WHEELS OF CHANGE ARE TURNING

A question that seems to come up a lot lately is "What makes things so different now? When efforts to cultivate change have always failed before, what gives you this audacity to say you will succeed were we did not?" 

And my answer to you, oh non-believer, is very long but ultimately simple. I assert that change can and WILL finally come about for the simple reason that we as one generation in a hundred years, are the first to actually have the tools for it. Our human race is once again shifting its collective conscious from a paradigm of conservativism, to progressivism.

  

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary." -Cecil Beaton

Conservative does not always mean how you vote. It can also mean how you wear your clothes, the types of food you eat, the way you organize your environment, who you associate with, even the kind of vehicle you drive. This is not to be confused with traditionalists, who will base decisions on routine despite lavishness--although it is traditional to be conservative in western culture. 

Then there is progressive. It's the practice of progress; moving forward. Politics borrows the term to describe a belief in the need for new policies and governmental overhaul in a more liberal direction. But progressive thinking can also reflect any other aspect of your life that you are moving forward in. It can describe your willingness to make new style choices, venturing into a new field of profession, trying a new food, opening a business that had never been imagined up before, making progress rather than standing in one place with tradition. 

I guess you could say it like this: you can conserve your energy, imagination, individuality, and emotions in a way that will insure comfort and acceptance and general success in your efforts; or you can move forward with everything you have in you in the name of progress, risking it all, thinking in scary new ways and imposing the unfamiliar on your peers in hopes that they will follow. 

We are ripe for a renaissance. American culture as a living generation lost it all when the economy went sour, a new war erupted in the middle east, and the baby boomer generation began to grow old, leaving us behind, alone and lost. Faith was shaken to the core as science and technology fed into itself tenfold it's historic ability as it birthed the internet and split-second worldwide communication and discovery. All this time we as as force of three generations were here, with nothing left to do but think and dream and plan and lament the way our western culture was holding us down telling us who we could and couldn't be. And then only a few years ago the tools we needed came. Internet in every home, smartphones in our hands, empty seats in our local non-profits as the earliest born baby boomers began to retire, and boarded up shops that went on sale during the recession dustily awaited their time to reopen their doors to happy patrons of the next decade.

And WE, with the hobbies our unemployment allowed us to master, with the knowledge we obtained from that world wide web of communication and information, and with absolutely nothing to lose. It just took us a few years to figure it all out. And when we did, BOOM.

Dreams for the future,

Betty