Many voices are now raised as we move into June, 2020. In Minnesota, attention is now emerging on the need for long overdue structural reform of the Minneapolis police department. The state's leadership is now determined to undo a long history of offenses against humanity. The city's leadership is very much on task and no scenarios of rage from both the police themselves or from within the ranks of those protesting harsh practices will bring sustainable solutions into being.

That is a horizon filled with compromise because no one camp has a monopoly on power and all are now confronted by both the viral pandemic and the increasing collapse of the economy beyond the strokes of anyone's pen.

Changing demographics is a part of this mix - Minnesota's largest city is becoming a minority majority city of the first class. The economic well-being of ever expanding circles of settlement  - suburbs, exurbs, and the great extent of Minnesota itself  - now depend on a new vocabulary of political will that can embrace and celebrate the diversity that is our strength. The history of settlement in this part of the United States has more than a passing similarity to the growing pains that preceded what we now observe in larger regions around the globe and now the imperatives of consumerism and imperial pretension are lost in clouds of tear gas and increasing desperation.

We must have a new social contract that simply replaces the abuses of previous erstwhile winners with more humane understandings of values we hold in common. As mere newcomers to the only planet we know of that can sustain our species, exploitation and furious conflict destroy more than mere governance systems and threaten the survival of homo sapiens as participants in the global ecology that sustains life in general.

Mass extinctions are occurring with increasing regularity and the planet's inevitable adjustments in climate and more prosaic habitability are seemingly lost in the minutiae of human conflict. If future generations are to prosper, quite the changes in direction must occur and bravura performances in the survival of the fittest meme will have to countenance the likelihood of failure before even this current century passes by. Spiritual growth has been lost lately and there are no magic remedies short of retooling fundamental beliefs beyond mere physical symbols of value.

One must look to more stable cultures than what we presume we understand in the melange we now experience and our newest neighbors bring a wealth of insight that we all must come to embrace if we are to grow and prosper. This has nothing to do with violence and outmoded power struggles.

I can certainly howl at the moon as our American cultural practices succumb to inanity, or I can look to strengths that start with familial loyalties and expand to far greater acceptances of diversity than we have previously shown in my lifetime. 80-odd years on this earth and I'm only beginning to grasp  what is important and what is delusion. Go figure.