Tag Archives: Events

Washedashore.org: art to save the sea

Posted on by
3

Meet Lidia the Seal. She stands as tall as I can reach, in a vacant lot in Bandon, Oregon, the creation of artists and volunteers of the Washed Ashore Project.

Lidia2

The group’s goal is to turn plastic and other ocean garbage into art that illustrates the harm to marine life and the entire food chain resulting from careless dumping.  So far, 1000 volunteers have collected three and a half tons of marine debris along 20 miles of coastline and used it to create 18 giant sculptures.

Detail of Henry the Fish, showing the kinds of objects used to make the sculptures. Henry is 15'x9'x8'

Detail of Henry the Fish, showing the kinds of objects used to make the sculptures. Henry is 15’x9’x8′

Plaques beside the sculptures explain a little about the dangers of the degrading petrochemicals in plastics in the ocean, as well as the process of collecting, washing, sorting, and recycling what the volunteers collect.

One of the plaques affirms that, “Every action you make in your life has an impact.  Even small actions make a positive difference.  People working together CAN create results.  This project proves it!”

I wish you could have been there to share the delight of rounding a corner to find Lidia and Henry, but for the next best thing, please visit the project website: washedashore.org. There are many more photos and descriptions illustrating the process of turning these castoff items into art, as well as information on exhibits in other locations.

Maybe one day soon, one of these washed ashore creatures will visit a spot near you!  Meanwhile, enjoy these, and perhaps, as one of the plaques says, you will be moved to see art where others see garbage, right where you are today!

Informed Citizen Disorder

Posted on by
13

Words can sometimes illuminate.  Bill Moyers’ recent interview with Marty Kaplan, Professor of Entertainment, Media, and Society at USC, gave me a phrase that crystalizes the sense of despair that increasingly follows attending to current events.  “Our spirits have been sickened by the toxins baked into our political system,” Kaplan says.  That’s one definition of what he calls, “Informed Citizen Disorder.”

Marty Kaplan by adamrog, CC-by-SA-3.0

Marty Kaplan by adamrog, CC-by-SA-3.0

Kaplan has an impressive and varied resume; a degree in Microbiology from Harvard; a Ph.D in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford; twelve years as a Vice President at Walt Disney Studios.  Kaplan wrote speeches for Walter Mondale and co-authored the screenplay for The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) starring Eddie Murphy.  He was the founding Director of the Norman Lear Center at USC, which studies “the social, political, economic and cultural impact of entertainment on the world.”

In the interview with Moyers, called Weapons of Mass Distraction, Kaplan spoke of the weeks he recently spent in Brazil, watching the widespread protests against “political corruption, economic injustice, poor health care, inadequate schools, lousy mass transit, [and] a crumbling infrastructure” while the government spends billions to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.

One of the obvious questions Kaplan asks is where are the protests in our country?  With ills so blatant and parallel to Brazil, where is our outrage?

“Sickened spirits,” is one of his answers.  Another is misdirection; what passes for journalism often has us asking the wrong questions as it feeds us “the infotainment narrative of life in America.”  Learned helplessness is another factor that Kaplan often cites.

Learned helplessness entered the language of psychology in a now-famous experiment conducted by Martin Seligman in 1967.  Dogs were subjected to electro-shocks with no means to avoid them.  Eventually, they stopped looking for an escape and entered a passive and “hopeless” mode.  In the experiment’s final phase, when means of avoidance were introduced, the dogs did not discover them, because the helplessness had been so thoroughly learned they no longer even tried.  Researchers had to retrain them to manipulate their surroundings again.

The analogies to our situation are obvious.  Citing incidents like the lack of change after Sandy Hook, Kaplan wonders how many times can we stand to have our hearts broken?  Answering a question from Moyers on “Informed Citizen Disorder,” he adds:  

“Ever since I was in junior high school, I was taught that to be a good citizen meant you needed to know what was going on in your country and in your world. You should read the paper, you should pay attention to the news, that’s part of your responsibility of being an American.

