There are many who don’t hear the music; and many of the more powerful who hear it, and don’t want to get to the end of the dance. It is a new rhythm and meter called the Next Economy. And it is stepping on a lot of toes.
No wonder that it seems discordant and unfamiliar to the Growth Forever economy folk. It seems strange–dangerous even–to ears that cannot hear the words when it is suggested that so much must change so quickly. We can’t go forward much farther with BAU. Business has been as usual for a half century, or a century, depending on how you measure it.
And we have waltzed so near the edge of the precipice it makes one giddy, should they dare to look down. Most BAU folk don’t look down.
And those audacious enough to do so look to the other side of the chasm, across a long bit of stumbling and occasionally purposeful staggering to the music, with their eye on the world that has changed partners. Some argue you can’t get there from here, just accept that and live out your lives, best you can.
But others see it clearly, and they are becoming vocal about the reasons their future will no longer tolerate their father’s economics, built on the backs of our carbon energy slaves; powered by a disempowered workforce whose poverty is only now becoming so clear to them–a dis-ease given increase at the same rate at which the living planet and its non-human creatures have become impoverished and its habitats despoiled.
The New Economy folks don’t fully know the how, but they see the end-goal what, more or less clearly. And the bar has never been set any higher for our species. In the end, regardless of the pejorative labels attached to the awkward, difficult and disruptive dance ahead of us, the new waltz will come, if somehow we can strike up the band. Now.
And my children’s generation or the next or the one after that may see a sustainable, just, and equitable prosperity and true well-being that goes far beyond the “happiness” whose pursuit has, at best, failed to satisfy and turned citizens into mere customers and consumers.
Read more on this topic from Resilience.com…
Interesting that the original sense of “pursuit of happiness” as found in the Declaration of Independence was likely quite different from our own. I ran across this in my files:
“In the context of the Declaration of Independence, happiness was about an individual’s contribution to society rather than pursuits of self-gratification. While this sense has largely fallen out of use today, it’s important to keep these connotations of happiness mind when studying political documents from the 18th century.”