Occupation forces have gone into hibernation in many places as the authorities have moved in to shut down their encampments. But the melody should linger on. Economic disparity certainly will.
In an effort to do our part, Prophets of Boom will feature two kinds of posts over the coming months. The first stream will be drawn from a book manuscript written a decade ago but unpublished because nobody was ready to acknowledge the threat posed to individual and collective sovereignty by mounting debt loads. Entitled "
Futurehype", each post in the series will describe how North Americans were lulled into thinking that the honeypot of postwar prosperity was bottomless.
There will be stories of naiveté, of greed and of gullibility, to be sure.
American Greed wasn’t just discovered to explain the credit crash of 2008.
More to the point, there will be accounts of how faith in technology and the pipeline of mass communications overheated expectations.
In a real way we allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by our own ingenuity.
In the process, we lost sight of our core values. That, basically, is how we let ourselves get in so deep.
The second stream of posts in this blog will be based on our search for answers out of the current economic de-stabilization.
In this search we will be asking whether the
Conversation of a Generation is beginning to take shape.
Is there anything happening out there to give us hope that the most innovative and productive society in history can work its way out of this slump?
What are people proposing to do differently?
This series will not be a simplistic critique of capitalism run amok.
Rather, it will be an exploration of ways to shape our collective experience for the common good.
Has Occupy Wall Street really signalled the start of something big?
Or are we programmed to sleepwalk into a new Dark Ages?
Along the way, readers will be urged to look for solutions themselves and tell the rest of us what they have found out.
We will be … and we will post our findings as they emerge.