And the problem, especially in recent years, is the more informed I am, the more despondent I am, because day after day, there is news which drives me crazy and I want to see the public rise up in outrage and say, no, you can’t do that, banks. You can’t do that, corporations. You can’t do that polluters, you have to stop and pay attention to the laws, or we’re going to change the laws.

…every time that doesn’t happen…something bad happened and nothing was done about it…the sadder one is when you consume all that news…all the incentives are perverse. The way to be happy, to avoid this despondency is to be oblivious to it all, to live in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.'”

Despite everything, Kaplan remains an optimist.  “I have kids,” he says, “I have to be.  The world has kids, we have to be.”  The alternative to optimism, Kaplan warns, is to “medicate yourself with the latest blockbuster and some sugar, salt, and fat that’s being marketed to you.  The only responsible thing that you can do is say that individuals can make a difference and I will try…”

Not the happy-happy answer we’d get from the “infotainment” world, but though Kaplan is an optimist, he’s not going to feed us bullshit.  I urge everyone to listen to the interview or read the transcript.  A key finding with learned helplessness that researchers discovered and Kaplan cites, is that since it is based on perception rather than fact, it can be quickly reversed.  We’re not there yet, he thinks, but maybe as people become more and more unhappy with the state of affairs around them, a critical mass is building that will lead ordinary citizens to demand change as we have done in the past.

July 6 is the Dalai Lama’s birthday

Posted on by
1
His Holiness with a participant at the Young Minds Conference in Sidney, Australia, June 17, 2013

His Holiness with a participant at the Young Minds Conference in Sidney, Australia, June 17, 2013

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is 78 today.  Regarded by many as an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, here is a summary of the Dalai Lama’s mission in the world from the website of the Gyuto Vajrayana Center in San Jose.

Three Main Commitments of His Holiness

Firstly, on the level of a human being, His Holiness’ first commitment is the promotion of human values such as compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline. All human beings are the same. We all want happiness and do not want suffering. Even people who do not believe in religion recognize the importance of these human values in making their life happier. His Holiness refers to these human values as secular ethics. He remains committed to talk about the importance of these human values and share them with everyone he meets.

Secondly, on the level of a religious practitioner, His Holiness’ second commitment is the promotion of religious harmony and understanding among the world’s major religious traditions. Despite philosophical differences, all major world religions have the same potential to create good human beings. It is therefore important for all religious traditions to respect one another and recognize the value of each other’s respective traditions. As far as one truth, one religion is concerned, this is relevant on an individual level. However, for the community at large, several truths, several religions are necessary.

Thirdly, His Holiness is a Tibetan and carries the name of the ‘Dalai Lama’. Therefore, his third commitment is to work to preserve Tibet’s Buddhist culture, a culture of peace and non-violence.

Good News on the Food Front

Posted on by
2

In several recent posts I’ve expressed the opinion, and quoted others expressing the opinion, that traditional institutions and governments are no longer able to deal with the most serious problems facing nations and the world (see Notes on Tricksters, The North Wind’s Gift, and The Unwinding book review).  An image that comes to mind is the Titanic, whose rudder was simply too small for her bulk.

Titanic at Southampton (public domain).

Titanic at Southampton (public domain).

At the same time, I’ve been watching for stories of positive change that appear under the radar when people and organizations try out new things in new ways.  One of the most dramatic was a series on agricultural innovations called “Food for 9 billion” that aired on the PBS Newshour the week of June 10-14.

Those who watch PBS, as well as those who have read Dan Brown’s Inferno, know what the title means:  nine billion is the UN projection of world population in 2050.  Eighty percent of those billions will live in cities, dependent on food from shrinking acres of arable land.  Food will have to be trucked or shipped in even as oil supplies decrease.  Dickson Despommier, an ecologist at Columbia University, puts it in simple terms:  “We’re going to reach a tipping point really soon where traditional agriculture can no longer provide enough food for the people living on the planet.”

