At this pivotal moment in history, there are powerful forces that think we are meant to feel threatened from every side by news of impending economic collapse, if we don't implement austerity measures, get the government out of the business of regulation of commercial interests or elect our leaders by the measure of their "morality". We find that in several regions, all around the world, social upheaval continues to disrupt daily life and dethrone leaders who have ruled with iron fists for decades. Ironically, in the United States, the failed policies of the recent past (nay, a generation or more) are being trotted out as our only salvation from a road to hell. Politically charged ill winds have brought some of the most heavily laden rhetoric in generations to decision-making tables. The very rhetoric often verges on terrorism itself, proclaiming dire consequences if action is not taken. (or certain other actions are.) With greater frequency religious zealots rear up to claim political power. They use the same charged rhetoric and encourage a return to failed policies, isolationism or "end time" myths to inform their approach to both social policy and international relations. Long estranged and disenfranchised people in many countries and regions are pushing for their turn in the driver's seat of power and control. These dark skies have been roiling for decades, but the storms that they are spawning are larger than any that have come before.
The deluge of change that we experience next will be beyond any military power to stop or any government to guide. The fallout from decades of abuse and neglect will overwhelm any attempt to control it, the social levees and dikes that have been constructed, between class, ethnicities, cultures even between the sexes cannot stand. we are one people, sharing one finite planet. Collectively we must address this fact. When we do, it will not be possible to hold back the tide of humanity that will come crashing down around governments, worldwide. This is not territory that we can claim to know, for it has never been traversed. The shock of the new that we have lived through will pale in comparison to the tide of mounting change that will sweep clean much of the political landscape across the planet. If every finger were to be placed in the figurative dike, it would not be enough to stop truth from leaking out into the population. Every attempt to stop real and meaningful change will be overwhelmed by people power. Those who have benefited from manufactured fear and loathing of all that is different, misunderstood and deemed threatening and fear whatever they do not know, are about to have to take a backseat to decision-making of a totally different kind. The lies and hate that they have manufactured is melting under the intense light of instant global communication. The lies that were constantly propped up under the old paradigm, with more lies and lies on top of that, are falling like dominoes stacked in concentric circles around the shaky foundations of power that have served them for generations.
One discreet part of this manufactured mental landscape, the dying world view of Servoglobe (the technocrats whirring buzzing machine) requires us to believe that an electron that we send hurling through a wire for but a moment of usefulness is worth the poisoning the planet with nuclear waste that will be hazardous and require the utmost security measures for tens of thousands of generations.
The calm before the storm lasted nearly a century and the powerful changes that have been wrought worldwide have finally combined to create the most difficult time for human beings in history. Not only are we seeing the results of unbridled lust for money, but the concomitant raping of the landscape. Not only have we been thoroughly inculcated with the myth that humans are naturally brutish and offensive, but told the softer lies that "Nice guys finish last", that there is a "war" between the sexes and that "Boys will be boys." Having lived in over a dozen cities, I can tell you that there is not a single one that has benefited from sequestering their poor in food deserts, mega development schemes, the changing economy or the gentrification of our great land. Chances are, that worldwide, the changes brought on by wealth management, human resources and the dehumanizing influence of capital have been similarly destructive elsewhere. Our beautiful walkable city, complete with electric street cars and train service through the urban Fox River Valley down to Milwaukee, over 100 miles away, the same train service that linked our town to the two biggest ones sixty miles (100Km) to our North, has been gone for two generations now and it looks as if, without major change, we will never get that sensible and beautiful lifestyle back. Instead we have poured ourselves into growing numbers of automobiles that continue to choke the ever widening roads at unmanageable cost. Instead of having a gem of a city with a distinct core, walkable neighborhoods and grocers on nearly every corner, we have to drive over a mile to get expensive food and more than five miles to get good food at reasonable prices. The food desert that has been established over the center of Green Bay has created more and more difficult conditions for larger and larger numbers of people as the cost of transportation has escalated. The "nice" hospital has been established outside the beltway and as wealth disappears from the cities, the tax burdens associated with aging infrastructure and social programs falls on smaller and smaller numbers of poorer and poorer people. In days of old, even slaves had to be treated well enough to make them healthy and strong, otherwise slave owners would have invested foolishly. Today, we are told that there are ten workers for every job opening and that we need to scale back our expectations for salary, hours, vacations and/or flex-time and keep our heads down if we want to remain employed.
