| Color | Nickname | Social construct | Cause worth dying for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green | HumanBond | unions, environmentalism, feminism, racial justice, LGBTQ, et. al | For my brothers and sisters |
The genius of Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech is that it builds on the (Orange) words of the Declaration of Independence and brings us forward into a new stage, Green. Please watch it — it is better to view than read. He says:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
…
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Notice how he brings us back together to our shared humanity. Our deeper freedom arises from coming together not splitting apart. This realization was the start of so many important awakenings. The environmental awakening. We commit to cherish, honor, and protect our mother earth. The feminist awakening. Time to stop oppressing women and break free of our sexist stereotypes and limits. The peace awakening. No more mindless wars. The race awakening. We recognize how deeply racist our society is and we commit to healing this broken mindset. Later on – this one took much longer sadly – we started to embrace the LGBTQ community and the full continuum of our sexuality.
At this stage we start to realize that the rational mind is not the only source of Truth. Just because the detached observer mode (Positivism) worked out well for physics does not mean it is suited to understanding all of human experience. There is so much more inside of us than just the rational observer. And it in fact turns out that all those objective truths we think we are working with are greatly influenced by our culture. Truth can not be considered to be wholly separate from the culture it is found in. This stage reminds us to look out to see all the groups we are bound to.
I was born into this stage. My parents were liberal, college educated, school teachers who encouraged their children to care for this world. And Green explains a lot of things, except for the things I most needed to learn – how do I get out of all this pain that I am in? What does it mean to lead a deep, rich, meaningful life? What does it mean to be fully human? For those questions I needed to turn within.