Riffing on Christmas day

I gave myself a Christmas/Yule present; I took myself off the clock. 

After a four hour walk, I slept most of yesterday and I slept most of today.  And, right now I’m having the first course of my dinner – spinach sautéed in sesame oil with raisins.  Later I’ll make the second course, pasta with a green curry sauce.  I have a bottle of Gewurtzraminer lying around which should be a decent match to it.  Meatloaf is on the stereo and I just received confirmation of my order for two tickets to his concert in March.  I saw Rocky Balboa the other night. 

I also picked up a copy of Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher and I’m going to curl up and start reading it in the next day or so.

Schumacher’s work is considered a seminal piece in the environmental movement.  Coming out in 1973 following the first OPEC oil shock, he was one of the first writers to deal with globalization, technology and sustainability.  One reviewer, claiming to have never heard of Schumacher prior to reading the book said he was “ready to nominate him for a Nobel Prize”. 

Schumacher wrote, “man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful”.  That pretty much sums it up. 

Our systems have grown beyond any comprehension, serviceable scope or use, other than that of domination.  All of this is couched in the most obscene set of lies. 

We’re told technology will make people more productive when it’s actually used to obsolesce people and communities. 

We’re told even more technology will solve the problem of global climate change when technology, coupled with greed, avarice and envy created the problem in the first place. 

We’re told we have to run our companies lean and mean because we have to be efficient in order to compete.  But as Schumacher said, our industry is so inefficient that it defies imagination.  “Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed”. 

We’re told we must get rid of progressive taxation because we need to reward the wealthy who create the industry and jobs the rest of us rely on.  This argument is the economic equivalent of proposing that the best way to feed a village is by gorging the local Baron’s horse with oats and having the rest of us peasants follow him around with a bag, catching the undigested excess that comes out the other end.  It sounds great as a theory but it simply doesn’t turn out the way we propose. 

Lies all. 

Schumacher said we must, “(imagine) an alternative system which might fit the new situation”. 

In other words, we must create new stories. 

Here’s to a 2007 with new stories, written as if people mattered. 

Gabriel Draven

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