There's madness here. Is there a method to it?

Long, long ago, when I was young and sure of what I knew, I learned that "the Future" was something I needed to prepare for. I studied hard at school, got good grades, thought  about what I wanted to be when I grew up and believed that "the Future" was some separate, independent thing out there. It never included something like COVID-19, although I was a child at the time the polio vaccine was developed, I vaguely remember having some Summer plans disrupted as a precaution.

These days I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea that "the Future" is something we create by the actions we take, or fail to take, every day. For someone who is a Type A personality (who, me?) this disrupts a certain preference for a "Command and Control" world. Then, several decades ago, I read a few papers by Donella Meadows. From her writings I learned that systems don't respond to command and control structures, but Type A's can, and should, learn to dance with systems.

I am also learning from her, and others who share the values she espoused, to let go of my cynicism and work to create the future I want for myself and my descendants. I can't do much for my antecedents except honor their memories. In her last Global Citizens column, Meadows put it this way:

There’s only one thing I do know. If we believe that it’s effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while they last, well, then yes, it’s over. That’s the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.

Personally I don’t believe that stuff at all. I don’t see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed…We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there’s something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls.

This is our "Planet B"

Here I must confess that I haven't yet read the Global Citizens columns nor the Dear Folks Letters, an oversight I will correct this Summer. Meadows is wise, very readable, and, as I look about me these days, increasingly relevant. If you've been paying attention to what's been going on for the past several years, or longer, you have seen evidence of the regime in Washington, D.C. using one of Meadows' observations about systems. I feel better realizing that it's not sheer incompetence driving our ship of state these days. Consistent with and confirmed by the observations of contemporary chroniclers such as Sarah Kendzior in her book Hiding in Plain Sight, some years ago Ms. Meadows pointed out to us that:

“You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Watch the evening news, read a daily paper, check out social media from time to time and see if that isn't what the tRUMP / Putin gang, aided and abetted by the GOP,  isn't trying to do to us. Now go back and read the second paragraph in italics above, then see if you can answer the following:

13 Questions for the Next Economy 

Susan Briante

On the side of the road, white cardboard in the shape of a man,
           illegible script. A signpost with scrawl: Will pay cash for 
              diabetes strips.
 
A system under the system with its black box.
                     Disability hearing?
a billboard reads. Trouble with Social Security? Where does the
 riot begin?
 
Spark of dry grass, Russian thistle in flames, or butterflies bobbing
as if pulled by unseen strings               through the alleyway.
         
My mother’s riot would have been peace. A bicycle wheel
              chained to a concrete planter. What metaphor
 
              can I use to describe the children sleeping in cages in 
                  detention
centers? Birds pushed fenceward by a breeze? A train of brake
 lights
 
extending? Mesquite pods mill under our feet
on a rainless sidewalk. What revolution            will my daughter feed?
 
A break-the-state twig-quick snap or a long divining            as if
for water? A cotton silence? A death?                 Who will read
 this
 
in the next economy, the one that comes after the one that kills
 us?
What lessons will we take from the side of the road? A wooden
 crucifix,
 
a white bicycle, a pinwheel, a poem
waiting to be redacted:                         Which would you cross out?

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