One of the PBS stories centered on Singapore, where five million residents crowd an island with only 250 acres of available farmland.  Jack Ng, a 50 year old engineer,  founded Sky Greens, a vertical farming configuration that features four story greenhouses.  Stacked beds of vegetables rotate through nutrient baths, then back into the light, like slow-motion ferris wheels.  They are driven by gravity-fed water wheels, and the energy cost of each greenhouse is $3 a month!  Singapore’s population embraces the fresh vegetables Ng provides, and the Directer of Singapore’s National Institute of Education says, “I think, eventually, urban factories for vegetable production will take the place of electronic factories in Singapore.”

Each greenhouse stands 30' high and costs $12,000 to build.

Each greenhouse stands 30′ high and costs $12,000 to build.

Another Newshour account centered on farmers along the coasts of India and Bangladesh who directly experience the effects of climate change.  Rising oceans take 600′ of land a year along the fertile Ganges delta, and increasingly powerful storms, like Cyclone Aila in 2009, flood rice fields and farms with saltwater.  Four years after the cyclone, the only crop that will grow where the storm surge reached is a salt-tolerant strain of rice, developed by small farmers a century ago.  Crops promoted by government and agribusiness, which promised high yields with the use of chemical fertilizers, were the first to fail.

One farmer on the Ganges delta says the old seeds are worth more to him than gold.

One farmer on the Ganges delta says the old seeds are worth more to him than gold.

The so called “green revolution” in India, the introduction of high yield and sometimes genetically modified seeds along with nitrogen fertilizers, began in response to the loss of agricultural land to growing cities.  After several decades, however, yields are falling, the required amount of chemicals are rising, and scientists like rice conservator, Debal Deb, are trying to collect the old seeds, adapted to local conditions and weather extremes.  One 64 year old farmer grows 30 different traditional varieties of grains and vegetables on two acres of land, using seeds developed a thousand years ago.  The crops can withstand salt, drought, flooding, and local pests, so they need no chemical fertilizer or pesticides.

A third program in the PBS series shows efforts to improve dry land farming in the desert nation of Qatar.  It shows that agribusiness can play a positive role in adapting farming to a changing climate.  Two large fertilizer companies helped fund the The Sahara Forest Project, which has an experimental desalination plant in an urban industrial zone.  The plant also aims “to produce food and water and energy that actually reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”  

Jonathan E. Smith, now with the Qatar National Food Security Program, grew up on an Oklahoma farm, with grandparents who were dust bowl survivors – he knows about drought.  Saying it would be foolish for the nation to place all its hope in a single technology, he demonstrated a low tech solution developed by one desert farmer, who reduces water usage and waste with a series of inexpensive plastic greenhouses.

Notably absent in this series are agricultural innovations from the developed nations, which have not, in any collective sense, admitted there is a problem.  Countries already familiar with scarcity and rising food import costs do not have the luxury of delaying work on long term solutions.  Here, as in many other arenas, innovation tends to come from outside the status quo.

This echoes the European trickster stories I recently discussed (links at the top of this post).  In this genre, the heroes are often middle-aged or older, having worked on a farm or served as a soldier for decades.  The stories begin when these protagonists wake up to find they are on their own.  Increasingly, I think this is the story of people in all modes of life, from all countries, who no choice but to find new paths through the world.

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

Posted on by
4

We have all heard and read more words this week than we want or need. The ones that keep coming back to me were written in 1919, in a poem called “The Second Coming,” a haunting vision written by William Butler Yeats in the wake of the first world war.

W.B. Yeats by John Singer Sargent. Public Domain W.B. Yeats by John Singer Sargent. Public Domain

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

***

Yeats was a member of The Golden Dawn, an early 20th century occult organization centered in Britain that sought to recover lost elements of the western mystery traditions.  Their once-secret teachings are now posted online, where we can see that the group practiced the kind of visualizations that could give rise to spontaneous “images out of Spiritus Mundi,” the World Spirit, one of the Golden Dawn’s concepts.

Elsewhere we can read that the poet worked out his own concept of world cycles or “gyres” as he put it here.  We find theories of world cycles from many cultures in many times.  The Greeks said there once was a Golden Age, but now it is Iron.  We’ve all heard of the Age of Aquarius, though unfortunately astrologers now tell us it won’t begin for a few hundred years.  Eastern cultures envision vast cycles that rise and fall and rise again eternally.

