Unfortunately, much of the scientific and engineering is being eclipsed by advertising. Mass licensing. Cleaning up old messes without much consideration for the creation of new ones. Mobilization: Linkage of a professional pursuit to a societal, economic and cultural revolution. Sustainability: A mass movement. That does not mean that there are not professionals laboring out there. There are.
This is not the world I grew up in, nor the people I worked with to make improvements in the way we did business, working together with mutual respect, as if we lived in a free society. I have seen fads before, and this is one giant fad with a faulty endpoint, carbon. The goal is a mystery. Not one of process, getting better, one of a new shade of blind ambition. A zebra with green stripes. Sales of new toys, exporting pollution.Student protests, activism: They are an occasion to socialize and party. London, Paris ... is NYC next? (Study this picture carefully. See the pocketbook. The fashion statement. The social "I-experience": "See me, I was here for the destruction.") It's the picture of cool, entitlement, not stewardship. Destruction, not construction. And, vastly different from the civil disobedience and the environment left behind DC 9-12-09. (And, where were our commercial journalists then, warming the bench, seeking a larger, visible flame, with billowing black smoke, to record.)
My departure from the subject matter, not a belief system, is normal. We are part of Nature's ecology, a larger cosmos, whether we want to accept it or not. Besides, the individual freedom to create is something altogether different from Pavlovian training-style reform, habit-changing. We know better than you. Crashing the old system, as the new icons of the environmental movement, smiling, well-dressed – are inclined to espouse, but angry and divisive in their speech. When will the red warning flags spontaneously erupt?
I want no part of wanton economic destruction and centralization, the New World Order. No matter the commercial and industrial communities involved. Fakery is fakery. Or, is it sham with a purpose. Sales. Conformity. 1984. FEMA camps (What's that?) for the civilly disobedient.
My take is that there is no opportunity for a practitioners' view today. Common sense. An academic's approach, at the federal level, is dangerously compromising institutional memory and threatening our demise. Much more significant and consequential are the machinations of men taking place right now.
America needs to replace NIMBY with BHN - Build Here Now.
The basis of this movement to be Number 1 in sustainability makes no sense. There is no goal and a very weak process, filled with advertising and targeting marketing. I hear familiar refrain: Life is complex. There are a lot of people. It never sells with me that complex problems demand complex solutions. That's how bureaucracies are made. Power and control concentrated. Seems obvious that the ongoing centralization and management of all manner of things guarantees the loss of freedom, individuality, creativity.
What I have a sense of is people. Americans. What will work and won't work for them. This genetic legacy will not remain buried forever. It's embodied in the soil. Will feed the future.
Americans cannot escape a penchant for the unalienable: individual liberty, right to assemble, right to own property. We have been lingering around the precipice of open confiscation and wealth redistribution, as if it were returning us to a country-founding mindset. Not this USA.
On the election of the new President, I wrote a favorite aunt who was excited about The Change. She had been waiting her whole life for justice. Alas, finally, the elite, their wealth would finally be taxed and right-sized and proportional. Those with family heritage, compounds and cash advantage would face equal opportunity. As if the same result would not prevail.
Rhetoric is always rhetoric. Nothing could be further from reality. The chasm is stretching inordinately. Galaxies are moving faster and faster away from each other, so inflationary theories of the universe educate us. Will it all turnout to be a rubberband that reaches a limit and rushes back to a single point? Reverse "Big Bang."
A Billionaires' Club promise to give away half of their assets is not much of a promise. They give it to themselves and their direction. That's what some entrepreneurs do. Set up foundations to contain and protect their wealth. Serve on each others' boards of director. You can't dress up control. Power. If that were all true, anonymity, not branding opportunity, would rule action, example and altruism. What appears, in public and print, is a peer pressure and threats. Find me human progress in this reality.
You can test the claim rather easily: Study the boards of the largest and most successful non-profits (and their profits); their schooling; their families; the companies that they came from; and their politics. Our economic icons, lauded philanthropists should not be confused with those engaged in a daily grind. Even more so, with the spiritually-guided. Those who do what they can. Pray for all mankind. An intention released far exceeds material value. Mountain tops and desert valleys bear these souls.
It's not a race. Living. It is living. Love surrounds us, and knows no space or time. You can't find that chart on the pages of the Wall Street Journal or on CNBC. The meter that matters the most. The measurements which bring smiles, warmth, comfort could appear on billboards in Times Square as easily as outside Bismarck, North Dakota. But, you can't find it? We're in discovery mode, still.
Yet, as I listen to the societal hum, outside my morning window, I just can't imagine either change. A renewal of spirit, a Grand Awakening, or change in traffic patterns, decision to walk quietly, non-wirelessly. Yet, I know it will come.
Schadenfreude is the German word for the "pleasure derived from the suffering of others." It life's nasty word for a common expression of human emotion that we are wont to disclose: the glee and satisfaction at the misfortune of others. Every Sunday, though, someone is sipping the electrifying liquid of his team's victory, which tastes sweeter because his rival is crying somewhere. It is undeniably sick, but true.
People make a living off Schadenfreude. For some, it is their lives. If there was no human suffering, there would be no reason to live. Knowing that people can find happiness inside of themselves, without criss-crossing city streets, is disquieting. A disturbing disease requiring eradicative treatment by a licensed professional.
News is Schadenfreude's elixir. The spinning weekend roadster on an organized track right before it explodes into flames. A disaster in slow motion. We pretend to avert our eyes, we know and don't know that there is a live human being inside. The sensation is that it is not us. Proof that we're all human and inclined to read the newspaper and watch TV news for the episodic thrill.
How have we become so upside down in priorities? Become so connected and disconnected at the same time. I have been writing about this subject for six years now. Really, not very long. Although, it is a long reflective, tiresome-to-read, rant that is part of new construction. While I have appeared to waste precious time, I wonder if I really have or is my vision actually improving.
From the perspective of a parent and father, I have had the great fortune to examine professional ambition. Find perspective in the next generation. What is the measure of gratitude? This could not have been accomplished outside the family unit.
It's looking more and more like destiny. The possibility, the choice, most likely to succeed. Without taking that long step, what would have happened?
No matter how you slice the turkey, carving is a process. More art than science.
While it strikes us as a leaky faucet that we just can't seem to turn off, we learn to live with ourselves. Learn from our experiences. Recognize that we change ourselves. That we connect with some broader planetary adjustment of humanity is more a matter of societal variation by biological individuals than a contrivance by governance. Automatically learned by trial-and-error.
John Wooden was a process coach. A winning process coach. You can see him seated in his metal chair, arms folded, papers rolled in his hand, observing his team play a regular game ... planning for the next practice. Was he arguing with referees, throwing chairs, getting caught in recruitment violations? Or, was he concerning himself with the execution of the process of play.
Wooden was making a world, one repeatable process built on top of another. At present, I see neither a process, nor a goal. More of a mass-numbing mind control, shuddering in situ.
It's bricks and mortar. Mass revolution on a global scale. The smallest locale is still the individual. The personal mind.
We can get caught up in the fact that we are older. Not hip. We need a re-training in the new movement for sustainability. How to behave as a consumer. A reverse mentoring by youth in the ways of texting.
Wisdom sticks. Outlasts the faddish.
"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."
- John Wooden, UCLA Basketball Coach
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