Most people cherish their space which they consider inviolate – do not wish to be touched and arrange to have some distance between themselves and others. Yourtopia simply means your space or your place and most people just live in theirs without thinking too much about how they got there and why it turned out that way. On the contrary, MYTOPIA is a place I have spent a great deal of time thinking about.  I haven’t done too much about it – either to change “my place” or to better my self except to endorse the norms that everyone else seems to think is the way things are supposed to be.  So, I became a soldier, a college student, a teacher and worked my way up to become a professor in a college and then a university where I hoped I turned out better teachers and became a critic of the system that had developed over the years.

But YOURTOPIA is of great interest to me and I have not heard too much from you on this subject.  The utopias of old and even the newest ones are idiosyncratic and as such that applies to my own constructs of what might be a better world in which to live.  Certainly, we could improve on the one we share.

All the thinkers of the world have tried to explain where we have come from, what drives us to do the things we do and our destination when life ends.  I do not subscribe to the notion that after this mortal life ends there is a place to which we migrate where we will live forever – in a heaven or hell or some other idea that seems to have been born along with us from the earliest days of human existence. We can think about creation as an act of a super being or think about it in terms of evolution.  What happens between birth and death is something over which, to our discontent, we have little control.  That discontent has caused a great deal of experimentation and a great deal of words expended to try to affect the direction of nations and world affairs in one way or another.  Today there IS a contest between civilizations and concepts of what is the correct way to live in this life while no one really knows what happens after death.

I am very interested in what you think about the world we share.  YOURTOPIA should be as interesting as MYTOPIA and at least as valid as any utopia which means “nowhere”.  All our imaginings are equally valid when it comes to thinking about a better world or, stretching it a great deal, THE best world.  I am quite certain that despite all the thinking and writing we all may do will not come up with ONE such place.

But, YOURTOPIA is something that would interest at least this reader.