Remember the movie “Titanic”? There’s a scene where the bearded captain looks out from the bridge and sees the bow of his “unsinkable” vessel dip below the water. Imagine him at the radio, reporting that the vessel was experiencing a “downturn”!
That’s how most news media and politicians refer to the present economic transformation. A “downturn” implies a temporary condition – we just need to get through this stretch, then everything goes back to “normal”. We can resume our wasteful, toxic, greedy, unsustainable, selfish lives, once we get to the “upturn”. Just sit back and wait…
Does this look like a "downturn"??
Like the bow of the Titanic, this economy is simply not going to magically rise above the waters. And nor should it. I have been warning for over THIRTY YEARS that we were headed for this moment. Now, it’s here. Now that this moment is here, we know what needs to be done.
Because the makers of the Titanic believed the ship to be “unsinkable”, they did not put enough lifeboats on board. Because the captains of our economic ship believe(d) it to be unsinkable, they did not put ANY lifeboats on board!
That’s the bad news. The good news is… we actually have time to design and build our own lifeboats! There’s lots of usable materials lying around. Some of us have been working on the lifeboat designs for quite awhile. (My book, “Creating a World That Works for All”, is almost ten years old!)
So… a word to add to your talking/thinking about the economy: TRIAGE. In an emergency, where there are lots of injured people and only a few aid providers, doctors work out a system of who gets the limited resources.
- Those who will die without immediate attention get treated first.
- Those who are only slightly wounded, or those whose maladies are not life-threatening, get treated next to last.
- Those who are on the brink of death get treated last.
In our economic triage, we should add another category: those that really OUGHT to die! (Now, you can’t get away with THAT when dealing with humans!) The billions of dollars in life-support is NOT aimed at human casualties, but at non-human (inhuman?) institutions… some of which (in my humble opinion) are destructive of the Earth and our human niche on this planet. For example: General Motors was a bad idea 20 years ago… now that its about to die, why bother putting them on life support?
The billions that are aimed at keeping these dinosaurs alive should go to the millions of workers who are caught in this economic transformation. It would be money well spent.
Peace,
Sharif
Tags: downturn, economic transformation, economics, lifeboat, triage