I have heard a lot of talk of pros and cons about the pressing issues of progressive politics and I am paying less and less attention because it is just getting old to my ears. Instead of judging mainstream people for thinking the way they do, it is better to understand them. It is understandable to want to escape through media, consumables and other media, and by obsessing with social status because we are taught to see the struggles associated with the human condition as depressing and dismal.

Another issue is the way we seek to solve the problems of the human condition. Politics is not reflective of serious and geninine desire of those who really control the political process to change things. Within this dynamic what keeps politics interesting, exciting and most stimulating is sensationalism. We cannot blame people for fleeing serious discussions about politics (at least I don’t), when so much of the discussion is so far removed from any obvious relavance in terms of the immediate issues of their lives that they face on an everyday basis. As corporations and institutions have become more centralized, the power of the common people to impact politics and the social dynamic has declined. From the mindset of Joe Six-Pack nothing ever changes and so what is the point in trying to change the system?

The continued irrelevance of the green party is its own arrogance and blindness to the diversity of the progressive movement and to the larger perspectives of mainstream society. There is a proclivity to talk about the problem rather than to see the many ecological designers, socially conscious people and innovative businesspeople that are working towards solutions. The ecological cassandras--the die-off and peak oil people--have their purpose but they are so obsessed about these issues that their ideology becomes unhealthy and ineffective to truly looking at solutions. In the extreme it becomes more the problem than the solution.


If there are fifty million people in America (according to demographer Paul Ray) who are sympathetic to green values, then why are they not voting green? Why is green biz not more influential than it is today? Why hasn't sustainable development taken off?


Newtonian Politics
The term Newtonian Politics refers to the linkage between the overall patriarchal paradigm that drives our society and the political. It also makes the connection between the assumptions of the founding modernists and the dehumanizing and ecologically destructive aspects of modern technology and the systems that have evolved to uphold that system’s values. Sustainability therefore must involve a change in the mindset. I constantly hear of how people hate Bush. I see more and more people consumed by hate and resentment of those who run our society. To me that is simply a rehashing of the same mindset that created that system and its incompetent clique of leaders. More radically I see the dialectical necessity of Bush within the larger context of history (and I feel the same way about Hitler).

Progressives should know better than to see leaders in isolation of historical events. Bush represents the rising extremism (the current system metaphorically has its back to the wall) that is embedded in the American system and its need to dominate people and resources to sustain the greed of a few, keeping a grossly unsustainable system going. This is not to say that I do not see the need to replace him of course, but I understand that any replacement will face a tough time creating real changes unless a significant number of people are mobilized not simply to protest as political activist but in terms of a comprehensive change in how they live their lives. Until progressives develop a proactive strategy to challenge the present discordance that is enveloping our world, events will continue to spiral downward and we will have to content with characters much worse than Bush and with significant public support.


Grassroots Economy
We cannot effectively talk of national or global solutions until we are practicing them at the local level in our backyards and communities. I think there is a simple basic common sense logic to this that resonates with most people, particularly those in the mainstream. Right now I still have to ask: where is my community? It is scattered across the globe and much of it is internet based. This is not necessary bad but we must have global as well as local communities, to complete the whole and manifest that sacred loop that empowers us as change agents for global transformation.



Progressives speak so much but complete so little on a tangible and practical level because the movement still revolves around a leadership that is very much living in the pain of the past and is more about theory than practice. Possibly this is because it is so much based on academic ivory tower intellectualism. Much of the progressive community seems to define itself primarily by what it stands against and does not seems to want to see how ineffective this strategy is in winning over mainstream America.

The real issue is that we are constrained by our built environments. As long as we exist within built environments that are defined and dominated by the dominant paradigm of sprawl, consumerism and commercialism, we can expect little resolution of these problems that so bother us as progressives. This is not to say that we are not capable of doing great things within constraining environments but that suburban sprawl and consumerism that most Americans now live and define themselves by is constraining to the human spirit and to the realization of full human potential. And this is why if you see economic growth not as an ends to itself but as a means to an ends of improving the overall human condition and quality of life then our overall social RIO on economic growth is not only low it is actually in the negative.


The cassandras are right for each unit of economic value created, we are degrading the ecological and socially commons not at an incremental but an exponential rate. So things will come to a head very soon. We could talk about this until we were blue in the face and specify and quantify every little nook and cranny of the dysfunctional system we live in but it would not get us inch further to what we want in life.


Let us imagine the incredible potential of humanity if there was a shift in how we humans spend our energy and that more resources was spent creating a sustainable economy that was a positive and life affirming force for humanity and that less energy was put into talking about all that is wrong with the world. This is the tipping point that we are striving for when we talk about reaching critical mass in a global movement for social transformation and sustainable development. We need to be well informed about the problem but not allow ourselves to be defined by it.