in one’s suitcase, unwrapped, next to clothing.)

I’ve had lots of time to ponder airport screening procedures, given that all told I’ve sacrificed literally weeks of my life in screening lines, taking off my shoes, my coat, my sweater and my scarf; emptying my pockets; taking out my laptop and my toiletries; enduring the pat down of my head (I wear a barrette), which invariably messes up my hair (I can be vain); and periodically getting full body searches (so fun).

And I’ve come to the conclusion that the TSA as an approach to safety is insane.

Read the complete essay.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

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Thinking about Death Prompts us To Live our Lives with Greater Meaning

Posted on April 4, 2013 by zoeweil

In this powerful and moving TED talk, Candy Chang shares her New Orleans community’s most fervent wishes. Candy converted an abandoned, graffiti-covered building into a chalkboard wall with these words, “Before I die I want to ____________________.”, repeated over and over. Very soon, her neighbors had shared their deepest desires, and the wall was full of a community’s longings.

This reminds me of one of the keys to living according to the MOGO principle of doing the most good and least harm to ourselves and others. In my book, Most Good, Least Harm, I write about living one’s epitaph. To do so, we must reflect upon what we would want our epitaph to be. Asking ourselves these questions, “Before I die, I want to….” or “What do I want my epitaph to be?” allows us to more fully and deeply lead lives of meaning, purpose and, ultimately, joy.

If we extend Candy’s provocative, community-building, enriching question even further, by asking a slight variation on this question, we can add even great meaning to our lives: What do you want to have done before you die to make this world a better place?

With your one, precious, miraculous life, what matters most?

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

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Cultivating Patience and Perspective

Posted on March 21, 2013 by zoeweil

When I wrote Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times, I explored a number of virtues that people listed as the best qualities of human beings. The list I’d gathered was long, and I narrowed it down to ten. Fortunately, “patience” wasn’t in the top ten. I say fortunately because I wasn’t sure how I would write about a quality I possessed so little of.

I tend to be a rather reactive person, reacting quickly and sometimes fiercely to things, especially to injustice or cruelty. There are good aspects to this quality. I’m able to work passionately, speedily, and efficiently, to get a lot done, and often to get what I want (I mean that only in the best ways!). But sometimes, it’s not such a good quality. I can get angry too easily, lose perspective, and catastrophize. And because I don’t possess much patience, I too often fail to wait, compose myself, and respond wisely.

And so I surprised myself a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago. I’d flown there on a Friday afternoon with plans to fly home Sunday. I had rented a car, driven nearly two hours to Valparaiso University in Indiana, where I was keynoting a Peace and Justice Symposium and leading a workshop the next day. Following the symposium, I drove back to Chicago to perform my 1-woman show at Northwestern University.

Everything had gone beautifully, but it was an intense day, and after the show, as I was packing up my props, I realized that I didn’t have my wallet. I must have left it in the car, I thought, but when I got to the car it was nowhere to be found. My wallet had everything in it: my I.D., money, credit cards, even my cell phone.

Yet, I found myself remaining so calm.

Although it wasn’t in the building’s lost and found, nor anywhere in the room where I’d performed (at least as far as I could see), I still didn’t find myself reacting very strongly. It would be a pain to lose my wallet, that’s for sure, and I’d have to figure out a lot of things in order to get home the next day, but I knew it would all resolve itself. Then, just as I was about to leave the room and abandon the search, a group of students began reorganizing the space for the next event. When a guy moved the table I’d used on the stage area, there was my wallet underneath. What a relief.

There were a few other mishaps that night, including having trouble finding the hotel where I’d be staying, not having change for the automated toll both (necessitating getting info from the car rental company about the car to pay the toll online the next day), leaving my phone in the rental car, and waiting for quite a long time to be checked in at the hotel; but I didn’t have big reactions to any of these things either.

The next morning, as I waited for my first flight to Philadelphia, I received an email. My plane from Philly to Bangor had been cancelled. I would not be getting home that night. Oh well. No big reaction then, either.

What had happened to me? Where was the impatient, reactive Zoe?

Over the years, I’ve tried quite hard to cultivate patience, calm, serenity, and perspective. I travel too often – with too many travel mishaps, including frequent overnights in cities that were supposed to serve only for connecting flights – to keep reacting as if these mishaps are a big deal. I’ve learned that they are not catastrophes.

I remind myself, over and over and over again, about how very privileged I am; that I will have food to eat and a place to lay my head and I have nothing – NOTHING – to complain about in the big scheme of things.

And this is something I think that those of us with food to eat and a home and enough money to meet our needs must keep reminding ourselves. Patience and perspective are qualities worth cultivating. Fortunately, like most virtues, they will not only serve us but everyone whose lives we impact.

Serenely yours,

Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

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Attention Countries with Declining Birthrates: You Do Not Need to Produce More Babies

Posted on March 14, 2013 by zoeweil
Image courtesy EnvironmentBlog/Flickr.

The earth is populated by over 7 billion people and growing. Those 7 billion people need adequate food and clean water, a home, and economic opportunity. Approximately 1 billion of them don’t currently have adequate food or clean water. The great majority of people around the globe would like nothing more than to have what the average American has, even though the evidence suggests that our planet’s resources are insufficient for everyone to obtain such a standard of living and the resulting environmental devastation might well be catastrophic.

Despite these sobering statistics, wealthy countries are bemoaning their declining birthrates, including the United States (see this recent Newsweek article). Apparently, many “selfish,” “childless” couples are impacting the future solvency of our country because there won’t be enough young people to care for the aging population.

It’s worth deconstructing this concept of selfishness versus selflessness. There is nothing selfless about choosing to have biological children. In fact, in an overpopulated world like ours, it’s rather selfish to create more people, especially when there are so many children who need homes.

