Despite common perception there were many experts out there who for years had been warning of the crisis.
Most of the warnings were ignored because too many of the people who made the decisions were comfortable or helped to remain in power by those who needed the status quo. And because power needs support there was an inherent symbiosis that grew more difficult to break as time passed.
Vision, backbone and resolve were needed. People who had the foresight to see what was coming and would risk everything to do what was right. But in an age where what was right was too easily attacked by those envious of power, and where those who’d lose the most had the best resources to shout down any suggestion of reform, shouts that would cost all but the most charismatic critical support, well, there simply weren’t enough visionaries alive to make it happen.
Restrictions that were hard to enforce, and even tougher for adhere to, needed to be made a hundred times more rigid if disaster was to be avoided, but each attempt to put these reforms in place were hard fought by those who wanted the status quo to remain as it was, because who in charge wants to risk what they know for the unknown? Sustainable the buzzword, as if an ever growing bubble was possible forever.
And even as the end neared and those who were “with” quickly became those who were “without”, few wanted to admit there was a problem with the system. Fewer would admit the whole system needed to be scrapped in favour of a new way.
Not that it mattered. By the time any attempt was made to stabilize things things had progressed so far that the act was simply putting off the inevitable. The very foundation of how things were run needed to be rethought, broken down to its core, and rebuilt with a new model in mind.
The collapse had already begun and what would’ve cost too much to avoid was costing a hundred times more just to stabilize. Changing that, restarting from the ground up, that meant dismantling everything, it meant rebuilding, an no one could even conceive how that could happen. That is until the system collapsed and those left behind had no choice but to start over, creating a new system in the vacuum caused by the loss of the old.
Now you might think what you just read is about the current economic crisis, or the looming ecological threat. It’s actually about Russian Communism. A system that many spent billions trying to prop up but wasn’t workable, particularly as a competitive system, and rather than early reform, a controlled transition to what the smartest in that land knew was inevitable (and many ended up in Siberia for saying) they tried to keep the system going, until it completely collapsed. The Chinese Communists have tried to manage the same transition, but their model as well is based on an unrealistic growth model. It too will collapse, only hopefully without creating a void that crime and the mob will rush into.
And yes, when one takes the lessons of history and applies them elsewhere, you can’t fail to see the comparative to today’s economic crisis. Some smart observers have already said we’re in a post-consumerist society, but you wouldn’t know that from those in charge. The power people among us are spending trillions in an attempt to stabilize things so they can return to normal while failing to realize or admit that what was ‘normal’ was a fantasy based on risky investments and the free flow of cash that didn’t exist.
And the same is true with the environment. There are still too many who have too much say in what happens who continue to marginalize people like Al Gore. The power continues to argue that the cost of change is too high, that the trends of the last 40 years are coincidence, that the signs are inconclusive, or that we need to continue as we are because we can’t afford to change.
Well, perhaps if the reforms had been put in the 1970’s when the first signs of planet-wide manmade environmental toxicity were first noticed we could’ve reformed our current model into something sustainable without needing a complete overhaul. But we didn’t because those in charge were getting rich, or propped up by those who were getting rich because it was too cheap to pollute.
And now, countries like Holland are spending Billions to prepare their shores for a rise in the oceans because they don’t believe enough will be done to avoid that; while the rest of us, 10% of which live in coastal flood zones, are blithely continuing to pollute as though we’re not somehow approaching an ecological version of what happened to our economy.
Of course, when the inevitable occurs there’ll be many who shake their heads in shock. Who will wonder how come we didn’t see this coming?
The irony would be delicious if it didn’t threaten half the planet.
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