Can we all just get along?

Depends. How much time do we have?

I ran into an old USAID colleague at the Washington Folk Festival last weekend. I was standing outside the Chautaugua Stage, having just taken in a mesmerizing raga performed by Soumya Chakraverty on the sarod, a North Indian string instrument. It sounds similar to a sitar to my untrained Western ears, structured as it is with strings that are plucked and 15 other strings that resonate with the adjacent strings. My mind was appropriately soothed and continued to feel the effect of the other-worldly concert.

And there suddenly was Eric, smiling, bright-eyed, slightly scruffy, dressed for cooler, wetter weather to come. He is the kind of person I see every two or three years at some event or another: an art event in an abandoned office building in DC during Covid; a show at Joe’s Movement Emporium; and before that an international development conference, I think. I am always happy to see him.

We met during my time as a contractor with USAID. I designed and ran a retreat for the office where he worked. Our paths would cross again just before I retired when we were both working in the Center for Excellence in Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (which, as I type it out, summons in me a sad nostalgia. Who put the “US” in “We USED to do that kind of work in the world”?)

Before I tell you about his latest project, I need to provide some context. You can picture the “COEXIST” bumper sticker, right? According to Wikipedia, the original image was created in 2000 by Piotr Mlodożeniec, a Warsaw-based graphic designer.

The focus was on the three Abrahamic religions, and was a kind of “can’t we all just get along?” meme of the time.

Not to miss an opportunity to divide rather than unite, some zealots on the “T” team protested a false equivalency – only one of these is the right path!

Some years later, Jerry Jaspar created another version, using all seven of the characters:

Here the three religions of the original share the space with Peace, Male/Female, and Yin/Yang icons, as well as a Pentangle in the dot of the I.

Before he left USAID prior to its summary dismantling, like the East Wing but without the dust, Eric had been pondering creating an environmental graphic along these lines. He reached out to artists and professionals in many fields to come up with each shape. He approached a print gallery for pro bono feedback and got a beta version. Further refinements rendered this graphic which he texted to me as we were talking:

He has been pitching this to various nature and conservation organizations. Classic Eric, he is interested in neither credit, remuneration or copyright. He summarized his personal mission statement this way:

I’d just like to get it out there.

The uncredited design appears on a website of a collaborator, Annie Houston, author of Tales of Mother Earth and Her Children.

It’s an inspired design, and I told him so: the colors, the variety of shapes, the heart-shaped continents, all of it. I was especially impressed by the human figure, which I interpreted as the international sign for woman, but with a breeze blowing from the left. No, he kindly corrected me – it’s one half man, one half woman.

OK. But I still see a breeze.

This simple graphic is instructive in this regard – the human shape is one of many forms of life, and not even the biggest or most significant. We are part of a string of characters.

The meme beseeches us to ponder the path of coexistence. “But,” one might reply, “we already coexist. We all occupy this small blue dot in space and time.” To which the reply might be, “Well, ok then, let’s dig into what it means to coexist in a sustainable way, in a judicious way, in a loving way.”

What is the quality of the love that we bear with all the other shapes of life?

That line of thinking requires conversation – lots of conversations – and a lot of re-thinking about what I refer to as our fraught relationship with the rest of the planet. (See my post on the Anthropocene.)

Social and cultural movements can start with a provocative image, and widen into further awareness and to action. Let’s hope.

Poster by Seymour Chwast, 1964. An ad for Booth’s Gin, it hung in my sister Martha’s bedroom when I was young. I still see it as a profound declaration…

Primer, by Lorraine Schneider, 1968

“for the oaks” by Corita Kent 1971 Transcribed text by Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: “the press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.”

And keep hoping.

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