Rather than sharing a video of one of the dozens of protests, the clashes with police, or all the looting that's happened the last few days, I'm going to an old song by epic Canadian rock band Rush, to start this final chapter. The opening line shares their hope, recorded 43 years ago. It still hasn't come to pass, in a large way.
Written by Steve Emig (The White Bear)
"And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start, to mold a new reality, closer to the heart."
Rush- "Closer to the Heart" recorded in 1977
I remember singing along to this song as a high school kid, hoping "the men who hold high places" really would build a more positive world. But they didn't. By and large, the exact opposite has happened. "The men who hold high places," and a small number of women, have largely failed us, the everyday people of the U.S., and the world. Their financial system is collapsing, though they're trying to prop it up a little longer by creating money out of nowhere and pumping it into major corporations and Wall Street. The nationwide protests right now (and some rioting and looting, early June 2020) these past few days, show that policing isn't working for much of the population either. The thousands of visible homeless people (myself included, at the moment) in major cities, show us that there were not enough good jobs before the financial collapse, and that our social network for those who experience catastrophic personal issues, doesn't work well either. Our mostly deadlocked legislature shows us that traditional political parties don't work well anymore, either. Our grossly incompetent, maniac of a president, Donald Trump, shows us our voting system doesn't work well, and that a sizable number of Americans don't really believe in our Constitution anymore
All of these things, and many more major issues in our society struggles with today, are Industrial Age institutions and systems that are breaking down. They just don't function well, if at all, in today's hyper-connected, high tech-enabled world. If you've read this book all the way through, you know now that this is the Toffler's Third Wave concept playing out. The remaining remnants of the Industrial Age are breaking down.
It's June 1st, 2020, as I begin this final chapter of "Dystopia- book 1." This project started with an idea I woke up with one morning, last October, in 2019, about seven months ago. What started as an idea to go back and look at the movie and TV trailers of the futuristic movies from my childhood, morphed into me explaining why I believed we were heading into a full blown great depression. That idea seemed ridiculous to most people, when I first wrote it. In the past few months we've been hit by a 100 year pandemic, the Covid-19 human corona virus. More than 106,000 Americans have died from it already, over 1.8 million have been sick, and most of our economy was shut down for two months. It continues to sweep through society, in the U.S., and worldwide.
The virus turned out to be the "black swan" that sent an already shaky economy into the fastest stock collapse and bear market in history. While I've been writing this online book/blog thing, over 40 million Americans have been laid off in just ten weeks. Most of these lay-offs were supposed to be temporary. It's now becoming apparent that a lot of them, possibly half of the layoffs, will be permanent. Our lives have changed dramatically in the time I've been writing this. We now wear masks in public, and practice "social distancing," a term unknown seven months ago.
I predicted the 10,000+ point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in my blog, on January 26th (Here's the post), and similar predictions for the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000. I missed my call on the Nasdaq, though. Those came to pass, already. I'm not looking into a crystal ball. I'm looking at ultra-long term societal trends that most people ignore. Other people simply don't believe such trends exist, and dismiss them. For 30 years, I've been learning about these trends, watching the economy and social changes, and building a worldview where today's chaos, unfortunately, makes sense.
Change. Our current Dystopia is massive change. We are in a period of societal change unlike anything in our known history. Several major aspects of human society are changing, all at once. And that's hard. As adaptable as we'd like to think we are, we humans don't like change. But change is here, it's big, and it will keep happening for some time to come, like it or not. The downside of this is that what we call "normal" is collapsing around us. The upside is that we,as humans on Earth, get to build something new. What we do this decade shapes the world for the next hundred years or more. IF we survive this decade, as a society. One big thing has we have definitely learned from these last months, stockpile toilet paper in case the Mad Max days do come.
All kidding aside, we have several rough years ahead, for most people. This decade, the Tumultuous 2020's as I'm calling them, oozed in quietly, then turned Godzilla on us all of the sudden. We've had a 100 year pandemic, a huge stock market collapse, our society, including most businesses, got put on time out for over two months, most of our major corporations were basically insolvent two months ago, and our small businesses have been hit by a barrage of economic nukes. Over 40 million people have been laid off in under three months, numbers never seen in history. Half of America struggled to pay their rent last month. And we just had a 5.5 earthquake here in Southern California, a little reminder that even the Earth itself is shaky at times.
We're in an economic Never Never Land, with negative interest rates on bonds worldwide, small businesses hoping to open again, and the astronomical bailouts, 6 or 7 trillion dollars so far, pumped into Wall Street and big business. The stock market has surged back. Hey, ANYTHING will surge if you throw $7 trillion at it. But the vast majority of people, the real world economy, is a train wreck.
