I have been reading Jim Kunstler's blog for a few months now and was really taken by his post looking forward to 2009 from last week. He has amazing economic foresight/insight/knowledge, whatever it is, he hits a chord with my world view; that we are deep in a "long emergency", out of touch with ecological principles, a just and sane economic foundation, and each other. He is an air raid siren in a country that seems to be deaf. But to the people with their eyes and ears open, he does a great job at putting sound economic facts to his foresight and makes his predictions seem like projections from a computer system that just crunches the numbers and spells out our gloomy future. Yes, I believe it is going to get gloomier before we fully wake up as a country and rebuild our lives with what we have left around us. I don't believe it is going to get better, as someone on NPR said, by "hitting the reset button on the current economy, add some new regulations, and hope for a better outcome". That would be suicide, if this time around wasn't already.

But what really struck me was again finding myself, as I often do, slowly slipping into a haze of daydreams, shopping, pumping 2 dollar "happy motoring" gas, consumption, community-bitching about our current predicament, and then every week or two reading up on the reality of our global economy and being slapped awake. Again, again, and again. Something about our US economy is so strong as to make us believe that our problems are somehow outside of ourselves and our local community. In a lot of ways it is, sitting in offices of multi-national corporations and the ether of global markets and computer systems that determine everything for us. But even as unemployment soars; friends of mine sitting idle and frantic all at the same time, it is still so, so easy to actually feel disconnected from the horrid realities of what is going on here. I can click a few buttons and have things arrive at my front door. I can pump gas and move myself to the grocery store to buy food that comes from 3000 miles away. I can pick up the phone and make 120 dollars a day substitute teaching at the local schools. All without interacting with the rest of the broken system. Most of my part of the system is still working just like it has with no immediate window to the parts that are broken for so many others.
I am not going to make any predictions or try and pretend like I have enough knowledge and writing skills to sort out any part of this mess we call our economy, our lives. I'll leave that to people like Kunstler; read it.
But what I do want to record is the idea that the solutions to our problem are all around us. They are in the people we live next to. They are in the material resources that we consider "waste". We understand ecological principles extremely well, we only need to apply them to the foundation of our lives. They are in our legs and arms to pick up tools and build a human scale, ecologically coherent infrastructure.
The answers are not where our problems are; far away from us in multi-national corporations that suck value away from local communities and leave us with confusion and degradation.