imminent crossover
2011 ended up being a charged up, go-go-go kind of year for me and for many around me. Personally, it was a year incredibly busy with the continued development of CJMP Community Radio and Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative, that developed my technical and interpersonal/managerial skills and a somewhat steadier (and busier) work situation than in the past four years. Globally, lots of social change and much-raised awareness of the challenges we have in the face of levels of unimaginable inequality (the Occupy Movement), the lack of democracy (The Arab Spring, and its repercussions throughout the world) and facing up to the lies our governments and corporations tell us (Wikileaks). In many ways, these are inter-related in a general theme of reckoning– an awakening of the masses to ‘what’s really going on’. Add to this, the further awareness of the environmental destruction we knowingly just keep heaping onto the planet through billions of tiny actions (and several huge actions– like our lovely full-steam-ahead Tar Sands projects); these addictions that we can’t seem to wrap our head around. We’re in a strange place where we know what we do cannot be sustained and we carry on, not in a (more honest) spirit of ‘live and let die’, but this is where it leads. We put on an extra sweater in the house to reduce the heating bill, while planning our next trip to Mexico or wherever… carbon footprint/climate change be damned. We’re convinced that the time for change was yesterday.
Sometimes I think of our society as really stuck in the past, where dreams of 60′s era expansion and the hope of the return to resource extraction-based ‘prosperity’ (while stage-managing a photo-op with Miss Millennial Sustainability) can get you elected, in desperate (and embarrassing) Reagan-era style.
There is an unspoken shrugging social agreement that says “ok, we’re screwed, and everything is obviously wrong, and we keep going in the wrong direction, and so many people are so unhappy; but what else are we going to do?– we’ve invested too much to change now”. The first part of this is where the Occupy Movement is now, I think. The lament is widespread and vocalizing it horizontally— without a top-down structure, and leader-less — makes it all the more potent. The disappointment (with Obama, with corporate responsibility, with all levels of government and their corruption as they respond to corporate wealth and power and not to the people) is very real. It’s the first step but it can’t stop there; next comes the restructuring of the widespread complaint into real action beyond politics and beyond petty changes to the system to make it just a little fairer. Major structural changes are coming.
There is no doubt in my mind that 2012 will bring a lot of change, and my hope is that the people who’ve been working on the sidelines, building local communities economies where people work together to serve a common end benefit, will see a lot more people on their side. 2012 is the United Nations year of the Cooperative — a viable alternative to the pyramid schemes the planet’s ’99%’ have suffered under for decades. The mind-shift that has begun in the realm of ideas needs to be reflected by the marketplace, where the concept of ‘value’ itself needs to explode and include instead value to the society, to the environment, and even value as an intangible benefit to the future generations alone– way beyond the dollar and instant personal gratification on a material level. This change may bring lots of residual conflicts as the 1% are revealed as sociopaths rather than our supposed role models.
