This week has seen the end of the debate over whether we have a planetary crisis.
Weeks of a new experience of winter in Europe and in North America have finally alerted the people to the truth - that we live indeed in the most challenging time in our species history. I sense a great awakening as seemed also to have occurred in 1939.
This week the political winds have also caught up with the people's experience as more reports confirm what we all know.
As I thought about this general awakening and the final aha in politics, I could not help but think back to the threat from Hitler in the 1930's and the processes of denial, of awakening, of still doing too little and then the final reckoning that forced us into total war that our grandparent experienced.
I see a direct parallel.
The idea of going to war again after WWI was unthinkable in the 1930's. The people and their leaders leadership hoped in the mid thirties that Hitler was not going to force them into another war. They thought that he could be negotiated with. The insisted that he be negotiated with. They could conceive of no event that would make another war possible. They despised people like Churchill who kept saying that the storm clouds were gathering and that war was inevitable. Wake up and deal with the threat now he would thunder from the sidelines. The establishment hoped that he would shut up - they accused him of being a war monger.
By Munich though - many were waking up. Many saw this last gasp of appeasement as immoral.
As Chamberlain offered these words in Parliament, trenches were being dug in Hyde Park.
"After everything that has been said about the German
Chancellor today and in the past, I do feel that the House ought to
recognise the difficulty for a man in that position to take back such
emphatic declarations as he had already made amidst the enthusiastic
cheers of his supporters, and to recognise that in consenting, even
though it were only at the last moment, to discuss with the
representatives of other Powers those things which he had declared he
had already decided once for all, was a real and a substantial
contribution on his part"
Even when war was finally declared, it took the fall of France and the fall of Chamberlain for the conflict to be seen as it truly was - a desperate and uncertain all out commitment to save Europe from true evil. It took a further tragedy at the close of 1941 to bring America into this conflict.
I see many parallels today.
What is the great challenge that we hoped would somehow go away or be negotiated away?
I think that it is our idea that our happiness is based on a society that depends on endless unsustainable growth of consumer goods and services. We are so convinced that this is the only way to live that we will do anything to stay in its thrall.
We pray that we would not have to make a choice that would mean that we might have to re-evaluate this premise. Give up my car!
We do not even see that we do indeed live in a Matrix. We live in a world that has its norms set by a handful of institutions that control our idea of reality.
We think that they have the same interests as we do. But they don't. Their paramount interest is to maintain the world as it is because that keeps them in control. They will never surrender this control willingly.
So this misconception about the motives and the interests of those that we are dealing with resets the Munich and the Phone War conditions of 1939- 1940. We will do our best to negotiate with organizations that may use all the right words but that are compelled to act in their own interests. They are masters of deception - not the least because they also deceive themselves. We will think that we have got their number but they have ours. We think that we can control them but they control every aspect of the system that keeps us stuck.
You think I exaggerate? Then answer these questions for yourself and then think about who controls whom and why they could ever give their power up without a fight to the death.
Who has been funding the skeptics in the warming debate?
Who has just announced profits of $40 billion?
Who says that energy has to be big and centralized?
Who makes all the money in agriculture?
Who makes and sells all the food that makes us ill?
Who controls the health regulations for food that make it impossible to grow, process and sell locally?
What is the fastest growing sector of the healthcare industry?
Who controls the idea that health can be found in a drug?
Who has been exposed as being the biggest liars in the health care industry?
Who wants to lock up the access to the web?
Who controls access to the mass media?
Who controls the idea that education is a factory system?
Who has the money to make the politicians notice?
If we are to live differently all this has to go away. All of this sets the incentives and sets the environment that tells us every day in every way that we are lost without growth. It is impossible to make a change of how we live unless we change the incentives and we talk back our own power.
So here is my prediction.
I think that the time now is Munich. Our politicians think that they can negotiate with the institutions that really govern us. We hope they can too. After all - who wants to go to all out war.
The institutions, like Hitler, will say all the right things to make us feel better and that we are making progress - "Peace in our Time" - A better environment in our time and all we had to go was to negotiate a few terms. We could let Czechoslovakia go because we knew that this was the price for peace. So we can let the tar sands still run or worse - back Ethanol made from Industrially farmed Corn that costs more to make that it yields.
The a new crisis will emerge, as in the fall of Poland - we will say that we are really going to war. But we wont. We wont give up how we live really and we wont really take on the institutions that govern how we live.
Only after a out and out disaster, as in the fall of France or Pearl Harbor, we will get serious.
Dan Crosbie Canadian Ice Service via the New York Times
Pictures of starving Polar bears will not be enough for us to give up our SUV's. This tragedy is too far away. This is what I fear we have to wait for. Something that affects us directly.
So what can I do? What can you do beyond whine?
As our politicians go into a Green Wash Frenzy - let's help them see the truth.
There was no negotiating with Hitler. There is no negotiating with the institutions that control how we live. Let us use the web to tell the truth about what is really going an and what the interests are of those that claim to own business, food, health and education.
I see no point is just going out and attacking them either. There is a better way of taking on institutional power that has been shown to work in the 20th century. It is moral power. We can be like Gandhi or Vaclav Havel who instead of taking on the powers - build an alternative so that in the end the powers became irrelevant and had no power.
If we are to live differently, then we have to pull away from the Matrix. We have to come together to build alternative ways of living that are more natural and more simple.
It is not beyond us to connect directly to those that grow real food. It is not beyond us to heat our houses differently. It is not beyond us to start traveling differently. I am giving up our second car in April and will rely in the summer on my bike. It is not beyond us to educate our kids and ourselves differently. It is not beyond us to focus on becoming healthy in a whole way.
But as we know in Change or Die - we need support to make big changes. So let's get together and help each other.
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