Life Beyond Measure

by Sidney Poitier

  In the later progression of wars of mankind, power has been the driving force more than survival—although mankind’s need for power, I think, grew out of the survival instinct. Opponents proclaimed: “We are not going to let them have what we have. It is our birthright; this is who we are.” And so they made conquest the most important thing.

  Conquest eliminates the enemy, and the enemy’s spoils become the conqueror’s. This emboldened early nations with large armies like England to eye the Middle East and to say, “Let us build a fleet of ships, and have a navy and an army, and just the vision of us will be fearsome. We can sail along the Mediterranean coast and into the cradle of civilization, with its ancient treasures, and forge alliances with the region in trade and commerce that will bring other nations closer to the empire of the queen. Resources will be developed in the interest of the modern world.”

  The game of war has not changed. Instead, it has intensified. Because we have technology, television, and newspapers, and because our subjects can read now—which is wonderful—we manage our wars differently.

  We are at a point now where our need to survive and our gratification of it take different forms. We have Wall Street, we have farms, we have gleaming workplace towers, and we’ve got all kinds of things that cause us to get up in the morning and go to a job.

  In America, we, too, have battle relationships on many levels: political, economic, class, communal, religious, and philosophical—to name but a few. These are wars that we believe we can live with, if you are going to use the yardstick of logic and reason and the need to survive, plus all of the moral and ethical things that we superimpose on ourselves.

  Still, nations do go to war—sometimes to defend themselves, sometimes to ensure the security of their borders, and sometimes for all the wrong reasons.

  The power question still bothers me. Power was always in the mix, either exercising itself on its own behalf or to weaken the power of its adversaries and prevent unwanted challenges to itself. What changes is that power takes on different forms as we are a world no longer of, say, 1 or 2 million people, but rather of 6 billion, and we are all still playing that game. In much of my lifetime there were only two countries playing the game of power: the United States and the Soviet Union. And we played it for many years, to the disadvantage of a lot of smaller countries and at the threat of eliminating everybody on earth.

  Now we have refined the game. In all too many countries in the world, leaders who wish to maintain or increase their hold on power have found it necessary, in order to go to war, to manufacture an argument to convince their people that it is necessary for their survival.

  Not only was that how we were sold the war that was supposedly waged to take down an impotent tyrant named Saddam Hussein, but that was the means used to convince us, in spite of our inherent faculties of logic and reason, that such a thing as “preemptive war” could ever be in our own interests.

  Now, I don’t think we are killing people because we’re any worse than anybody else or any better. I think that what we are doing is showing the darker side of what human beings have always been: we have a capacity for love, a capacity for kindness, a capacity for passion, and we have an equal capacity for their opposites. Love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, but love and hate have their opposites, and we have now a huge dilemma: we have the world’s number-one spot, we are the strongest military in the world, and we have more people hating us than ever before.

  I think it is not altogether wise to presuppose that their hatred of us has to do with their envy of us; it isn’t that all the time. Some of the time it has to do with who we perceive ourselves to be, and who they perceive themselves to be.

  Now, we know that, in this latest exemplar of the warrior within us, we should have taken another tack. Where we are now, we look at each other in terms of what we are to each other: enemies. And where we are now is a dangerous, dangerous place.

  Thus we, Ayele, the generation before you, and many generations before that have been derelict in opposing the warrior within us long enough or hard enough to provide you with a less violent, more agreeable world.

  We had our chances. While the early wars were often fought between tribes or nations who knew nothing of each other and feared each other’s strange looks, customs, and unknown powers, much of that changed over time. In the wars of my time, while people spoke different languages, nations were no longer fighting total strangers. We knew, at least, the overwhelming similarities of the various members of the human family. Beyond our mutual need for food, water, and air, we knew that even among our enemies there were similarities of love, kindness, religious worship, and reverence for children as inheritors of our space on earth.

  But war remained the ultimate way to settle our differences, even when we described the most recent one to be the last. The First World War, sometimes called the war to end all wars, involved twenty-four nations and claimed an estimated 11 million dead. Still, some twenty years later came the Second World War and its staggering human toll of more than 59 million.

  That should have been enough for man to say, “Stop! Enough!” But the fate of the young men and women who pay the ultimate price for our national disagreements was totally in the hands of older men, the politicians charged with the care of the world, the elder statesmen. In this important responsibility, they failed their generation, Ayele. And during the time of that failure, the Hitlers and the Stalins ravaged the world.

  But even though we speak of the warrior nature within mankind in its most cruel manifestation, it is not one-dimensional; that same warrior instinct, that same battling for survival, has produced not just the bad wars, but also the good wars.

