It's amazing how life adapts to change. As we head at a crashing pace towards our inevitable demise, there seems to be a part of the human mind that is desperately trying to find balance in the world. On an ever growing scale (and I say ever growing because more and more people recognise the pure common sense of it), people are starting to dismantle the Western capitalist model (and all the others that don't work properly), in favour of alternatives.
Simple systems that for too many years have been firmly lodged on the fringes of society are now becoming more and more mainstream. Things like Permaculture have developed out of the fragmented "Back to Nature" movement of the Sixties and Seventies into fully-fledged, viable alternatives to the "That's Just The Way Things Are" way of thinking that I, for one, grew up with.
Take a website like Freecycle, for example, where people literally give things away to one another. Not just junk, but everything from books, clothing, kitchenware, computers (good ones), and even cars along with many good and useful things besides!
Talent Exchange is another one. A place where you can swap your skills for those of another. Such an ancient idea, and yet so modern. What's next, bartering chickens for a lift to work? Why not.
Mother Earth News ran a story many years ago now, about a thing called the 'Hour' in Ithaca, New York. Similar to the Talent Exchange idea, you swapped your abilities for "banknotes". The thing about the notes was (still is, I believe) they were for time, not money. So you paid your barber with time, who paid his mechanic with the same time who then went and bought fresh organically grown veg. with the same "hour". Everybody got something out and no money went through the system. The taxman was the only one with a blank look on her face!
These are all examples of people's willingness and ability to beat, bend and hammer the system into a more humane and sensible shape. They are indicative of the groundswell of awareness that the capitalist model, with its unerring ability to favour the few over the many, is not the way Nature intended us to live.
People working within the system are becoming more effective all the time. I remember way back in the Seventies when I was a kid that there was an often violent differing of opinion between two differing schools of thought amongst the "alternative" communities of the time. The one crowd thought that the only solution was violent revolution while the other sought to subvert the system from within (basically joining the system in an effort to beat it). These people were decried as having sold out to the system and were given short shrift by the more angrily vocal crowd. I was kind of torn between the two, and being young and foolish went with the fast turnover idea that "revolution was the only solution". Luckily that didn't last long and as I became a slightly more sensible person the idea of change by evolution began to take form. I was always reminded of the song lyric "...now that you've got your freedom, what are you going to do with it?" and it had a sobering effect on me and many people that I knew as we began to reflect on what actually does happen after the revolution. Do we keep on making the same old mistakes as those bright minds who went before us? Considered soberly, the honest answer had to be that no, we didn't actually have a clue as to what to do next.
Then a very weird thing began to occur... The "corporate subversives" were popping up all over the place in government and civil society and providing solutions to problems that most people hadn't even seen yet. They were educated and eloquent and passionate and were making a difference from within the system. Holy shit. they were starting a revolution! A living, breathing, walking, talking revolution. A real paradigm-shifting, upside-down turning make-you-sit-up-and-think revolution. And people really are starting to think. They're starting to think that maybe we really can "wrest technology's sword from the hands of the warlords".
Check out something like the Reclaim Camissa project (which will soon have its own home here)and you'll see that there is real change happening right in front of us. There are so many projects like this happening all over all the time that I would dearly love to see splashed on the front pages of every daily newspaper and as headline news on TV. Well, at least they got it onto 50/50
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