One Of The Big Things I Know For Sure Part 1

Every so often I get an idea for a series of posts. This is the first installment of a short series that I will be posting over the next few weeks on big things I know for sure.

It’s Tuesday morning here in my neck of the woods AKA The Quiet Side Of The Lake.

Twenty miles to my north is the hustle and bustle I grew weary of and left more than two years ago now. It was a move that I made with more than a little trepidation, but one I have not regretted for a single day.

It’s a move that allowed me to break with the cycle of hustling work, doing work, and hustling more work. Which I had done for the past 25 years on my own, and another 20 while other people were hustling the work and my job was doing it.

It was a hell of a thing and I loved it. Every minute of it. It taught me a lot about people and what makes them tick. It taught me a lot about myself too and what I like and don’t like. It paid, in part, for my life In the Big City and whatever this is now.

The Most Precious Commodity

Over the past two years, I have given myself time. I have done some paid work, but nowhere near the amount I used to do. Instead I have used that time to think. And any writer will tell you that time to think is the most precious commodity in their lives.

I have also had the luxury of being able to get up every morning and write about whatever I have been thinking.

There is no rhyme or reason to the form it takes. Because that doesn’t matter when you are not writing on demand. Today, it’s whatever this is. Because the substance is always going to dictate the form.

Empathy Sucks Sometimes

I’m alright. I don’t see my life changing all that much over the next decade or so. We have taken the steps to ensure that a modest existence, with a few perks, is possible.

But what’s not alright is the world. It’s a very confusing place and I have spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out why that is. This is part what I have come up with so far.

One Of The Big Things That’s Wrong With The World IMHO.

The best way to look at this is from the broadest possible perspective.

This poem (on the right) was written by William Wordsworth back in the very early 1800s. It’s really quite prophetic in a way. But, ironically, it talks to the bigger issues that are causing so much unrest in the world today.

I believe that Wordsworth had a lot of time to think too and I believe what he was reflecting on was the Industrial Age and all its baggage, which began some 40 years, give or take, earlier than when this poem was written.

Today we are more than a couple of decades full blown into the Information Age, and like all major changes, it’s coming with a certain amount of baggage.

The key suitcase in all this baggage is the simple fact that the the Industrial Age has caused severe damage to the planet. Close to 3 centuries of pretty much unbridled sucking oil and minerals out of the earth and spewing toxins into the atmosphere from the processing of all that stuff and the manufacturing of products using that stuff have finally caught up with us.

We see this in atmospheric studies that tell us the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is approaching critical levels of toxicity.

The rampant use of chemical treatments on the crops we grow to feed the world are killing the very creatures that create organic plant growth through pollination.

We are pouring the waste products from all this mining and manufacturing into the water systems and creating shortages of clean fresh water in many places in the world, which, of course, is causing a health crisis.

You know the story. Everybody does. But here’s the rub.

The people who control the mining and the manufacturing realize that something needs to be done about all of this.

But they have become so enslaved by the free market based economy that they would much rather try to get us to believe this problem is nothing more than a hoax then divert the capital required to re-tool their plants and adapt new processing and manufacturing techniques that would make their businesses more environmentally responsible and an actual part of the solution.

There is also a certain amount of ego involved here. Many of these people fancy themselves to be ‘Titans Of Industry’ and believe the only way they can only hold onto that moniker is if they keep on doing what they have always done.

A lot of these people are old men, set in their ways, extremely resistant to change and wealthy and influential enough to be able to have their way, and in so doing, prevent a lot of much needed progress from occurring.

So what you see here is basically the beginnings of a huge world wide puppet show. Reactionary leadership in government bought and paid for by greedy ‘titans’ whose desire is to maintain the status quo at all costs.

That’s one of the big things I know. And I’m hoping that the more progressive countries of the world don’t fall prey to this reactionary influence.

And I am also hoping that that as these old bastards die off that their businesses will be taken over by younger people with more social conscience than their predecessors and take the steps necessary to clean up their operations and make their companies part of the solution.

The weird paradox in all of this is that there are literally dozens of technologies that have already been developed to help industrial businesses do this.

So it’s not like anybody has to re-invent the wheel here. They just have to develop some empathy for the planet than made them rich in the first place.

Jim Murray is an experienced advertising and marketing professional and amateur photographer. He has run his own business (Onwords & Upwords), since 1989 after a 20 year career in Toronto as a senior creative person in major Canadian & international advertising agencies. He is a communication strategist, writer, art director, broadcast producer, mildly opinionated op/ed blogger & beBee Brand Ambassador.

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