Over the course of many generations, the wealthy have enslaved us. The cultural divide itself is a manifestation of their wish to remain segregated from those they oppress. The higher the mountain separating them from us the better, at least for them. Forget the fact that with great privilege comes great responsibility. Many have been fooled into thinking that the ultra wealthy had something on their side that was preferable to what we were allowed to have on our side. Rather like the valley people in the theme from Billy Jack, many swore that they would have it for their very own. Hundreds of billions of tiny pains have resulted from the century of striving to get "ours". Countless children have been neglected while Mommy and Daddy have run off in pursuit of wealth. The familiar but tired strains of the cultural elite to "pull ourselves up by the bootstraps" rely on having the ability to buy expensive boots. Even our language is based on exploitation and long held beliefs that the poor deserve their lot in life. The term "wrong side of the tracks" comes from the fact that prevailing winds would blow coal ash, clinkers and the acrid smoke of the railroad into neighborhoods that were unlucky enough to be downwind. There now exists a tool called a toxic release inventory which allows us to get a company by company breakdown, a business by business estimation of how much pollution is released into our neighborhoods. Of course the regulated community are the ones who compile the data, but I'm sure these reporting requirements are being proposed by the current batch of uneducated fanatics. We all need to look it up and learn how to read it. TRI Toxic Release Inventory TRI. Don't forget, I want you to know about poison in your air! Without knowing, you can't do much about it. That's how bad things happen, people don't know enough to be scared. Even though this database can help us to understand the nature of our exploitation, many feel powerless to change things, when we account for the toxic and carcinogenic compounds that routinely flow through our neighborhoods and not unusually, the poor are often closer to the plume and less able to be able to afford to pick up and move, do we not have the responsibility to speak out against the causes of cancer and disease?
Rather than running from these problems, or hiding our heads in the sand, the coming storms will require us to capture the high ground and begin the long process of sorting out the difference between needs and wants, wresting power from the people who have had their way with us for generations and finally acting in accord with the logical approach that acts as if the future generations were depending on us. There have been breakthrough moments like this throughout the arc of time between ages where this has been done on a tiny scale, nearly forever. Everyone in the tribe had to adapt to new information. With more power beneath our fingers today than a dozen Guttenberg Presses could have given you in 1450, we are able to snap our attention to hundreds of concepts per hour and discover discreet elements of disparate disciplines at will. Now don't consider me rash, I don't expect everyone to even pursue enough data to make coherent arguments, but as the inevitability for change becomes available to more and more folks, we will hit the perfect concentration of ideas at just the right pressure and suspended angst will crystallize around things akin to condensation nuclei in atmospheric physics and meteorology. some of these crystallizations will be schools, farms and new lending institutions, not-for-profit groups, pagan groups and loacalizers, those who work as agents for mediating the flows of goods and services in more local economic structures.
The potential for jobs in an economy based on people, profits and the planet is nearly infinite. Unlike what the technocrats would have us believe, treating the planet as if we just have one means learning to organically adapt, learn to live lives of grace, leave little impact and enrich each location that we pass. Humans were made to walk, just doing that more can transform society. In fact, in some parts of the world it is about the most revolutionary thing you can do! walk and ride bike, take the billions of gallons of gasoline off the table as a bargaining chip. Stop feeding the beast. Petrodollars are hemorrhaged out of nearly every State in the USA. Likewise, with coal (read electricity) eighty percent of our fossilized carbon, coal comes from just six states. (over 50% comes from the top three coal-mining states.) The more demand we create, the deeper we will dig into the earth's crust for more. Sustainability demands sipping from finite reserves while spending our time building better lifestyles that inhibit waste and throughput. Throughput is the resources that do not accrue as investments but transform themselves into waste within our budgets, our bodies, our families and our homes. The limits don't end there though, it has reverberations through our neighborhoods, our workplaces and the community. Of course, the tendrils of this new way of being extend to the ends of the Earth as we slow the devastation, redirect the dollars and start to make sense.
