2012: A Positive Message?

We haven’t done anything close to a “scientific” poll (not that I think polls these days are really scientific) but it’s pretty surprising how many people associate 2012 with doomsday scenarios. I’m starting to feel like a skipping CD telling folks that our message along with many other explicators of the Shift is largely a positive one of personal empowerment and co-creation in this unique time in history.

That said, shepherding our own internal resources and state of mind in a positive and mindful direction is one thing. Trying to assess the overall direction of where things are headed as one surreal news item after another jumps across our computer and/or TV screens is another and is a huge challenge to deconstruct, at least from my perspective as a former research analyst. Perhaps that’s why there are so few books available these days attempting to sum up our wandering and attention deficit laden zeitgeist from either a sociological or anthropological perspective. It’s a work in progress -- a moving target -- so who can capture it?

In this context, there seems to be a ying/yang effect going on where things – i.e. all the tangibles and intangibles that make up quality of life -- are simultaneously getting better and worse reminiscent of the classic phrase “the best of times and the worst of times”. Brought down to the personal level, the glass is either half empty or half full of course depending on how someone chooses to add things up: a net positive or net negative.

This theme surfaced at one of the Emergence Project’s recent events in Cambridge during a discussion after the showing of the film 2012 Science or Superstition? In that discussion we looked at some of the positive things that are happening globally right now that resonate with Annette’s wonderful phrase “radical creativity”. But for present purposes I came across a great example recently that I wanted to share with you: nothing less than the reinventing of the state of California.

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg wrote about this recently (link below). In the article he says that that state’s political process has become so hopelessly gridlocked that there is a movement afoot to scrap the whole state constitution and, in essence, start over. So California may be at that unique tipping point at which things get so bad that radical creativity is indeed brought to bear and totally new paradigms start to be considered.

Here’s Hertzberg: “California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons.” Not so good right? But he goes on to say that “Something remarkable is beginning to happen”.

Apparently this all began with an op-ed piece by Jim Wunderman in the San Francisco Chronicle asking (because of the aforementioned mess) “…are we not obligated to nullify our government and institute a new one?” Wunderman called for a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to do just that. This movement is now called Repair California. Herztberg concludes by saying “If California has the courage and imagination to become a true laboratory of democracy, the experiment will be something to see.” Indeed. And this is a great example of what a unique time we’re all living in and what positive developments can arise, Phoenix-like, out of the ashes.

Here's the link to this article:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/08/24/090824taco_talk_hertzberg