Social Mode

So, the question comes up more than once…

“What’s different about the changes that occurred in the 60’s and 70’s from the changes we are experiencing during our current crisis?”

There are not many parallels between the two times because they are as different as the 50 years apart that separates them. ALL the context is different. How could they possibly be similar?

First of all, we are just started the reaction and the responses to the last seven years and the 31 years leading up to this. It has just begun. You didn’t think it was some Palooka on Wall Street or in corporate America that made this happen, did you?

There are a lot of things that came together in the 60s and 70s that made them what they were and there are a lot of things that are converging now to make this what it will be. That is where the similarities probably end.

The 60s and 70s was the push back against repression, control, delayed gratification and isolation. The early 60s was a set of things in opposition to the status quo…. then other things came together, not by plan but by their own path and the confluence went POW!

Music was the medium like the Internet is today… But, no one had any idea what they were experiencing and it wasn’t because of the drugs or music.  Caesar didn’t realize what was going on either. It was just what was happening.

There were waves of change between the surfers-dudes and the button-down guys represented on the one hand by parents, Pat Boone, The Kingston Trio and, on the other, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the Birds or Jefferson Airplane.

• Drugs, sex and rock and roll
• The pill
• The war – the draft – the secrecy
• The car
• Woman’s liberation
• The idealists

The “pill” represented freedoms never imagined as did the car. Both were escapes from mom and dad’s world… In a similar but opposing ways, Britney Spears music is devoid of any content relating to the world today as the Zits cartoon series is today.  The 60s and 70s had irreverent tunes and MAD magazine… Both ‘anti-now’.

But where is the VOICE of today? I don’t mean the Village Voice, which morphed into respectability and successfully collects ad revenue to support circulation of its coffee house rebels. I mean the “VOICE” of someone calling the ball on what has happened in America. That means accounting for losses as well as our mis-gotten “gains”. Whose voice is going to ring out to address America’s privatized profit but socializes risk, isolation from allies, might-makes-right arrogance and the branding of ‘Democracy’ through colonization?

We have untold messages yelling at us about losing allies, losing hope, losing dialogue, losing respect, losing trust and openness that is displaced with secrecy, fear and loathing of anyone different from us including our government and the other boss in the corner office.

What are you willing to give up? Cassias Clay was willing to lose everything. Martin Luther King Jr. did. Freedom riders, lunch counter activists and everything in between including those who were caught when the world changed on them like it has today for us.   You know who I am talking about; the cops that thought they were doing the right things, the governors, the FBI, the soldiers, the parents… they were All doing what they were told was right even if it was the opposite from what those they were repressing had been told.

If you have no answers, the next 12 years aren’t going to be a good time for you in America or Europe, or Japan or… You will end up sour and ailing because today you are witnessing the tree of entitlements being cut down. It will take years to grow another. What is the expression in business? “He is a dead man just looking for a place to lie down!”

So, where is the lightening rod for change from all this doom and gloom?   Where is that person going to come from? Come on; use that teraflop of processing power and your angry brain to generate something you like.

• Is it the blogs?
• The social communities?
• The recipient paparazzi replacing investigative reporting?

With all the complexity, technology, information, misinformation and confusion…what we’ve done in the past isn’t going to be what we do in the future.    Some prognostications:

1. More suffering as the financial stuff sinks in and new things will rise out of the ashes.

Hard times are going to drive a new of barter or “in-kind” exchange. Will it be a cottage industry economy? Will it be a network community sensitive to exchange and barter… a Woot.com for product and services grow up? I am guessing it will be those types of things.

That will result in the middle man being taken out of the formula for commence more and more.  That is unemployment and that leads to some heart ache but change.  If it didn’t we’d be using buggy whips today…

2.   Having a black President is a lightening rod! Having a President with a vision will draw the volts    and colts as needed.

Now the insurgents in our own country will be running for the caves. And when they come out we, the people, have to meet them. We have to find our cohones and get them in the game.  You don’t need to change them; just participate.  After the election we’re going to hear and see some nasty stuff. If anything happens to the President there are going to be riots for all sorts of reasons and it won’t be only if our black president is gone.

This all sucks you know… it sucks because it is not COMPLEX. It sucks because we have to experience it to grow.

All the money and power falls apart at our feet without the slightest bit of introspection. We’ve had no introspection and we all are the greedy ones living outside our means.

For them and for us, it’s all about the race, the chase, the game for positions and status. Trouble is, once you’ve arrived, where are you? We are rudderless now.  Our experiences will put us on a course with a world view rather than a mirror view.

It is as reported to be for us and for our government?   Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.