“Maybe you'll find direction around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you.” – The Grateful Dead, “Box of Rain”.
Edgar Cayce believed that anything could be looked up in the Akashic Records. In my opinion, invention might be a similar phenomenon. Inventions come at night and at odd times, little piece by little piece. I can’t tell you if invention is psychic in nature or if it’s sheer persistence plus a clear mind, but I know that it works.
My job as a dreamer has been to get to that place around the corner, early. You’re going to turn that corner at some point. Then you’re probably going to want answers to the following questions:
--How do we stop climate change? What should the climate Manhattan Project look like?
--Our government is corrupt. How do we fix it?
--If we should build a solar version of Exxon, how is that going to change things?
It’s getting to that time. Hi! I can’t answer all of your questions immediately, but I can give you a synopsis:
At least for this year, we need to concentrate our limited energies and funds on backyard solar applications. If we can store solar heat at night so that we can retrofit existing buildings, that’s somewhere near 50% of fossil fuel use. The other surprisingly easy task is growing ripe tomatoes in January. I use slightly concentrated sunlight.
The easiest answer to corrupt elections is to point to the Cambridge, Massachusetts method of electing their City Council. It’s been in use since 1940 so we know that it works. My own improvement to their voting system is to break each vote into one million microvotes. This way, if 2,000 people vote for one candidate and the threshold for election is 1,000 votes, every vote contributes 500,000 microvotes to that candidate and the other 500,000 microvotes are transferred to that voter’s second choice vote. This mathematical improvement allows for accurate recounts every time, whenever one vote is later declared to be valid or invalid.
I believe that lots of other corruption improvements can be found and tested. The country’s Founding Fathers never originally endorsed our two party system. Our two party system grew out of nothing because it served the wealthiest people in the country.
Permanently controlling a social enterprise to have it adhere to its community’s values is similar to controlling a government against corruption. The difference is, we can start a small social enterprise quickly and without much of a political revolution.
Finally, I’d like to say that the world needs more dreamers. What tough issues will people be wanting to solve ten or twenty years from now? Can you be there?