  The good wars are the ones we fight in the name of children, in the name of the poor, in the name of those oppressed by overwhelming odds or forces beyond their control. We fight good wars in medical laboratories, endlessly seeking to cure the scourges of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and mental illness. We fight good wars when we devote time, energy, and money to relieve the suffering of hungry people around the world. We fight good wars when we come to the aid of those struck by the overwhelming forces of capricious nature: fire, flood, drought, hurricanes, and earthquakes. We fight good wars when we refuse to allow injustice to be done to others. We fight good wars when we oppose hate, bigotry, and ignorance.

  These are the battles, Ayele, in which you and the best of your generation will need to engage. While the energies of my generation have grown fragile with age and worn with effort, your generation can bring fresh insight, boundless vigor, and rigorous intelligence as you merge into the ranks of those a mere generation ahead of you. You must fight to make the words freedom, democracy, and equality more than just the buzzwords of men and women seeking higher office. In the current time of my life, the words terrorists and terrorism have become almost daily chants to be absorbed into the public psyche.

  I do not know how the atmosphere will be for you, Ayele. But understand that terrorism is not just the landscape of the terrorists; it is also inhabited by those who cry out the word to spread fear for their own political gain. Do not easily accept the premise that another war will change things, or that it is necessary. Demand more accountability.

  While collectively you can change things, you can do that only if you firmly believe that you, as an individual, can make a difference. Too many good causes have met bad ends because too many otherwise good people felt there was nothing that they, individually, could do to make a difference.

  Let me rush to explain, Ayele, that I am not suggesting that you devote your life to being a missionary. You are entitled to your share of love and joy and leisure and pure happiness. But within the warm periphery of your life, there should be room for passionate involvement. As the Italian poet Antonio Porchia put it: “In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.”

  Racial, religious, and sexual bigotry must be your enemies. Go for the jugul
ar when you encounter the principal adversary: ignorance.

  Why did we not do it, my generation? We tried, despite our overall failing grade. And we succeeded in modest bits. We fought the scourge of AIDS and its early bigots. We raised our voices and our hands against genocide, and we began our efforts, although belatedly, to better protect the planet. My generation and the one that followed have not been totally negligent in trying to make the world a better place.

  Ah, but yours, Ayele, will be better educated, more worldly-wise at a younger age, and early adapters of the technological magic that the people of my time can hardly understand or utilize. Our society tends to cling to old ways, safe customs, and cautious acceptance of new and sometimes seemingly strange ideas. We lag behind despite the speed afforded on the communications autobahn. We often watch but do not always listen. We have come to prefer entertainment to information. We blame some of these traits on the young, but we, the old, have been the ones at the steering wheel.

  We hope you will accept our apologies.

  twentieth letter

  THE ENVIRONMENT

  As I’m certain you’ve concluded from my last few letters, Ayele, the purpose of the questions, answers, and mysteries that concern all of us, regardless of our station or background, is not only to provide grist for the philosophical mill. We can hope they do more by occupying us, awakening us to matters we have been ignoring or denying, and, for most of us, that they call us to action. In our time, dear great-granddaughter, the issue of our environment is of the utmost urgency.

  Think of it. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat—they all bring us life, miraculously, year in and year out.

  The snows and the rains come, and the water accumulates in mountain regions and flows toward the sea to form rivers and lakes, and it happens every twelve months. Almost like clockwork, it comes, it comes, it comes. For thousands of years we have lived as if these forms of abundance were in inexhaustible supply. But here in the twenty-first century we have come to the slow realization that they are not.

  Now we’re at a place where the coming of the rains and the snows is seemingly being altered ever so slightly, but more progressively than we might think. We are now hearing phrases like global warming and climate crisis. We are talking about shortages of water. We are concerned about those essential environmental aspects of our lives without which we are all doomed.

  These concerns take me back to my original classroom in nature where I learned about the environment when I was a kid. Cat Island was the home, the environment, of some nine hundred to one thousand people, in a land area two times as large as New York City, of a shape similar to that of the isle of Manhattan. The environment itself was the force in control. The air over Cat Island was bathed with purity, clean and fresh, and it enveloped us. We’d breathe and not wonder if the air was pure. We drank water that came from the ground and never wondered whether it was contaminated.

  Food on the island was abundant; we turned to the earth, and we turned to the sea. The sea constantly replenished us. The land nurtured us and replenished itself, year in and year out. In that environment where I spent my early years, I flourished. I learned how seeds placed in the ground burst into a sprig and then become a tree, and how trees bear fruit. I understood and accepted this as a part of my life, a tree’s life, and a part of nature itself.

  But we’re now at a place where we have begun to tabulate our obligations to the environment rather than the environment’s obligations to us. The environment’s obligations to us have been met for billions of years. The environment was in service to us, altering itself, changing itself, maturing itself, widening itself, dimensionalizing itself for our arrival. When we first came, the environment was ready to receive us, and it nurtured us. It was so massive, so pure, and so thunderously healthy that we had no need to worry for generations upon generations whether it would be able to sustain itself on our behalf. In its infinite beauty, it has done that, but now things are beginning to change.

