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Joanna Macy

Page history last edited by Deanne Bednar 15 years, 2 months ago

From Joanna Macy

October 27, 2008

Dear People,

Well, it's happened. The financial meltdown so long predicted has

begun for real. Even if we knew it had to happen, it's scary. Stock

markets crashing, foreclosures skyrocketing, the biggest banks going

belly up, jobs disappearing. With so much suffering for so many, and

more losses foretold, it's hard not to feel the panic.

I'm scared of what that panic will do to our country--corroding our

trust in each other and in the future, when we need it for the Great

Turning. At moments I feel fear about my own life, wondering what it

will mean for Fran's and my work for the world, if the cushion of

savings he's so carefully husbanded evaporates.

So I am grateful for teachers who, at just the right moment, remind

me to hold a larger perspective. Here are three who have been of

particular help: Minqi Li, Robert Reich, and Granny D.

Minqi Li is economics professor at University of Utah. He shook me

awake to the realization that this economic collapse, far worse than

anything since 1929, is what life on this planet needs for the

survival of complex life-forms. He says that in order to cut

greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to avoid irreversible climate

disaster, "the world economy must contract at a historically rapid

clip--at an annual rate of -1 to -3.4 % between now and 2050….

Economic growth will have to be thrown into reverse."

The retrenchment he sees as necessary is about 55% over a span of 40

years; that is what occurred over four years in the Great Depression.

As Stan Cox of AlterNet points out, everything depends on how the

economic contraction is handled. If chaotic efforts are made to

restore capital accumulation, life on Earth will continue to

deteriorate. To cure the malignant economic growth that we've

unleashed, new ways of thinking and acting must come from the bottom

up and from both hemispheres of this ailing planet. The turbulent

times that lie ahead may offer the opening we've been waiting for.

According to Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton, the

"deep recession" he foresees is the direct result of the economic

inequality we've created. His analysis suggests that this economic

failure is the price of moral failure.

The top 1 percent of American earners take home about 20 percent of

total national income. Reich says the last time that happened was

1928; after that the economy caved in. "The wealthy," he reflects,

"devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than

the rest of us because, after all, they're rich and already have most

of what they want. Instead of buying, they're more likely to invest

their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest

return… The underlying problem of such imbalance in earnings has been

masked for years: first by sending more women into the work force,

till working mothers with school-age children almost doubled since

1970, to more than 70 percent. The second coping mechanism was

working more hours, till Americans became veritable workaholics,

putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European. Then came

a third way of coping: to borrow... But now with the bursting of the

housing bubble, we've reached the end of our ability to borrow, just

as lenders have reached the end of their capacity to lend. That means

there's not enough purchasing power in the economy to buy all the

goods and services it's producing.

"We're finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality and ever

more concentrated wealth… The long-term answer is for America to

invest in its working people--health insurance, good schools and

higher education, while also investing in the clean-energy

technologies of the future, and adopting progressive taxes at

federal, state and local levels. Call it bottom-up economics. It

would be a sad irony of the Wall Street bailout robs us of the

resources we need in order to do that."

Nine years ago at the age of 90, Doris Haddock, known as Granny D,

walked 3,200 miles across the country to promote limits to corporate

rule. Two weeks ago in Philadelphia, she shared her memories of the

Great Depression and urged us to stop viewing it as a time of horror.

"Maybe we were hungry sometimes, but did we starve? No, because we

had our friends and family and the earth to sustain us. Our memories

of that time are more round and golden than sharp-edged. My husband

Jim made an ice rink from a little meadow, and he made a few dollars

extra those winters of the Depression. I learned to put on one-woman

plays and performed in women's clubs here and there, making the rest

of what we needed. We were fountains of creativity. We were fountains

of friendship to our neighbors. As a nation, we were a mighty river

of mutual support."

Read on. Granny D's words are such wonderful medicine for us all

right now that I'll not interrupt her till I sign off.

"Imagination! Let me suggest that a generation raised on books and

storytelling, where one's own imagination had to fill in the colors

and details, made us a generation quite able to imagine marvelous

ways to fill our family dinner table in those years. Let me suggest

that the power of imagination was essential to the rise of all the

grand improvements we achieved for each other and called our New

Deal. Imagination allows the citizen and the politician to connect

with people of every situation and condition.

"The foundation of right-wing politics is a grand absence of

imagination. If you cannot imagine what people need until it happens

to you, then I suggest you have never read a mystery book under your

covers by flashlight…

"I want to tell you - especially if you are young and have not

experienced true hard times - that there is nothing much to it, if

you will insist on creatively and ferociously loving the friends and

neighbors around you. And fifty or seventy years from now, if you are

blessed with a long life, you will count those years as being some of

your best, as indeed I do…

"Fear for the loss of material things is but the jitters of an

addict, and the jitters go away once we relax into whatever new world

we find ourselves come into…

"If you own stocks, you own a small percentage of the nation's

economy. It's like owning a family business. Some years your shares

will be worth a lot, some years they will not. But they are your

piece of the action and you should hold onto it. You might even use

the current low prices as an opportunity to increase your share of

the pie.

"Our real challenge is not the disaster caused by the deregulation of

Wall Street, for which my friend Senator McCain must answer, but

instead it is the dislocations -- economic, food supply, coastline

and weather dislocations -- caused by our continued use of fossil

fuels and the resulting warming of our atmosphere that is our real

emergency and the true challenge for our character.

"And I want you to understand that you must see beyond the

distraction of these present headlines to the true challenges ahead,

which have little to do with Wall Street and everything to do with

changing the very ways we live, so that intelligent life on earth

might prosper and survive."

Amen!

Yours in glad solidarity,

Joanna

 

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