We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Designing the Future

from Resurgence. 
...this is where you come in. As planetary citizens we can all now go beyond ‘business as usual’, by pooling our collective dreams and ideas and imagining a new kind of future. We can build it inside the existing system, using the worldwide web as the operating system, so that when the time comes for a new, truly democratic, open-source system of governance, there will be a blue-print ready and waiting.