In all of these visions, this is the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, a time of degeneration, where the ceremony of innocence is drowned.  Different traditions differ on where it goes from here.

In one account, offered by Paramahansa Yogananda, the crucifixion marked the nadir of this particular world age.  Things are getting better; right now we are experiencing inertia, a last gasp of the dark ages.  Even in this hopeful account, nothing is fixed or pre-determined.  It’s up to us.  How we live our lives, what we think, and what we do, matter more than we know.  More than we can imagine.

In truth, we already know this, just as we know that despair is not an option.  It seems to me the only choice we have is to live moment by moment as if we are the people we want to be, living in the world we want to live in.  There may not be anything more important.  Isn’t it true that the sum of our collective thoughts and actions is going to shape our world and the one future generations are going to inherit?

The North Pond Hermit

Posted on by
10

He was just arrested on Tuesday, but already they’re writing ballads about the North Pond Hermit:

Nobody seen his face in twenty-seven years,
Since that day in ’86 when he up and disappeared.

The story has travelled around the world, and unless you are living in the woods, you’ve heard the rudiments of Christopher Knight’s story:

At the age of 19, he disappeared and set up a camp in the woods near Rome, Maine, where he lived for 27 years by stealing sleeping bags, food, propane, and books from nearby vacation cabins and a summer camp.  He spent the long winters wrapped in multiple sleeping bags and never made a campfire for fear of being discovered.  He spent his time reading and meditating.  His only conversation in 27 years was a greeting exchanged with a hiker he met on the trail in the ’90’s.

Christopher Knight

Christopher Knight

When he was arrested, Knight was neatly groomed and clean shaven.  He’s up on current affairs thanks to a transistor radio he used to listen to rock music, news, and Rush Limbaugh.  That’s about all we know, since Knight politely refuses to talk to journalists or explain himself to anyone.  This guy is going to pass on his 15 minutes of fame, his shot at a spot on Letterman, and the chance for a best selling ghost-written bio!

He walked away into the pines to live out in the woods
He turned his back on everything and he was gone for good.

I think the story resonates so deeply because part of us too, wants to walk away from all that crap.  “Lives of quiet desperation” in the words of Thoreau, who lived for two years in relative solitude at Walden Pond, but never made or intended to make a break as complete as that of Christopher Knight.

Into an unimaginable mystery like this, each of us will project our own biases.  For me, Knight’s practice of meditation aligns him with spiritual seekers who have sought out caves of one sort of another for millennia, but they never threw off all human connections.

The Hermit, from the Tarot

The Hermit, from the Tarot de Marseille

Christians have maintained a hermit tradition from the desert fathers through Thomas Merton, but none of them relinquished all human company.  Milarepa, a famous Tibetan yogi, lived in a cave for years eating boiled nettles, which gave his skin a greenish cast, yet once he attained awakening, he returned to teach what he’d learned to others.

Did Christopher Knight intend to return someday, to tell us what he’d discovered about the mushrooms and eagles who were his only companions?  We don’t know and won’t unless he decides to tell us.  In a way, I hope he doesn’t.  Whatever his story may be, it will be trivialized and forgotten a week after the tabloids get ahold of it.  I don’t want Christopher Knight’s tale to be forgotten.

Some of his old friends have said he was “intelligent, quiet, and nerdy” in high school – just like millions of us, in other words.  What could make an intelligent man who is one of us, simply decide to walk away, to opt out?  I hope we will wonder about that for a long, long time.

The North Pond Hermit, livin’ in the woods,
The North Pond Hermit, they’d catch him if they could.

You can listen to The North Pond Hermit Song here.

*** UPDATE after posting the original article ***

Troy Bennet and his dog, Hook, who brought you this great ballad, have posted a link to an MP3 version we can download for an optional contribution via Paypal.  Bennet says it isn’t his very best song, but it’s the one he’s written about a hermit this week.

Robots ‘R Us (?)