  We are 6.4 or 6.5 billion human beings on the planet. The water supply is shortening. The amount of topsoil to produce food is dwindling. The remaining clean, fresh, unpolluted air for breathing and for nurturing all living things is being poisoned by substances incompatible to its health.

  Pollutants foul our air and water, damaging the food supply in the oceans and on land. They threaten the very ozone that protects that earth’s atmosphere. In our joy for life and our voracious consumption of resources, we have carelessly reached a critical point in our own survival. Even yet, Ayele, as I sit here, many people are reluctant to accept the responsibility that rests with us all to pursue answers to the problems and, as we find them, to engage in them.

  As a society we have grown to prefer the easy over the difficult, the quick over the slow, the cheap over the costly—and those choices are not often to the benefit of nature.

  Lord knows we’ve been warned; books and essays by the hundreds have been tumbling off printing presses since the 1970s; some even much earlier. Still we respond higgledy-piggledy, if at all, against multiple threats: nuclear meltdowns, acid rain, leaking oil, hazardous waste, and contaminated watersheds. All these present a menace not just to us in the industrialized nations, but to indigenous peoples threatened by expanding globalization.

  Acid rain, that mixture of nitric and sulfuric chemicals arising from the burning of fossil fuels, affects large parts of the United States and Canada, damaging lakes, streams, and forests along with the plants and animals that live there. Using pesticides arbitrarily and haphazardly threatens to wipe out whole species of animal life, and threatens our food chain.

  These are not theories, Ayele; they are facts. It has taken some time for too many of us to realize that the building pressure of world population, along with the mixed blessing of vast new technological capabilities, now threatens the survival of life on beautiful planet Earth. We are faced, as Nobel Peace Prize winner and former vice president Al Gore, a longtime champion of the environment, observes, with the moral responsibility to respond.

  The arguments that contest a belief in limitless natural resources, or that confront those who insist air and water quality are not worsening, can no longer be dismissed.

  Some of these problems may be less dire in your lifetime than they are today. Nevertheless, they are certain to be present well into your young life. And so, Ayele, there may be a need for you to look around yourself and take, as we are now taking, the small steps as well as the larger ones to make the earth a continuingly livable place. One example is energy; we use it to drive, to light and heat our homes, grow food, raise livestock, and dispose of mountains of garbage. All of this sets loose greenhouse-gas emissions, a noxious substance we can all curb easily by simply changing lightbulbs and properly inflating auto tires. We all desire clean water, but keeping it uncontaminated is not enough; it is a vital resource that must be consumed more judiciously than it has been in the past.

  We are just now realizing that an army of one can be effective. We can turn off lights, computers, and other appliances when they are not in use, and use electric appliances only when we need them. Energy-efficient appliances should be in abundance for your generation as some are now, Ayele—among them, refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, lighting equipment, and others.

  We can avoid other extravagances of comfort: keep thermostats at sixty-eight degrees in winter and seventy-two degrees in summer, and turn them even lower in winter and higher in summer when we’re away from home.

  In California, where I live, the automobile has replaced the old cowboy’s horse. Big-time! We each ride our own. But slowly, we are beginning to carpool, use public transportation, and a few even walk or bicycle whenever possible. Still, despite the enormous benefits, for the most part we continue to be resistant.

  Why do I mention such mundane things to you, Ayele, such small potatoes, such middling advice? Because they are ignored by too many who sit greedily consuming resources with no co
ncern for tomorrow. I do not want—and I certainly do not expect—you to join the ranks of the dim-witted or obtuse. So if you are with me so far, here’s a word or two more.

  Besides the small steps in the salvation of our planet, there are larger ones to be taken. This may mean avoiding companies and their products if they continue to dump chemicals into water that poison sea life and us as well. If they send toxic fumes into the air, demand their change or closure. Some may argue that in too many cases the economy will suffer. But what good is a thriving economy to a dying public?

  The planet and everything on it must be considered as an integrated whole of creation, and rallying to its cause must be more than a passing fad in the panorama of mankind’s life.

  So, Ayele, talking to you about the environment is important for me, because I would like you to have a sense of its importance as well as the knowledge that your existence is intertwined with it. This makes you—you and the fellow human beings of your generation, of the generations behind you, and of the generation ahead of you—partially responsible for what used to be automatic. And what used to be automatic was clean air everywhere on the planet. What used to be automatic was an abundance of drinkable, usable water—for food, for nurturing the fields of the world, for accommodating the scientific needs that depend on clean, pure water.

  Things are changing, so we must change. The face of the earth is being altered in certain ways that are alarming. We must do what we can to make the cut for our survival. To that end, I would hope that you’ll forever be cognizant of the importance—the absolute, absolute importance—of water, of air, and of food. There is no life for living things without those elements.