A few years ago, the World Health Organization said that the most severe health problem worldwide was depression.
There are many ways to analyze this, but these are some of my personal thoughts: We are seeing that neither humans nor animals can thrive in a mechanistic, technological society without nurturing a community. Our bodies breathe in the intense negative energy of competitiveness and greed, and we are assaulted throughout the day. Our children are trying to relieve the pain of isolation and loneliness with drugs and suicide. We seek temporary relief from the inner voice calling for answers to our spiritual and physical needs by buying more distractions.
Meanwhile, we are asking more women to move into leadership positions in the vacuum that exists in such areas as business, agriculture and medicine because women have taken the role of nurturer throughout the history of the planet.
The world became less livable when women's gifts were cast aside as being without value, as unrealistic, as blocking progress in a mechanistic, technological world. (In this world, the value of humanity is measured in terms of money alone).
When we ask women to take a leadership role in creating a more human culture, a culture in which they recognize that their spirits and bodies are valued more than money, they see the need for community over competition.
Just putting a woman in the driver's seat will not change the disastrous journey we are on. Women are needed in the driver's seat because we need women's gifts to heal our broken, beautiful earth that is dying before our eyes.
As women, our contribution is not merely to take and sit in the chairs of those who have enriched themselves with depleting the well-being of the earth along with the well-being of their brothers and sisters. Women should make for themselves new chairs and new platforms constructed with the tools of women's universal role in the world — the nurturer.
Mabel Gill lives in Albany. She worked for 17 years in the Assembly developing food policy for New York state.