SIX GRACES

2007 has arrived and billions of people have made soon to be broken Resolutions for the New Year. One way of ensuring that we keep our New Year’s Resolutions is (a) by keeping them general rather than specific; (b) making these general resolutions important as our own personal contributions to Humanity; and (c) devising an Acronym to enable ready application and simple recording of our adherence. With these notions in mind I have devised 6 New Year’s Resolutions that are encapsulated by the Acronym GRACES, these Capital Letters successively standing for Greenhouse activism; Recording adherence; Altruism; Choice; Exercise of Mind and Body; and Speaking out. Doing the 6 GRACES daily will ensure that you make a small, conscious, personal contribution to a better world every day.

The philosophy behind the 6 GRACES is unexceptional: that all men are created equal and have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; do unto others as you would have them do unto you; and, if there is a purpose to life, one could not do much better than to use our lives to promote Beauty and Truth.  As English poet John Keats (1795-1821) said in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The rationales behind my 6 GRACES are outlined below.

Greenhouse activism.  Global warming due to man-made (anthropogenic) Greenhouse gas pollution (mainly carbon dioxide) is the most serious problem facing Humanity today. Global warming transcends the major problem of Global Inequity (16 million people die avoidably each year, of whom about 10 million are under-5 year old infants) – and simply because it is already severely exacerbating the problem, especially in tropical and subtropical regions. The Chief Scientist of the UK has declared that hundreds of millions of people will die in the Third World unless urgent action is taken to address global warming. The recent UK Stern Report says that  if urgent action is taken now to tackle global warming then atmospheric carbon dioxide may be contained  to 500-550 parts per million (ppm). However Professor James Lovelock FRS in his latest book “The Revenge of Gaia” asserts that at 500 ppm carbon dioxide there is a major failure of the ocean phytoplankton system (vital for global temperature balance) and the Greenland Ice sheet disappears. We can make our own personal daily contribution to energy efficiency in all kinds of ways (short showers, turning off lights, walking rather than driving etc) – in addition to personal and collective activism through advocacy.

Recording adherence. It is very easy to record your daily adherence to the 6 GRACES on a calendar. Do all 6 and you can mark the date with a simple tick. Any GRACES you miss out on can be simply represented by crossing out the appropriate letter in GRACES. Of course qualitative adherence is just so easy - you can very easily do something to satisfy complete adherence. Resolute adherence will have the effect of making the 6 GRACES protocol a standard daily routine.

Altruism. Each day you can do some small kindness to other individuals – a kind word, a kind deed, even as little as a peck on the cheek or a pat on the back. Of course you can be even more generous after the wonderful examples of Bill Gates and George Soros – the sky’s the limit.

Choices.  The Bush-Blair War on Terror has so far been associated with 3.0 million post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories – mostly Women and Children and largely due to gross Occupier violation of the Geneva Conventions that demand that Occupiers do everything within their power to keep their Conquered Subjects alive. The Bush-Blair War on Terror is in harsh reality a cowardly War on Women and Children (see MWC News ).