{"id":9239,"date":"2015-06-19T06:31:17","date_gmt":"2015-06-19T11:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9239"},"modified":"2015-06-19T06:31:17","modified_gmt":"2015-06-19T11:31:17","slug":"future-shock-and-the-greening-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9239","title":{"rendered":"Future Shock and the Greening of America"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><span class=\"Apple-style-span\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/blogjune15\/future-shock6-15.html\" target=\"_blank\">Future Shock and the Greening of America<\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\"><i>What I find fascinating is our limited ability to make sense of trends unfolding in real time.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>During our recent breakfast meeting in Berkeley, author\/blogger Jim Kunstler suggested that the coherence of eras waxed and waned, and the present era was incoherent.<\/b>\u00a0By this he meant the narratives being propagated by the status quo no longer align with reality, and often conflict with one another, resulting in incoherence.<\/p>\n<p><b>There is a time lag of many years between fast-changing events and our ability to make sense of them,<\/b>\u00a0i.e. construct a coherent account or narrative of what we collectively experienced.<\/p>\n<p>Each era has its Big Events and trends, but the last era with truly ground-shifting changes that affected virtually everyone in the nation in one way or another was the 1960s. 9\/11 increased airport security but other than that, the changes wrought by the Global War on Terror (GWOT) only heavily impact narrow slices of the state and populace&#8211;the armed forces and security agencies.<\/p>\n<p>The same can be said of the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09: the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) destroyed the yield on savings, but the daily-life effects on most people have been relatively restrained compared to far more disruptive eras; some have seen their portfolios skyrocket in value, but most households have seen their real net worth decline. Social welfare did its job of providing a safety net for those who lost their jobs in the recession.<\/p>\n<p><b>The 1960s visibly changed society in a few short years, and less visibly, the economy.<\/b>\u00a0Two books published in 1970, at the end of the tumultuous 1960s, attempted to weave a coherent narrative of what everyone was experiencing:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B008PBFBBY\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B008PBFBBY&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=charleshughsm-20&amp;linkId=2TCOMNESXDDLISH6\" target=\"resource\">Future Shock<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0553067672\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0553067672&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=charleshughsm-20&amp;linkId=FUWYWP66HTHZH7U2\" target=\"resource\">The Greening of America<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Future Shock and the Greening of America What I find fascinating is our limited ability to make sense of trends unfolding in real time. During our recent breakfast meeting in Berkeley, author\/blogger Jim Kunstler suggested that the coherence of eras waxed and waned, and the present era was incoherent.\u00a0By this he meant the narratives being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[127,2219,6515,6514,449,4924,6516,6518,6517,1940,1939],"class_list":["post-9239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-future-shock","tag-global-financial-meltdown","tag-global-war-on-terror","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-oftwominds","tag-social-welfare","tag-the-greening-of-america","tag-toffler","tag-zero-interest-rate-policy","tag-zirp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9240,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9239\/revisions\/9240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}