I know. I was one of those people who decided to have a biological child, knowing there were plenty of orphans in need.

My desire to create another human being with my husband and participate in the grand unfolding of the lifecycle so eclipsed my values that even though I think it’s better to adopt, I chose to get pregnant. There was nothing selfless about it. Yet it’s the couples who choose not to have children who are routinely judged as selfish. They’re also asked regularly why they don’t want children, as if there is something wrong with them. Meanwhile, couples who reproduce are rarely, if ever, asked why they want kids.

There are people all over the planet desperate to emigrate to the many Western countries that have experienced declining birthrates. Instead of encouraging citizens in countries such as ours to have more children (and providing monetary incentives to do so), why not encourage more immigration of young people and the adoption of orphans?

There are ways to solve the challenge of an aging population that don’t include increasing the number of people in an overpopulated world. We need to meet the problem of an aging populace creatively and wisely, not by adding to an existing and growing overpopulation problem.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm; Above All, Be Kind; and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

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The Power of the Smallest Choice

Posted on February 21, 2013 by zoeweil

Back in December, I had the privilege of speaking at TEDxYouth@CEHS alongside Steve Wessler, a human rights educator, trainer, and advocate. His talk, “Having Courage When You’re Scared”  moved me so much, and one story he shared was particularly powerful.

He told us about a high school boy who noticed another student standing in the doorway as a crowd of other students passed by, leaving the school on a spring day, oblivious to this girl even though they had to walk right by her. She looked miserable, like she had the entire weight of the world on her shoulders. As he walked by her, he simply said, “I hope you have a good afternoon.” She didn’t respond as one would expect, her eyes opening wide, and so he looked her in the eyes and said again, “I really hope you have a good afternoon. And I really hope you’re going to do okay.” The next day, on his answering machine was a message from this girl thanking him. She had been planning to go home that day and commit suicide. His simple act of connection and kindness was enough to stop her.

I heard Steve’s talk the same day that I heard about the heartbreaking suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, a nurse, wife, and mother, who was on the receiving end of a prank perpetrated by two Australian deejays. The deejays impersonated the Queen of England and Prince Charles in a phone call to the hospital where Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was recovering from severe morning sickness. Jacintha was the nurse who answered the phone and, falling for the hoax, patched the call in to the nurse caring for the Kate Middleton. Jacintha killed herself shortly after.

One young woman saved; another woman dead. One the recipient of kindness; the other a recipient of an unkind, thoughtless joke.

How little it can sometimes take to have such a huge impact on another person. How powerful our smallest choices can be.

Please be kind.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

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Clear Values ≠ Easy Decisions

Posted on February 18, 2013 by zoeweil
Image courtesy michaelaw.

During a recent board of directors retreat at the Institute for Humane Education, our facilitator helped the group (comprised of several new members) get to know each other through a wonderful activity. He’d collected a bunch of quotes and put them in a bowl. We each picked a piece of paper from the bowl, read our quote, and pondered what it meant for us. Then one by one we shared our quote and reflected about its meaning to us.

My quote came from Walt Disney, who said: “When your values are clear, your decisions are easy.”

Not in today’s world, I thought. Really, not even in Walt Disney’s world. Not if your values include compassion, kindness, and living sustainably. Being kind and compassionate and walking lightly in a complex, globalized world requires a great deal of knowledge about a great many things. It may be relatively easy to make kind and compassionate decisions in our interpersonal relationships, but what does it mean to be kind when the foods we eat, the clothes we wear, and the products we use may have contributed to the exploitation, abuse, suffering, death, and destruction of people, animals, and ecosystems?

My values are pretty clear. And I try very hard to live by them. But my decisions are certainly not always easy. Some are easier than others. I don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering and death to animals, so I’ve chosen to be vegan. I don’t want to cause the exploitation and enslavement of people around the globe, so whenever possible I opt for fair trade foods. But few foods actually have such labels; and every day I learn something new, such as how the high demand in the U.S. for the nutritious grain quinoa is now preventing poor Bolivians, for whom it has been a national staple for generations, from being able to afford what is grown in their own country. The truth is that the more deeply I attempt to live according to my values, the more challenged I am and the less easy it becomes to make truly humane and just decisions.

And so when it was my turn to share my quote with the group, I thought how perfect it was that I had picked this one. I had, in fact, written an entire book, Most Good, Least Harm, about the challenges, as well as the joys, of living as deeply aligned as possible with our values. I found myself thinking that Walt Disney’s quote represented a simplistic kind of black and white thinking that I’m trying to depose, by urging people – especially students – to think in ways that are complex, nuanced, thoughtful, and creative, so that they will be able to make wise decisions — a far more important thing to me than easy decisions.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxYouth@BFS “Educating for Freedom”
My TEDxYouth@CEHS “How to Be a Solutionary”

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Underwatcher Astonishments: Amazing Ourselves into More Humane Choices

Posted on February 7, 2013 by zoeweil

A friend became vegan last year, largely to lose weight, but also to consume a diet more aligned with her values. She loves animals and realized she didn’t want to cause their suffering. But she’s found remaining consistent in her eating habits challenging, and at times she consumes dairy products, fishes, and calamari. Calamari are squid, and when she wrote about her challenges remaining true to herself and her goals with her diet, I shared the above TED talk with her, “Underwater Astonishments.”

I wanted to share this talk with readers of our blog, too, not only because it is truly astonishing, but also because seeing such astonishments often leads to our awe, wonder, reverence, and sense of responsibility to cause as little harm and suffering as possible. My hope is that this film will ignite your passion to protect the ocean’s creatures by doing the most good and least harm through your diet and your life choices.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxYouth@BFS “Educating for Freedom”

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to our RSS feed.

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