The deluge of change that we experience next will be beyond any military power to stop or any government to guide. The fallout from decades of abuse and neglect will overwhelm any attempt to control it, the social levees and dikes that have been constructed, between class, ethnicities, cultures even between the sexes cannot stand. we are one people, sharing one finite planet. Collectively we must address this fact. When we do, it will not be possible to hold back the tide of humanity that will come crashing down around governments, worldwide. This is not territory that we can claim to know, for it has never been traversed. The shock of the new that we have lived through will pale in comparison to the tide of mounting change that will sweep clean much of the political landscape across the planet. If every finger were to be placed in the figurative dike, it would not be enough to stop truth from leaking out into the population. Every attempt to stop real and meaningful change will be overwhelmed by people power. Those who have benefited from manufactured fear and loathing of all that is different, misunderstood and deemed threatening and fear whatever they do not know, are about to have to take a backseat to decision-making of a totally different kind. The lies and hate that they have manufactured is melting under the intense light of instant global communication. The lies that were constantly propped up under the old paradigm, with more lies and lies on top of that, are falling like dominoes stacked in concentric circles around the shaky foundations of power that have served them for generations.
One discreet part of this manufactured mental landscape, the dying world view of Servoglobe (the technocrats whirring buzzing machine) requires us to believe that an electron that we send hurling through a wire for but a moment of usefulness is worth the poisoning the planet with nuclear waste that will be hazardous and require the utmost security measures for tens of thousands of generations.
The calm before the storm lasted nearly a century and the powerful changes that have been wrought worldwide have finally combined to create the most difficult time for human beings in history. Not only are we seeing the results of unbridled lust for money, but the concomitant raping of the landscape. Not only have we been thoroughly inculcated with the myth that humans are naturally brutish and offensive, but told the softer lies that "Nice guys finish last", that there is a "war" between the sexes and that "Boys will be boys." Having lived in over a dozen cities, I can tell you that there is not a single one that has benefited from sequestering their poor in food deserts, mega development schemes, the changing economy or the gentrification of our great land. Chances are, that worldwide, the changes brought on by wealth management, human resources and the dehumanizing influence of capital have been similarly destructive elsewhere. Our beautiful walkable city, complete with electric street cars and train service through the urban Fox River Valley down to Milwaukee, over 100 miles away, the same train service that linked our town to the two biggest ones sixty miles (100Km) to our North, has been gone for two generations now and it looks as if, without major change, we will never get that sensible and beautiful lifestyle back. Instead we have poured ourselves into growing numbers of automobiles that continue to choke the ever widening roads at unmanageable cost. Instead of having a gem of a city with a distinct core, walkable neighborhoods and grocers on nearly every corner, we have to drive over a mile to get expensive food and more than five miles to get good food at reasonable prices. The food desert that has been established over the center of Green Bay has created more and more difficult conditions for larger and larger numbers of people as the cost of transportation has escalated. The "nice" hospital has been established outside the beltway and as wealth disappears from the cities, the tax burdens associated with aging infrastructure and social programs falls on smaller and smaller numbers of poorer and poorer people. In days of old, even slaves had to be treated well enough to make them healthy and strong, otherwise slave owners would have invested foolishly. Today, we are told that there are ten workers for every job opening and that we need to scale back our expectations for salary, hours, vacations and/or flex-time and keep our heads down if we want to remain employed.