Yeah, this is how a hell of a lot of people are feeling right about now. But like a summer thunderstorm, a hurricane, or even a kidney stone, this too, shall pass.
But this incredible level of change is happening to all of us. We all have to deal with it. And a common "enemy," or struggle, has an amazing effect on humans. It begins to bring us closer together. Not all at once. But these waves of trauma from change, the "future shock" the Tofflers wrote of 50 years ago, remind us what we all have in common, regardless of how we look, where we grew up, what name we give to a higher power, or who we love. Even in the clashes of the last several days, we've also seen great acts of kindness, and understanding, and the start of new alliances where none seemed possible before.
Individuals in a society learn to ignore the little things all to often. People are told to simply accept things as they are, particularly when a handful of less admirable people try to control the show for a while. But the Universe has a way of pimp slapping us, waking us up, and making us all look at life in a new way, from time to time. This is one of those times.
So take a few moments. Take a deep breath. There will be more shocks, more things changing that we wish would stay the same. That's just the time we're in right now. But periods of great change are also the periods of greatest opportunity.
Look around where you live, and ask, "What needs to happen here?" "What needs to be fixed? What needs to be re-invented? What new thing needs to be built? Pick one of those things, and get to work. A small group of people, motivated and using the creativity latent in all of us, can do amazing things if they work at it, and persist.
Creative Scenes
Apple, the company, started with two geeks in a garage, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, 45 years ago. Cirque du Soleil started when a group of Montreal street performers thought, "You think we could create a new kind of circus?" That was 36 years ago. Snowboarding happened because skateboarder/surfer Tom Sims wanted to "surf on snow," and then set out to make a board that could do that, and found some others in Tahoe stoked on that idea. The national parks in the U.S. began, in part, because John Muir sold Teddy Roosevelt on the idea that some of our great natural places needed to be protected forever. Two people here, three or four people there, with an idea, and the willingness to work hard and keep at it, are how all great things begin.
I call these little groups Creative Scenes. I started chapter 7 with a video of a little Creative Scene I was a part of in 1985-1986. We were a bunch of weird, offbeat young guys, who came together to do tricks on BMX bikes. Our visionary leader, Dave Vanderspek, died young in a tragic way, but left a lasting impression on all of us. Maurice Meyer, the focus of that video is a tech guy and a dad today, still in San Francisco. Two of us went on to work at BMX magazines from that group. One became a legendary skateboard graphic designer, still influencing people with his art years later. Another one was a really good graffiti artist, and does graphic design now. Yet another is now a leading business man in the electric bike movement. None of us saw those things coming. We were young, motivated, and creative, and came together to do tricks on bikes. That coming together on a regular basis helped each of bring our creativity out, and gave us a place to experiment. We found out we could make cool stuff happen. Those days on the BMX freestyle bikes shaped who we became, and what we thought was possible.
Creative Scenes, thousands of small groups of motivated, creative people, are how the United States, and the world, will be re-imagined, re-engineered, and rebuilt. That's where the remaining pieces of the Information Age will come from. A huge amount of that will happen in this decade. That's the "phoenix" part of the Phoenix Great Depression. Old things are breaking down, because that's what old businesses, old systems, and old institutions do, when new ideas, and new technology make other things possible. Yon can whine (or wine), and cry about how unfair it all seems. Or you can realize that it's going to happen anyhow, whether you and I like it to or not. Then you can look around, dream of what might be possible, and start working towards making those dreams a reality. Even if you don't make your initial dream come true, you'll probably be in a much better place for having given it a shot.
"A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at."
-Bruce Lee
Change is happening. Our world feels like some Dystopian nightmare right now because we have the fortune, or misfortune, to be alive at a time when several large, long term cycles are coming to an end, and new ones are beginning. Change. Massive change on multiple levels. This decade we've just begun, which I'm now calling the "Tumultuous 2020's," is going to be a weird one. It's going to be a rough decade. But it will also be an amazing one, a time that will set the stage for many decades to come.
Change is the theme. What are you going to do in this time of great change? That's your choice. Make the most of it.
-Steve Emig
The White Bear
6/8/2020
Blogger's note- 9/12/2023- I have not changed anything in these posts since I wrote them back in 2019-2020, except for these notes at the bottom. I even left in the typos I initially missed. As of late summer 2023, I'm doing most of my writing on Substack. Check it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment