Most of us live out our days in tin cans. You wake up and drive to work in a tin can, surrounded by countless other tin cans. You enter your office building tin can and go to your department tin can and sit in your cubicle tin can. You type all day in your own personal, enclosed, antiseptic tin can domain, trying to be productive: designing new tin cans, making faster tin cans, constructing cheaper tin cans, counting stacks and stacks of tin cans, etc. Your day is spent in a tin can which is in a tin can which is in a tin can. After many hours in your artificially sun-lit tin can, you get back in your tin can and head home, where most sit down in front of the high-definition tin can in their living room to be reminded and reassured of just how awesome tin cans are.

After many years of tin can lifestyle, I learned there was much more beyond the metallic walls of my tin can prison. I started to see exactly how our tin can world worked, and hopefully it was not too late to find a can opener.

This statement, this realization, is what The New Wisdom means to me. All of the staff here have differing opinions on the events and decisions that are shaping our world, but in general we all seem to agree that our country, our government, our society, our planetary civilization has been making progressively more and more of those decisions based not upon wisdom and justice, but rather upon greed, ambition, pride, and intolerance. A majority of the population is stuck within an all encompassing tin can: a paradigm of thought and action (inaction?) that must be cracked open if humanity is ever to ascend beyond our current state.

The New Wisdom is our attempt at sharing views, opinions, and thoughts on matters of significance as experienced by a person “on the street.” We do not have access to the hallowed halls of our government, the classified memos of high powered special interest groups, nor the secret agendas of hemisphere-spanning corporations. One might think the great distance of the aforementioned luminaries to the pulse of the world is what has driven them so far afoul of what we would consider the wise course of action, for we are just your everyman and everywoman.

Perhaps we will enlighten you or inspire you. Perhaps we will offend you and shock you. Perhaps we will shake the very foundations of what you believe and change the way you live your life.

The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran said, “Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.”

We are that public call.

We want you to turn the corner with us.