Closer To The Heart

Every day I wake up with a different song in my head. Today it was this song by the Canadian  group Rush. Rush was a trio of musicians who made a mighty sound coming from just three guys. They were a pretty hard core rock band but there was always a bit of a message to their songs.

The lyrics of this song, (above) Closer To The Heart, may have reflected a sort of hippie sentiment when it was out there on the charts back in the late seventies. But to me, listening to it today, it sounds prophetic and it might just be one of the blueprints that the world needs going forward.

The world, for anybody who doesn’t have their head stuck in the sand is quickly approaching a watershed moment, when it goes from salvageable to ruined.

The biggest risk the world faces at the moment is corporate greed. Large companies, especially those in the fossil fuel and manufacturing areas who, because there is no real pressure put on them to start figuring out ways to stop accounting for the majority of the pollution that is killing the air and the water, simply carry on, raking in big bucks, and supporting politicians who are as greedy as they are, and refuse to make laws to force these companies into situations where it is more costly for them to stay the same than it is to change.

These are companies who think only with their heads, and not their hearts. They have no empathy for the human race. They feel no sense of responsibility for the state of the environment. Instead they hire clever marketing people who create pretty lies for them to tell the public. I know. I used to be one of them. And then they carry on business as usual in a way that is so far from the heart that the heart cannot be seen.

Our only hope is with the thousands of new businesses that create and use renewable solutions. And if you look around, even just a little, you will see that. slowly but surely, these businesses are on their way to dominating the future of the planet.

The faster they get there, the more incentive there will be on the old smokestack and fossil fuel industries to change their ways. Because at some point soon, it will become not just a matter of doing the right thing, but a critical matter of their own survival.

A lot of what is going to happen in the future depends on a combination of forward thinking governments and a consumer market that embraces these new technologies and ideas, because they are, in fact, closer to the heart of our survival as a species.

I have no idea what is going to happen in the future, But my hope, for my kids and grand children is that they will have a cleaner world to live in, and a good career in their own business or with companies that are part of the solution.