Over the course of many generations, the wealthy have enslaved us. The cultural divide itself is a manifestation of their wish to remain segregated from those they oppress. The higher the mountain separating them from us the better, at least for them. Forget the fact that with great privilege comes great responsibility. Many have been fooled into thinking that the ultra wealthy had something on their side that was preferable to what we were allowed to have on our side. Rather like the valley people in the theme from Billy Jack, many swore that they would have it for their very own. Hundreds of billions of tiny pains have resulted from the century of striving to get "ours". Countless children have been neglected while Mommy and Daddy have run off in pursuit of wealth. The familiar but tired strains of the cultural elite to "pull ourselves up by the bootstraps" rely on having the ability to buy expensive boots. Even our language is based on exploitation and long held beliefs that the poor deserve their lot in life. The term "wrong side of the tracks" comes from the fact that prevailing winds would blow coal ash, clinkers and the acrid smoke of the railroad into neighborhoods that were unlucky enough to be downwind. There now exists a tool called a toxic release inventory which allows us to get a company by company breakdown, a business by business estimation of how much pollution is released into our neighborhoods. Of course the regulated community are the ones who compile the data, but I'm sure these reporting requirements are being proposed by the current batch of uneducated fanatics. We all need to look it up and learn how to read it. TRI Toxic Release Inventory TRI. Don't forget, I want you to know about poison in your air! Without knowing, you can't do much about it. That's how bad things happen, people don't know enough to be scared. Even though this database can help us to understand the nature of our exploitation, many feel powerless to change things, when we account for the toxic and carcinogenic compounds that routinely flow through our neighborhoods and not unusually, the poor are often closer to the plume and less able to be able to afford to pick up and move, do we not have the responsibility to speak out against the causes of cancer and disease?
Rather than running from these problems, or hiding our heads in the sand, the coming storms will require us to capture the high ground and begin the long process of sorting out the difference between needs and wants, wresting power from the people who have had their way with us for generations and finally acting in accord with the logical approach that acts as if the future generations were depending on us. There have been breakthrough moments like this throughout the arc of time between ages where this has been done on a tiny scale, nearly forever. Everyone in the tribe had to adapt to new information. With more power beneath our fingers today than a dozen Guttenberg Presses could have given you in 1450, we are able to snap our attention to hundreds of concepts per hour and discover discreet elements of disparate disciplines at will. Now don't consider me rash, I don't expect everyone to even pursue enough data to make coherent arguments, but as the inevitability for change becomes available to more and more folks, we will hit the perfect concentration of ideas at just the right pressure and suspended angst will crystallize around things akin to condensation nuclei in atmospheric physics and meteorology. some of these crystallizations will be schools, farms and new lending institutions, not-for-profit groups, pagan groups and loacalizers, those who work as agents for mediating the flows of goods and services in more local economic structures.
The potential for jobs in an economy based on people, profits and the planet is nearly infinite. Unlike what the technocrats would have us believe, treating the planet as if we just have one means learning to organically adapt, learn to live lives of grace, leave little impact and enrich each location that we pass. Humans were made to walk, just doing that more can transform society. In fact, in some parts of the world it is about the most revolutionary thing you can do! walk and ride bike, take the billions of gallons of gasoline off the table as a bargaining chip. Stop feeding the beast. Petrodollars are hemorrhaged out of nearly every State in the USA. Likewise, with coal (read electricity) eighty percent of our fossilized carbon, coal comes from just six states. (over 50% comes from the top three coal-mining states.) The more demand we create, the deeper we will dig into the earth's crust for more. Sustainability demands sipping from finite reserves while spending our time building better lifestyles that inhibit waste and throughput. Throughput is the resources that do not accrue as investments but transform themselves into waste within our budgets, our bodies, our families and our homes. The limits don't end there though, it has reverberations through our neighborhoods, our workplaces and the community. Of course, the tendrils of this new way of being extend to the ends of the Earth as we slow the devastation, redirect the dollars and start to make sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment