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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