Good Bye Oz, There's No Place Like Home

When our perception of perfection is warped by Disney and the future that we have been led to believe in consists of everything being made of either stainless steel or chrome, it becomes harder and harder to sell a vision of human proportions and meeting the needs of more people with less negative impact on the planet. The tenets of those who believe in Servoglobe, a land of hyper futuristic elegance, technodrome, immaculately planned urban oasies without smog or smoke and Emerald Cities upon Emerald Cities at regular intervals across the vast plane of Eden-like silvaculture, and punctuated by hundred story greenhouses full of aquaculture and hydroponic veggies, require us all to participate in a culture that cannot be created through any of the social systems that we have available to us.

To make their visions come true, we will need to cooperate rather than compete, give unconditionally and truly love one another. Considering recent trends this seems highly unlikely. Not to be a naysayer, hey, I'm for peace love and understanding as much as the next guy. However, I cannot foresee a time or place that relegates cities of today to the waste bin of history. I cannot fathom who might finance these crystal cities that are efficient and clean. The guys with all the money are dirty to the core. Coal, oil, gas and all the infrastructural tools and materials are born in the heart of a beast. The beast of fossil fuel exploitation, corporate welfare, incalculable throughput and externalities that bite us all in the proverbial hinder.

Getting things right involves several critical steps toward enlightenment that may just win the day. Women reclaiming their power and the corresponding rebirth of the
Goddess will be a great first step. Doing this in a culture that virtually worships Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga will be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack the size of The Moon, without using a magnet. we can however make inroads to this end by teaching our young girls that they are worthy of love, respect and admiration simply for being themselves, not for being what they think men want. I recently came across a great list of things that only women can do and it made me think, how is it that men have bamboozled everyone into thinking that they should be in charge of our world and that they are worth more per hour than their female counterparts.

I place my bets on a different sort of future, one that is real and rough around the edges. One that adapts to environment rather than subjugating it further. Evey home that I have owned got what I call my home energy makeover. It involves upgrading basic services to be both energy efficient and conservative in as many ways as possible. Each home that I have owned used between thirty and fifty percent less energy and resources when I sold it than it did when I bought it. The savings would be even more dramatic if I were not living right at the poverty line. We need to turn our imaginations and reverence back to the Sun. If we could just teach the "majority" that the Christ myth was plagiarized from previous cultures, pointing out the fact that the Christ child is just a stand-in for the Sun, perhaps we could dispose of all the baggage that comes from the Christian religions. Politics aside, there are very few reasons for the myth to continue. I'm sure the time will come when we will understand the heinous beliefs that spawned the Christian sects, but for now we just need to realize that they were imposed on all of our pagan ancestors. It is our birthright to reconnect with all of our gods and godesses, to feel them in our lives and to recognize them in the cleft of a ridge, or the forking streams that lead to high ground.

The yellow brick road leads to Oz on one end, and Munchkin Land on the other, but to truly learn, grow, and progress we need to take what the Munchkins and Oz can teach us and make it real in our lives. We all have the power of innocence that we can wield against our oppressors. Some will, in their own way use their intellect to question the obvious holes in the logic of capitalists and "consumers" We are all capable of loving one another, doing not only what may be deemed right or good but what is best. In my vision of the future, human needs will be met by humans, not robots or gleaming structures. We will still need to warm food, gather at the hearth for warmth, comfort and find a place in our community, active and participating. Transforming culture may be the hardest work we will ever do, but we are currently unable to understand the benefits that will flow from changing a basic premise that our current culture is based on, that is the theory of lack. In truth, nature is endlessly abundant if we just learn how to see it. As long as we perpetrate our human understanding on all that we see, instead of being open to the wonder of it all, we will continue to constrain reality into an unreal facsimile loosely based on the real thing.