Posted on by
4

forbiddenplanet

In the field of robotics, as in so many other areas of life, science fiction writers saw the future decades before the rest of us; they warned that androids were coming and the relationship would not always be easy.

Recently, I’ve seen adds on the cable channels by legal firms inviting the “thousands of victims” of botched robot surgery to join class actions suits (go to badrobotsurgery.com).  Ironically, the same Google search that brought up the lawsuit page also showed adds for robotic prostate surgery, which is not the time you want your robots going rogue!

Practicing medicine without proper training isn’t all the dastardly droids have been up to.  In an article called, When the future comes, what are we going to do with it?, blogger Orkinpod looks at how robots eliminate manufacturing jobs.

As an Apple geek, I was dismayed last year to hear stories of mistreated workers at Foxconn, the mammoth Taiwanese contractor that assembles iPads and iPhones.  Apple hired independent auditors to investigate, and Foxconn agreed to clean up its act, but that was not their only decision.  According to links in Orkinpod’s post, Foxconn is stepping up plans, announced in 2011, to deploy a million robots across their assembly lines.  They are much less inconvenient than humans.

If the sheer size of this transition is hard to grasp, the trend itself isn’t news.  Industry experts have already warned us not to get too excited about Apple’s move to bring mac production back to the states.  The process is now so automated that the number of new jobs will be far less than hoped for.

All this prompts Orkinpod to pose a question I haven’t heard anyone ask before:  “When the future arrives (and I believe that it is very, very close), and machines can supply all the things that humans could possibly ever want, what is everybody going to do?”  

That’s a question I’ve been thinking about since I read his post, and it generates many other questions centering on the value of work.  Even excluding the jobs that are dangerous or abusive, no work situation is perfect.  Everyone wants more respect or money or benefits than they currently get, but if we’ve learned anything over the last few years, it’s that being out of work is usually worse than being badly employed or under employed.  Aside from the money, work lies close to the core of self-esteem and meaning in our lives.  Even if we are working on the great American novel at night, as an artist I admire once said, “You’ve got to do something during the day.”

Even where there are safety nets, ever larger numbers of people displaced by technology is an issue I don’t think any nation has started to address.  In December, I discussed a report by the National Intelligence Council called Global Trends 2030:  Alternative Worlds. The report’s most definite conclusion was that the next 18 years will usher in more rapid change than anyone living has ever seen.  Summing up the findings, NIC Chairman, Christopher Kojm said:

“We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. It is our contention that the future is not set in stone, but is malleable, the result of an interplay among megatrends, game-changers and, above all, human agency. Our effort is to encourage decision makers—whether in government or outside—to think and plan for the long term so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.”

I recommend Orkinpod’s post, which asks important questions “for the long term, so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.”

 

Economic imaginings

Posted on by
12

The key aim of this blog, as stated on my “About” page, is to look at “the reality in our fantasies and the fantasy in our realities.”  The phrase was inspired by James Hillman, who used the word “fantasy” to suggest how imagination and the unconscious always elaborate “literal” facts.

These days, nothing seems more literal than “the economy.”  Its worldwide meltdown has caused and continues to cause untold suffering.  The suffering itself is not imaginary – losing a job or a house is all too real.  The fantasy, as Hillman used the term, is found in the fears that keep us up at night.  It’s lodged in the sharply differing stories we hear of what caused the crisis, who is to blame, how bad it is, and what we should do to fix it.

I want to share the best account I’ve ever heard of our impasse.  It’s a story of cause and  effect that reaches back two centuries.  It’s an account by Dr. Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, who was a guest on Moyers & Company on Feb. 22.

Dr. Richard Wolff on Moyers & Company

Dr. Richard Wolff on Moyers & Company

In an earlier lecture, ca 2008, Capitalism hits the fan, Wolff presented an historical framework to allow us to understand “how big, how serious, how profound” our current crisis is.

For 150 years, from 1820 to 1970, wages increased across every decade in America.  Wolff believes this is unique in the history of the world.

