Global Shifts Part 3: The Turn to Self-Governance

…Thus, after operating in deep debt for a number of years, when the shakedown among the giant corporations begins, your government, actually a bankrupt corporation, will shut down slowly and painfully.

The significance of this information provided to Penny Kelly in 1980, and detailed in her book Robes, is all too clearly being realized as we connect this message with today's current political events. At the end of the U.S. government's fiscal year, September 30, 2009, our federal deficit reached a record $1.58 trillion — 11.2 percent of the national GDP. Last fiscal year's deficit was only 3.2 percent of the GDP. Our national debt came to $11.8 trillion. It is a naïve presumption that we will eventually overcome this crippling debt brought on by concurrent wars and economic instability caused by short-sighted consumer and commercial debt. Other identifiably strong nations, such as Japan and Great Britain, have also found themselves in the same predicament.

However quick we are to blame one side of the political party versus the other for our predicament, the greater reality is such that the accumulation of decisions and events by all of us has been necessary in order to tear down now useless forms of institutions to make way for more enlightened structures that better support the next level of human development that we are all moving toward. This is difficult to grasp as we contemplate the idea that past leaders such as President Bush and our current President Obama have acted as instrumental agents of change who have helped us decide as a population what we want or don't want to embrace as a whole. Do we want to be supporters of aggressive pre-emptive strikes against other countries, or do we wish to discover and engage in more diplomatic solutions that are supported by a global majority…and in doing so become world leaders in innovative ways to deal with humanity's issues of tolerance and diversity? Do we want to be supporters of massive welfare using our inefficient and bankrupt government as a means, intuitively knowing this type of fix does not provide us with long-term benefits, or do we wish to support ideas that help us become more independent and sustainably viable, yet supportive and altruistic, without the limited and often incapacitating confines of government structures?

In these and many other different ways, the U.S. is now on the cusp of enacting tremendous change to a governments' approach of providing services for the people they represent. Throughout all this we are finding out that the new self-governing system we are moving toward will go beyond our current ways of dealing with society's challenges. So what will this next stage look like?

According to some visionaries for our new humanity — including Penny Kelly, Ramón Stevens, and Native elders, and some of my own visions — our new ways of governing and functioning will be more on the level of smaller communities: large families and like-minded people who come together to live in self-sustaining clusters that provide their own food and generate power from alternative energy sources. Similar to aboriginal and native tribes, these large groups of like-minded people will find ways to adopt more natural ways of living while incorporating some of our latest technologies, such as the use of the Internet in order to maintain communication with other large groups of people, preserve a system of trade for services and products, provide comprehensive online learning opportunities, and overall, adopt a more harmonious and fulfilling day-to-day existence.

You can already observe such changes taking hold, as we notice more emphasis placed on sustainability of our agricultural practices, consumer choices, housing structures, modes of transportation, and energy usage. We are also noticing the explosion of the usage of the Internet, with improved trade being accomplished through sources such as personal websites, eBay, and bartering networks such as itex.com; and how universities and even institutions of secondary education are creating online learning environments. The implementation of such systems will invariably include some bumps and turns as we figure out how to improve upon the delivery and exchange of information in such a way as to benefit a greater whole.

In addition, we'll see more women becoming involved in the transition from institutionalized government to self-government, as the Goddess energy — the giver of life — continues to emerge and intensify, making its presence felt with its nurturing and supportive qualities. This supportive energy will provide us with intuitive wisdom and help carry us through some of the turbulent times yet to come.

Those who label these probable developments as Utopian fantasies are missing the greater picture. We cannot continue on our projected population growth and our current ways of consuming and expect things to remain status quo, for as we continue to do so, the Earth is presently underway in making her own ecological and geological adjustments as she strives for equilibrium. (I often wonder, as we extract billions of gallons of crude oil out of the Earth's crust every day, what is replacing this enormous displaced mass of liquid lifeblood from underneath us, and how will the Earth heal itself in response?) Few of us are choosing to pay attention to the signs we are already being given, but inevitably we must accept the incontrovertible evidence that is now being brought to light by today's environmental researchers in their quest to understand our earthly natural cycles and provide solutions for our ecological dilemmas.

To get to this new stage of growth, it may take some upheavals to further open our eyes to the new choices we must make. It doesn't have to, but noting the ways in which the majority of humanity is still clinging to old ideas tells us we still have some more shifting to do.

If you wish to study further some of the new ideas that expound upon the exciting ways in which we are headed, check out the book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten. Many of his ideas encompass our necessity to move toward the more sustainable communities of tomorrow and our movement away from the vast empirical structures of yesterday and today.

In my next Global Shifts installment I'll discuss changes in consciousness and human energy systems.