Creativity, Determination & Innovation Drive America's Economy

The wealthy often lack these desired traits. When we get too comfortable in any sphere of our existence, change suffers. A wise friend once said, "If you're not growin' you're dyin'." This sentiment echoes this point quite well. Change is the onlt thing that remains constant in our world but you would be hard pressed to find it in our culture today. When still in college,I did a research project on the relationship between creativity and television exposure. The sheer mechanics were daunting, but in the end I was able to gain some great data and insight into some of what is ailing our nation today. In general, all the data lined up along a critical curve. As children watched more and more television, their creativity was more and more impaired. Two notable individuals from the thousand or so in the study provided exceptions to this and were exceptional for several reasons. One child scored the lowest on the assessment of creativity, but watched no television. As it turned out, their parents were Bible thumpers who didn't even own a television because they believed that it was an agent of the devil. Another child watched an inordinate amount of TV, but was still rated at the highest level of creativity. They tended to talk back to the television, challenging every premise that the advertisers could posit. As in most other realms of our lives, the more turned on you become, the more the world opens up to greet you. The more experiences that we have in the "real world" the higher our level of creativity. The more mediated our environment becomes, the less creative we become.

In my experience, I have learned that the America we hold up as a beacon to the world, the one that worships freedom and liberty, is less and less recognizable in our current perverted, media dominated era. We seem to have become part of a vast marketing scheme that leaves no room for questioning why any of our consumer goods should be purchased. In essence, we are expected to jump at the chance to buy whatever the box in our living room, or kitchen, or den tells us is fashionable. The dogged determination that led Louis and Clark to find that there was no Northwest Passage, or indeed the sustained effort required to link the nation with railroads is hard to find in our population today. The America we all learned about in school when I was young seemed to have a penchant for proving others wrong. If someone said, "You can't do that." no matter what it was, we had to prove them wrong. When they said we would never build a bridge across the Mississippi, we proved them wrong. When we began the trans-continental railroad they said that was impossible. Same with the interstate highway system and going to the moon. That was then, this is now.

Innovation flows from creativity. Trying something new often leads to new products, new ways of seeing the world and new ways of expressing who we are as a people. wealth tends to flow in the direction of what works, or more specifically, what has worked in the past. We are reaping the fruits of several generations of the faulty logic that if we do more of the same, endlessly replicating what used to work, all will be well. Even though the times have changed, there are still cheerleaders who advocate the old ways of doing business and "growing" the economy. Look around at the Christmas catalogs. Hundreds of items have been miniaturized but precious few items turn out to be "new". Invention and innovation have taken a back seat to miniaturization. We can hold a laptop computer in our hand, but many times we cannot find the time to try something new or different.

The indomitable human spirit that lived in the hearts of millions of Americans has been relegated to a status of quirky individualism, scoffed at and mocked by many. I often wonder where we would be as a nation if we were to reward novel approaches to problem solving, rather than providing corporate welfare to business as usual methodology. What if we were to value fluency and encourage folks to push the limits of what is real, good and possible? We shouldn't have let the rest of the world bring us hybrid car technology, or surpass us in renewable energy production. As we have fallen into our boob tubes, it seems we have lost perspective, purpose and a sense of who we are. If we are to survive as a nation, we need to become more than a police state in search of an excuse for eliminating rights that our citizens fought and died to protect.

If the rich were capable of taking real risks, I would be willing to follow their lead from time to time, but the entrenched values of competition, keeping up with the Jones', and playing the stock market and assuming that lack is the engine behind our economy have helped me to realize that the people with all the money are completely out of touch with reality and therefore can't get a grasp of what is needed in our current economic slump. The irony is that our electorate was told by big money to embrace the same party that drove the economy into this ditch. Now we will have to fight for change even harder. Looking at the big picture almost certainly leads to frustration and disappointment. What has worked for me lately is to look to the examples of solutions that abound all around us and the fact that there are millions of little guys making the real investments and creating new systems for meeting human and planetary needs efficiently and with malice toward none. Sweetwater Organics in Milwaukee seems to be on the right track. They have converted a giant warehouse to a three tiered living system. A greenhouse filled with food, fish and a biologically complex living filter. They will be able to annually produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and hundreds of thousands of pounds of protein, providing jobs, turning the tide on urban blight and feeding hungry people in the middle of a food desert.

Little things are happening daily that each in their own way contribute to the type of change that will be required. The one thing that they have in common is that they each have a dynamic person at the center of them. Someone who refuses to give in to the idea of scarcity. someone who sees the unfolding future as bright and full of potential. These are the people we all need to model ourselves after. Bernie Madoff's son committed suicide rather than face the facts that his ways were wrong and do the time that could not possibly fit the crime. The wealthy idolized his dad, because he was seen as a wealth creator. Nothing creative about it. That system was tapped long ago, he just did what had worked in the past. What is needed is revolutionary change in the way we create wealth, the way we measure success and how we think about the nature of our part in the grand scheme of things. The good old boys networks have failed us. No matter how hard they cry out, we should not waste resources keeping them on life support. Corporate welfare pays no dividend. If the least of us are worse off for the betterment of the wealthiest among us, we have forged down the wrong path. We have been lied to for so long that for many, even knowing which way is up can be difficult, but if we pay attention, understand who is behind all the messages we are inundated with and investigate the options that we have, chances are good that we will find a better path to freedom, dignity and liberty that will not enslave another or the planet that the Gods and Goddesses have blessed us with.