Many people still believe we can “recover” from our current economic meltdown. They believe that some form of fiscal conservation will set us “back on track” and/or some political leader will lead the charge back to “How things used to be”. But, I believe that “recovery” as such, is not possible now, as we find ourselves in an unprecedented cosmic soup of unique circumstances and new emerging truths. Let’s take a look at where we find ourselves presently.
We are living in a world that we have depleted of many of it’s natural resources. Oil, coal, water, farm land and more have become less and less available and/or more and more costly. We have, most of us anyway, fashioned an economy and way of living that depends very heavily upon those resources that now start to dwindle, or become so costly monetarily speaking, or in terms of environmental impact, that our will to continue relying on them starts to wane.
We also find that people all over the country no longer know how to support themselves, as they have become dependent upon money to live and feed themselves. Therefore, if they do not have money flowing in, they cannot eat or keep a roof over their head. Having lost touch with the ability to fend for themselves, they have bought into the idea that jobs are the number one pressing need to bring their lives back on track.
Small businesses find themselves caught in a net of government regulations and taxes that make no real sense to them and seem to feed the bureaucracy’s never ending hunger for new and unnecessary expansion of powers. They hesitate to expand, feeling that they may just end up feeding more and more of their income to the government. They wait for someone with vision to take the reigns of government and bring a favorable business climate back, as if bringing things back to the way things used to be was a real possibility.
All these current circumstances and more have led us to where we are now. And where is that? It is smack dab in the middle of chaos. Banks, businesses, government, politicians, institutions, Wall Street and every person on the street knows that something must be done. But, no one seems to know what will work.
As I look at this situation, I realize that what has worked in the past will no longer work going forward. The debt is too heavy to recover from in a world that tries to rely on ever more dear natural resources and does not have jobs to feed, clothe and house people. The burden of national debt now is so outrageously high that it is beginning to pull us all under. It’s like expecting a homeless person without food or shelter (and without a credit card) to lift 500 pound weights every day to get back on his feet. The bottom line is… it ain’t gonna happen folks!
In the 1930′s when people were out of work during the great depression, we still had family farms and we had undeveloped land and rivers where people could camp. We had fields where people could forage for food, and boxcars they could jump on to move to take them where work or family or opportunity awaited. Houses had large yards back then, where one could garden. There was much less regulation, and people still lived close to the land in most parts of the country. We have taken away many of these things from people over the last 80 years or so.
Now, you can be arrested for sleeping on public land, or for riding the rails, or for begging door to door for food, as they did back in the depression. Now it’s even illegal to grow food in your own yard in some areas and it’s even illegal to cook food and give it out to hungry people in public places or at the local farmer’s market and so on. You have to have an address. You have to have a license. You have to have a drivers license and references and birth certificates. In short, it’s become much harder to live without money, and the things it can buy, than it was back in the 1930′s, due to our declining connection with nature and our increasing reliance on money and the law.
Some might even say we have been hoodwinked out of our fundamental human right to access nature and live naturally. And we have been taught how to live a life that is almost completely dependent on money and those who have it. This makes the problems we face different and unique from any previous ones we have faced. In many ways, it is much more challenging than the great depression. Much of what worked then, won’t work now. Most of us don’t know how to farm or grow a garden, raise chickens or tend a beehive. And even if we do, we may have trouble finding a place to do those things. Millions who live in cities and towns across the country look to their government to provide opportunities to survive in a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams. It is deeply ingrained in us to expect government to fulfill the role of “nurturer” and caretaker.
We have forgotten that our natural nurturing partner is mother nature, not government. And, in our folly, we have failed to protect our natural resources and fashion laws that protect our Earth and our human right to live upon the land as a result of this forgetting. We have fallen asleep at the wheel and let smooth talking self-serving, fear driven leaders in partnership with greed, abuse the land, air and sea until we now come to a place where there is so much poison everywhere that our technology and laws have little hope of ever being able to clean things up, in the forseeable future. We actually seem to find a certain amount of poison and imbalance in our foods, our medicines, our environment as acceptable these days.
The “unraveling” we see playing out now in our financial sector and our political arena and more, will continue in my opinion, because they are built on the lie that money can provide what we need. When, in fact what we need is to wake up and start honoring nature where the real sustainable power lies. We will only begin to heal these challenging situations before us, when we wake up and begin to live a more balanced life of love and respect… for all of life. Money is not the answer. Nature is showing us that in so many ways now. Will we listen?
