Photo: Stock Exchange/ Miles Tanner

Dealing with the OPEC 1972 oil embargo was playing  with Legos® compared to wrestling with the worldwide challenges that confront us today. When the dust settles, we will look back in astonishment. That’s a good thing. When Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the brain researcher who experienced a stroke, completely recovered after seven years of effort, she wanted to tap into a fuller, more authentic version of herself. We will hit pay dirt when we break through to a grander version of ourselves and our world. There is plenty of room for improvement, wouldn’t you agree? Living through this wrenching experience will bring forth qualities and inner resources that we don’t even know are there—a break through as opposed to a break down.

Consider this paragraph from The Fourth Turning, the brilliant book by William Strauss and Neil Howe published in 1997:

We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube.  Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum.  To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime.  There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever.  People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted…

David Brooks’ op-ed piece, The Broken Society, cites the work of Phillip Blond:

Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

Although we have problems aplenty, there is widespread awareness, even alarm, and a sense that people are finally galvanized to take action. Exhibit A: The US Social Forum, seeks solutions for social and economic justice. We must declare what we want our world to look like and we 
must start planning the path to get there. The USSF provides spaces to learn 
from each other’s experiences and struggles, share our analysis of the problems 
our communities face, build relationships, and align with our international 
brothers and sisters to strategize how to reclaim our world. The US Social Forum is an outgrowth of the World Social Forums that originated in January 2001 and have taken place every year except 2008. Detroit hosts this year’s US Social Forum from June 22 – 26.

Local confabs, People’s Movement Assemblies are designed to generate community input in advance so that the Detroit event can be as productive as possible. Nevertheless, creating the future in which we everyone has a shot at earning an adequate living, decent housing, nourishing food and an adequate education will not be a neat or tidy process but at least this is a start.

Mess Hall is organizing local PMA’s in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood and other sites will be identified and promoted as they become known.