Bringing you Flowers

 

I did this piece when the whole banking/stock market/ busi­ness thing

fell on it’s head a few years ago—I’ve been think­ing about the whole

thing since the “Occupy” move­ments have been going on. Try­ing to

imag­ine what would have hap­pened had the banks and the stock market

had been allowed to col­lapse. It prob­a­bly would have been hor­ri­ble, but we

would have been forced to come up with a bet­ter sys­tem, maybe entirely

different–if we had sur­vived the chaos it would have caused.

 

In one sce­nario  I imag­ine a “gift econ­omy”, there’s a great book I read

“The Gift” by Lewis Hyde that goes into depth about the idea of “gifts”. I loved the book.

We kind of got a bit of a gift cul­ture with Freecy­cle and Fabmo. I’m sure there are

many many oth­ers I don’t know about.

 

I imag­ine maybe we’d all have to live closer to work, not drive so much. Maybe

more peo­ple would work at home when pos­si­ble. Maybe, since it really seems

we get what we need done in the world and more peo­ple need work then there is,

peo­ple don’t need to work such long hours. Maybe we’d end up work­ing four

hours a day, or some other amount/time, and then spend the rest of the day gardening,

mak­ing things, exercising, spend­ing time with fam­ily and/or friends ect. Maybe a culture

with more of an empha­sis on personal development.

 

We can change things for the bet­ter. It’s hard though when the

small “few” who do excep­tion­ally well don’t need/want to change. His­tory doesn’t

show a good out­come for those peo­ple though, they usu­ally end up with their

heads cut off.…..I hope they/we find a sys­tem that works bet­ter and is more

in har­mony with nature, with­out a lot of pain for peo­ple and all our other crea­ture friends.