NewThink

This week I am hosting a discussion titled Conversation Café. The topic of discussion is: "How should we re-invent the political process so that people feel that they have a voice?" (http://www.global-mindshift.org/converse/conversation_forum.asp#16972 Join in if you’ve a mind to.) Peripheral questions include: When have you felt that your voice mattered in a political process? What contributed to that? Where do you want your voice to matter that it doesn’t, and how has that impacted your political participation? What re-inventions in the political process would inspire you to participate more than you do now? What one change would matter most?

Several interesting concepts have arisen including web voting, mixed member proportional voting, and political divisions based on watersheds. General consensus, of course, is that the people are underrepresented, feel isolated from the political process even if actively involved at the party level, and think that the nation-state system under which the world operates is obsolete.

We are having a hard time coming up with concrete things we can do to try and impact those problems, though. Little wonder. How can one little person like you or me expect to have much impact?

The answer, I think, is that if we have expectations of seeing the rottenness we all recognize crumble before our eyes and be replaced with the utopias that we wish for, we will be bitterly disappointed. However, I also believe that systemic change comes about through a collective thought process something like osmosis. I read once that societal assimilation of a great idea for change takes at least 50 years from inception to first appearance. After that first appearance the idea’s form will evolve over centuries.

Following that line of reasoning, I think there is value just in the fact that such ideas are being discussed.

If you would like to join the conversation, please do so, but if not I urge you to visit www.globalmindshift.org anyway. There is an introductory series of videos that are remarkable enough just in their construction to make them worth watching, but the concepts they put forth and the argument they make for a sort of NewThink is well put, interesting and maybe even vital for a sane future. Doesn’t a sane future sound great when compared to the totally insane past with which we are all too familiar?!


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle