but I can’t see any of you you know one
of my greatest dreams is to live on an
earth that’s completely free of war or
the threat of war to be able to go
anywhere anywhere and know that I was
welcomed understood and accepted to wake
up each day knowing that I had a safe
place to live that I had enough
nutritious food to eat and that I had
unrestricted access to the basic
necessities of life to know that no
single person had enough power as to be
able to control the lives of others and
no person was so powerless as to be
forced to bend to the will of another
now these are not crazy wild-eyed dreams
right now right now collective humanity
has the knowledge the resources and the
technology to make all the pieces of my
dream a reality
in fact I believe that within the next
two years we could live out the reality
of the dream that I just described
within the next two years the only
problem is there’s this great big
roadblock standing in the way preventing
that from happening and that roadblock
is centered in story in the stories that
we tell about each other the stories
that we have in our hearts and in our
minds the stories that we share so let
me see if I can give you a story that
will help to illustrate the point that
I’m trying to make once upon a time
there lived these three brothers their
name was gruff now these brothers were
goats and they lived on one side of a
very very deep valley now on their side
of the valley they used to love to eat
grass and one day they realized they
woke up in the morning
they realized they had eaten all the
grass on their side of the valley so
they decided that they would cross the
one lone bridge that led over to the
other side of that Valley and they would
eat the grass over there but they knew
they had a problem because underneath
that bridge there lived this mean ugly
nasty disgusting cruel troll and they
knew that the troll would eat just about
anything that went across the bridge but
you know it goes in this story one day
the littlest billy goat gruff got so
hungry that he decided to cross the
bridge over the bridge he grows that the
troll comes up and the troll is just
delighted I mean the troll is just
drooling you know just slobber coming
all down it’s got a great big knife and
fork in his hands big old lobster bib
around his neck he is ready for a billy
goat gruff lunch but then the goat gets
an idea he says wait a minute I’m so
small I wouldn’t make a good meal I’m so
skinny why don’t you wait til my bigger
brother comes along he’s much bigger and
would be much tastier in the troll I
know you all are thinking even a troll
isn’t this stupid but it’s a story the
troll says ok so the gruff brother goes
across the second gruff brother comes
along does the same thing wait til my
bigger brother comes much bigger much
more delicious meal necrosis ok
the third gruff brother comes along but
this brother is huge I mean he has goat
muscles on top of goat muscles great big
horns curling around on his head he
butts the troll off the bridge down into
that deep valley below BAM did did now I
first heard this story when I was about
seven or eight years old and if you had
asked me when I was seven or eight years
old what is the lesson of this story
what’s the moral what’s the message I
would have said I don’t know um don’t be
mean to goats I guess and for a long
time even as an adult that was enough
for me but when I became a storyteller
I began to think about stories in a way
that was different than I thought of
them when I was simply a story listener
and as a storyteller I began to examine
the content of stories to look for what
not just the surface messages but what
were the hidden messages in stories and
I began to make discoveries that lots
and lots and lots of stories had the
same messages I mean no matter where you
went in the world folk tales and legends
and myths had the same underlying
messages now I don’t have time to tell
you all those messages so I’m just going
to share three with you here tonight and
their messages that are included in the
Billy Goats Gruff story the first one is
that there are good guys and there are
bad guys and they exist in diametric
opposition to each other the good guys
deserve to have good things happen to
them because they’re good and the bad
guys deserve anything we don’t have to
feel bad when we kill them because
they’re bad we don’t have to feel sad
when they get hurt they are bad guys the
second one is that violence works as a
viable means to solve problems in fact
in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
folk tales and myths and legends
violence not only works but it is the
medium of choice it is the method that
ultimately resolves problems over and
over and over again the third one is
that the resources of the world are
infinite and if you just happen to eat
up all the grass on your side of the
bridge just go over to the other side
there’s more grass there no consequences
now
those ideas worked for a long long time
I mean for thousands and thousands of
years those ideas worked they worked at
a time when people lived in situations
where you could be lunch for a large
animal any minute they worked in a
situation where you never knew when the
invading
hordes would come in over the hill and
they would want to eat you and they
would be speaking a language that you
didn’t understand and you couldn’t
possibly reason with them you had to be
ready to either fight them or get up and
run fast so those ideas they work to
keep us safe but those ideas no longer
work in December of 1972 during the
Apollo 17 moon mission one of the
astronauts turned around and snapped a
picture now they don’t even know exactly
which one did it when they asked who had
the camera I don’t know I think Joe did
I think Jim did but one of the
astronauts snapped a picture and within
days within 24 hours that picture was on
the front page of hundreds of newspapers
and magazines all over the world they
nicknamed it the Blue Marble it was the
first time that an image of the earth
had been taken from that far away in
space and with that much clarity the
entire Earth’s surface was illuminated
by the Sun the entire surface facing the
the Apollo 17 capsule and you can see
there are continents that are
illuminated you can clearly see Africa
and Saudi Arabia and even Antarctica was
included in this photograph and people
thought that with the publication of
this photograph the entire world would
be different I mean there it all was
this is our home our only home every
person everything every story that had
unfortunately here we are all these
years later and very little has changed
because our stories haven’t changed to
match the reality that we live with now
it is no longer true that we don’t know
the surface of the earth it’s no longer
true that we don’t know languages in the
interim years between those thousands of
years ago when we
eating Mastodon meter saber-toothed meat
in the thousands of years we have
learned several skills how to negotiate
we’ve learned how to resolve problems
peacefully we’ve learned so many things
it’s just that we haven’t put those
ideas into our stories we have yet to
create stories that reflect the ideas
that are true today that we are a single
global human family that violence is no
solution to the deep challenges we face
that we have to cooperate in being wise
stewards of our resources during the
thousands of our early years we had a
fractured an individualistic point of
view about ourselves on this planet but
today we know that it’s all webs
of interdependence II all it that it
takes is just for us to change our
stories I mean it really is that simple
as simple as once upon a time thank you [Applause]