America was blessed with unimaginable riches – minerals, timber, water, and millions of acres of farmland (after the native populations were killed or contained).  Immigrants poured in from all over the world to work in factories and build railroads, convinced that their sacrifice could provide a better future for their children.  For a century and a half, they were right.  This gave rise to the myth of American Exceptionalism, the conviction that we as a nation are unique and this is our birthright.

Collectively, we began to measure our worth and success by this standard, but it failed in the mid 1970’s.  Inflation adjusted wages peaked around 1973.  There are four reasons according to Wolff.

  1. Beginning in the ’70’s, computer technology began to eliminate millions of jobs.
  2. The practice of exporting jobs and entire industries began.
  3. Huge numbers of women entered the workforce.
  4. Successive waves of immigration came to America’s shores.

The combination of many more applicants for fewer jobs held wages in check and has continued to do so.  Americans tried to compensate by sending more people out of each home to work and by working longer hours.  By 2000 we were working 20% more hours than we had in 1970 (why else invent fast food, Wolff asks).  When that didn’t work well enough, we went on a borrowing binge to prop up our “standard of living,” often in the form of credit card debt, at 18% interest.

Forty years later, according to Wolff, we have a working class that’s exhausted, with collapsing personal lives and the anxiety of “a population whose average level of debt exceeds its annual income.”  

With a workforce unable to carry more debt or work any harder, “We have reached the limits of this kind of capitalism,” Wolff says.  “That’s why our current crisis is not temporary.  It’s not a blip.” 

Photo by Ann Douglas, 2010. CC by-NC-SA 2.0

Photo by Ann Douglas, 2010. CC by-NC-SA 2.0

The same period of stagnant wages saw an unprecedented bonanza for business.  Flat wages plus technology driven leaps in productivity delivered all time record profits.  Along with multi-million dollar compensation for upper management, more and more corporations got into the business of credit, and this, says Richard Wolff, is the key to understanding our economy over the last 30 years.  General Motors, for instance, made more money from interest in loaning people money to buy cars than it did making cars.

Banks and corporations began to loan workers the money they no longer paid them, and this is the system, says Wolff, that is now imploding.

Our leaders don’t know how to fix it.  Traditional economic measures, from stimulus to bailouts to regulation to austerity have been tried before.  They were tried by two administrations during the ’30’s without much success – it took a world war to end the depression.  These tactics have also been tried in Japan since 1989 with disappointing results.

What are the possible solutions?  Wolff does not propose any concrete answers but simply offers one alternative model, based on the cooperative structures pioneered by some Silicon Valley startups.  He claims such a structure offers a better hope of leading toward renewal than any other suggestions of which he’s aware.

“If we don’t take basic steps of this sort, to deal with a crisis that has built over this length of time; if we keep tinkering at the edges with our financial system, because we need to call this a financial crisis, rather than a crisis of capitalism, which is what it is, we will all be very sorry.” – Richard Wolf.

***

Work is a critical elements of our lives, one of the key factors of wellbeing or its lack.  As such, it is rife with fantasy and arouses huge passions.  Our current political climate of rancor makes that clear.  None of our other issues cause such concern.  What happens when the solutions offered by both political parties fall short?

Photo by windsordi, East Detroit, 2012. CC By-NC 2.0

Photo by windsordi, East Detroit, 2012. CC By-NC 2.0

In last week’s interview with Bill Moyers, Wolff suggested that the nation as a whole is like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. He went on to say, “if my psychiatrist wife is right, as she usually is, what happens after that period of stasis, of shock, is a boiling over of anger, as you kind of confront what has happened. And that you were deceived and betrayed in your expectations, your hopes. And then the question is, where does that go?”

Best case, he says, we begin to ask questions about the system as a whole: “I think there’s a wonderful tradition here in the United States of people feeling that they have a right, even if they don’t exercise it a lot, to intervene, to control. There is that democratic impulse. And I put a lot of stock in the hope that if this is explained, if the conditions are presented, that the American people can and will find ways to push for the kinds of changes that can get us out of this dilemma. Even if the political leaders who’ve inherited this situation seem stymied and unable to do so.”

If he’s right, this is the place for fantasy, the place for imagination to plumb the sea of possibilities to bring up something that works in a new world in a new century.