Welcome to the future. Are we having fun yet? Or maybe it’s the past, I’m not really sure which. I watch the news and believe I’m seeing events futurists predicted a few decades ago. In the next moment, I’m wondering what historians will be writing about us 50 years from now.
Here’s what I’m thinking: 10 years ago this month, we were in the midst of Operation Desert Shield, the precursor to Desert Storm, in which a coalition of wealthy nations went to war against Iraq for control of Kuwaiti oil. It was, as futurists predicted, a resource war, a war of the future. Soon after, they said, there would be wars over water. We’re not quite there yet.
Last week, creeping even further into the future, Western Europe was brought to a halt by oil rebellion. It started in France and soon spread to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK. Back home forecasters are predicting both a cold winter and the highest home heating oil prices since – what else? – the Gulf War. Can we expect oil riots? Stayed tuned.
Protests in general are becoming more popular. It’s only been 10 months since Seattle was shut down by protests over the World Trade Organization, and similar anti-globalization protests have since occurred in Washington, DC, Davos and Geneva, Switzerland, both major party conventions in the U.S., and most recently, Melbourne, Australia, just to name a few venues. The next round is slated for the IMF meeting in Prague. What’s that all about? If you read the newspapers, you’d think it was nothing more than an easily-dismissed overdose of 60’s nostalgia. I think there’s more to it than that. I think both the European oil rebellion and the anti-globalization protests both result from the realization that political leaders from many nations now view corporations as their constituents, rather than communities.
Since the mid-1980s, I’ve seen this realization take hold in the minds of grassroots activists from Allegany County, New York to East Liverpool, Ohio, from Taylor County, Florida to Sierra Blanca, Texas and from Homer, Louisiana to Gloucester, Massachusetts. The situation was nearly always the same. A big company came to town and tried to force an unpopular project – a factory, or dump, down the throat of the community. Valid concerns raised by the community were treated with disdain and condescension. The citizens, in all good faith, trooped off to the offices of state and federal regulators, who were, at least in theory, supposed to be looking out for their best interest. At some moment in the process, these people realized the government wasn’t on their side and at that moment they made the switch from citizen to citizen activist. There was no 60’s nostalgia at work here. These women and men were fighting to hold onto their communities and their kids’ future.
Activists are, as the word implies, active. They talk to each other and they find that what’s happening in their community is not an isolated case. That’s also the point at which community activists and environmentalists, human rights activists and labor activists realize that in the big picture, they’re all working for the same thing and that thing is democracy.
So welcome to the future, to the era of resource wars and resource rebellion, to the age of globalization and the backlash against it. If you haven’t taken a side in that dispute, you should, because if globalization hasn’t affected you yet, it will soon.
Oh yes, there’s been one more relationship at work in the last decade, the results of which are yet to be manifested. We in America have seen one of the greatest economic expansions in our history and the simultaneous removal of the social safety net we’ve come to know in the last 50 years. The effect of the first has hidden the effect of the second and there have been few protests so far – but wait until the next recession.
Consent of the Governed
Welcome to the future. Are we having fun yet? Or maybe it’s the past, I’m not really sure which. I watch the news and believe I’m seeing events futurists predicted a few decades ago. In the next moment, I’m wondering what historians will be writing about us 50 years from now.
Here’s what I’m thinking: 10 years ago this month, we were in the midst of Operation Desert Shield, the precursor to Desert Storm, in which a coalition of wealthy nations went to war against Iraq for control of Kuwaiti oil. It was, as futurists predicted, a resource war, a war of the future. Soon after, they said, there would be wars over water. We’re not quite there yet.
Last week, creeping even further into the future, Western Europe was brought to a halt by oil rebellion. It started in France and soon spread to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK. Back home forecasters are predicting both a cold winter and the highest home heating oil prices since – what else? – the Gulf War. Can we expect oil riots? Stayed tuned.
Protests in general are becoming more popular. It’s only been 10 months since Seattle was shut down by protests over the World Trade Organization, and similar anti-globalization protests have since occurred in Washington, DC, Davos and Geneva, Switzerland, both major party conventions in the U.S., and most recently, Melbourne, Australia, just to name a few venues. The next round is slated for the IMF meeting in Prague. What’s that all about? If you read the newspapers, you’d think it was nothing more than an easily-dismissed overdose of 60’s nostalgia. I think there’s more to it than that. I think both the European oil rebellion and the anti-globalization protests both result from the realization that political leaders from many nations now view corporations as their constituents, rather than communities.
Since the mid-1980s, I’ve seen this realization take hold in the minds of grassroots activists from Allegany County, New York to East Liverpool, Ohio, from Taylor County, Florida to Sierra Blanca, Texas and from Homer, Louisiana to Gloucester, Massachusetts. The situation was nearly always the same. A big company came to town and tried to force an unpopular project – a factory, or dump, down the throat of the community. Valid concerns raised by the community were treated with disdain and condescension. The citizens, in all good faith, trooped off to the offices of state and federal regulators, who were, at least in theory, supposed to be looking out for their best interest. At some moment in the process, these people realized the government wasn’t on their side and at that moment they made the switch from citizen to citizen activist. There was no 60’s nostalgia at work here. These women and men were fighting to hold onto their communities and their kids’ future.
Activists are, as the word implies, active. They talk to each other and they find that what’s happening in their community is not an isolated case. That’s also the point at which community activists and environmentalists, human rights activists and labor activists realize that in the big picture, they’re all working for the same thing and that thing is democracy.
So welcome to the future, to the era of resource wars and resource rebellion, to the age of globalization and the backlash against it. If you haven’t taken a side in that dispute, you should, because if globalization hasn’t affected you yet, it will soon.
Oh yes, there’s been one more relationship at work in the last decade, the results of which are yet to be manifested. We in America have seen one of the greatest economic expansions in our history and the simultaneous removal of the social safety net we’ve come to know in the last 50 years. The effect of the first has hidden the effect of the second and there have been few protests so far – but wait until the next recession.