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Introductionby Bob Banner
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We see problems daily. It is oftentimes difficult to cope. Time and again we
see governments being financed and influenced by transnational corporations
to maintain their agenda of looting the poorer and weaker countries. Often
it’s easier to see these abuses when they are happening somewhere else. Yet
we also need to see what’s happening in our own backyard.
Water is getting more and more precious as corporations and governments band together to privatize it. Water will no longer be a right based on human and species need, but a commodity bought and sold on the “free” market. Water wars have already begun. And the battle is happening here in our own region. Young HopeDance videographers from Santa Barbara went to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, to understand the global role of water. Since their return, they are editing numerous hours of filming. Stay in touch, since we will be supporting them in showing their work throughout our tri-county area. For this issue, Santa Barbara and Ventura activists focused their attention on Watersheds, exploring the questions of how we will survive, and how we are going to develop intelligent ways to use (and reuse) our water. There are solutions. We know answers, but we also have a myriad of challenges facing us, including the momentum of stupid, outdated policies added to new agendas of corporatized greed. . We at HopeDance continually dance between hope and despair and look toward radical solutions, not only to ease our souls but to fuel our form of activism — an activism based on solutions and thinking outside of the conventional box. As Einstein poignantly articulated it: We cannot solve problems if we are using the same mental framework that created the problem in the first place. It reminds me of the scene in Soderbergh’s film “Traffic” when the head of the drug enforcement agency (Michael Douglas) pleads to his entourage of consultants to think outside of the box for some solutions. The result was probably the longest pause in American film. No one came forward to utter a word. An example of this hiatus in creative thinking is the way debate about affordable housing is played out in communities. Conventional solutions don’t work (see Stacey Warde’s article on p.30). We need considerable creativity and some guts if we really want viable solutions. I have this stinking suspicion that the people who are being paid to work on solutions react like many of us when confronted with a controversial problem. They do nothing in order to guarantee their jobs. A major difficulty is that we too often depend on governments to solve our problems (that’s why they are there, right?). Well, I hope it’s becoming more and more obvious that governments are among those least interested in change and real solutions. Just look at Rio in 1992: all sorts of promises, contracts, and announcements were made. Ten years later, we and the environment are worse off. We’ve got to stop giving governments so much power and start creating solutions ourselves. In this issue we also have a few articles focusing on what we have learned since September 11th of last year (see the centerfold). We could probably publish an entire special issue about all the controversy that surrounds the various investigations or non-investigations. Please check out our list of top websites doing serious investigative work, top questions to ask our government and a book review that challenges our sacrosanct view of how the world works. We need some disturbing information to jolt us out of our slumbers, especially at a time when our “freedoms” are being taken away, oftentimes without awareness or struggle. We hope this issue helps your activism, shakes you up a bit, and convinces you that there is a growing movement of progressives right in your own backyard. Now’s the time to jump on the bandwagon and ride the ride. |
