It is just about new year. Time to share visions of the new. So, here is another batch of visions about a better world.
- Flemming
My vision is that we will all realiize that we don't need anything and that we don't have to avoid anything in order to be happy. Also that happiness is the goal behind all other goals and that we already have this ability. If we stop putting our attention on all the things we believe we need in order to be happy or that we have to avoid in order to be happy and just relax in the hear and now we will be automatically happy. Whitin this happiness we will find the feelings of Euphoria, joy of Live, Love and feeling All powerful (coded ELLA). We will adopt this new basic feeling instead of our feeling of need that we have had before (i.e. a longing for freedom, security, to be loved by other, to be accepted by others, ...). Then our world will mirror this new basic feeling. So it will soon change into a world without limitations. We won't need any more food, drink or sleep. Out bodies will be indestructable, whitout illness and immortal. We will be able to change their form in any way we like. We will use teleportation for transport, telepathy for commuincations, manifestion for creating things we want and whatever else you can think of.
For the first manifestations of my vision check out my homepage see URL below.
Everlasting Love and Happiness to You
Chris
ELLA Cooperations - How to be happy 24 hours each day
** Maireid Sullivan , California **
What about cleaning up our environment and living under the magnificent hemisphere of the sky with clean air water and healthy soil. We are not far away from being able to restore our natural environment. Many new studies of the effects of our current environmental practices lead to the concept of an "up stream" solution to our problems -- where we simply remove the offending practices. There are studies which compare organic vs pesticide farming's impact on economics and health. Organic farming,in every way, outstrips the supposed economic and health benefits of pesticide farming (with all its outrageous health-impacting associated practices.)
I am of the opinion that we will need a movement larger than the civil rights, Vietnam War movements, etc. to turn the tide on this much more serious of issues. I would never want to shut myself off from this magnificent garden of earth in an environment which could never be much better than living in a gigantic high-rise buliding -- no matter what shape.
We don't need a science fiction approach to survival. We need to return to beauty, truth and love for every living being in all forms, as the guiding principles of our social strategies. This agenda must be promoted everywhere, in schools, the work place and in the arts. We must be strong in our determination to act locally and think globally.
Each individual must reclaim their realization that reality starts with them and radiates out. We need to understand the concept of "Personal Sovereignty" as a modern principle.
With Love,
Maireid Sullivan
http://www.maireid.com
** Barry Pittard , Australia **
COMMUNITIES NEED TO BRING WORTHWHILE JOBS TO COMMUNITIES.
How can a jobless person get even halfway to being a citizen?
In Western societies, long ago, a social welfare safety net was extended. But not, truly speaking, a psychological one. Those out-of-work feel useless. A human being, who can be so full of life, is now idle, defeated, prospectless.
A welfare society is an illfare society, no matter how humane it may, at its best, attempt to be - and the children of the jobless fare illest of all, and are, yes, our future.
Towards those on social welfare payments, pitiable and still marginalising as these amounts are, a class antagonism is felt among many taxpayers. Moonlighting becomes the norm, and with it exploitation by employers, some paying less than a subsistence wage.
And what of job creation? Search the newspapers and the journals - where may we find any real discussion of the problem along wholistic lines? There's plenty of talk which equates economic growth with job creation. And there's plenty which would put that the other way round - from commentators who show no real thought about the quality of the work, of what it does to both workers and consumers, or in fact of the welfare of other nations, or of what consumerism does environmentally.
Whole countries succumb to sectors and lobbies, and nasty splits of overworked and underworked; employed and underemployed; productive and unproductive; powerful and powerless ...
But what more superficial myth can there be than the one, certainly common here in Australia, which, in response to the problem, would focus virtually alone on the growth potential of south-east Asian markets. A new version of the old myth of putting all one's eggs in the one basket. And consider one of the gravest dangers of this focus - in order to keep one's own country employed, it would have to - even desperately - keep up trade levels with, say, South-East Asia no matter what the wider harms may be; forever tossing increasingly soggy logs at those markets to keep them hot and the home fires at least a little warm.
And where the private sector is relied upon to create jobs, the public and community sectors are left to languish. And on whose shoulders is the burden greatest? Of course - the employees, who are forced to work increasingly longer and harder working hours and who have very high stress and burn-out levels. Inequality, then - both material AND psychological - becomes a feature in the lives of BOTH those with and without jobs.
We need real creative thinking about the second, the Public, sector, as a potenial area for job creation. Of that, some other time. But - most of all - I suggest, we need to look at the potential in our own individual communities. The little known Third Sector. Some promising examples of this focus are happening in France, and in the suburb of Kensington in Melbourne. One great virtue of job creation in community-oriented projects would be that they embody values approved by society at large. Therefore, those employed in any of the three sectors can be well-satisfied at how their tax dollar is spent.
Nicer, isn't it? than all the rorting, the moonlighting, the odd-jobbing, much less the appalling joblessness itself. Alright, let's suppose a more or less wholistic still required some tax impost. But people abhor taxes for which they see tangibly few benefits. And tangible is the word. Especially in their own local communities, people need to see security, both physical and psychological, and good things occuring in their own neighborhoods. Dare we even drop the old concept: "civic pride." If we do, we're done for.
In this third, the Community, sector, let's create jobs in areas like domestic services. We could, for example, take considerable burden off vast numbers of unpaid, untrained carers - usually spouses, often women, often themselves in need of care. Let communtiies themselves shape ideas of social usefulness, and the accountability of workers. Rather than allowing the vital decisions to be made from far above, and from far away. Much of the money now being spent on unemployment benefits can be funded to communities involved in substantial job creation and training schemes. In this way, at last, citizens come to participate - physically and psychologically. Now, participate. There's the other word.
** Walter Fritz , Argentina, South America **
GOVERNMENT IN THE FAR FUTURE
To make some concepts more evident, lets take a look at vast amounts of space and time. Human beings already have lived some 1.8 million years on this planet. At the speed of present space vehicles, we will have visited and populated 1000 planetary systems in another 1.8 million years. We take the present speed at 1 to 2 years to reach Mars from Earth, a distance of 16 light minutes. Also we take the average distance between stars at 5 light years. Since future space vehicles will be faster, humans will reach the described situation sooner. Exactly how this will be done, is an interesting question, but has nothing to do with our proposal.
With a thousand diverse planets occupied, what kind of government will exist? Lets suppose that we have a central government that tries to keep its people at peace. Further, to facilitate commerce, it maintains a unified currency, unifies the main measures, such as weight, distance and time (or mass, distance and velocity). Finally it creates laws that permit a maximum of liberty to all members and a minimum of interference of the actions of one member by the actions of other IS's.
The basic law within this society could be:
Every member has the right to do as it pleases,
as long as
its deeds do not interfere
with the right of other members
to do as they
please.
Such an objective for a government seems reasonable for any space extension and any future age. Today countries are subdivided. Lets suppose that our galactic society, of a 1000 planets, is also subdivided. There could be 10 galactic sectors, each with 10 zones and each zone with 10 planetary s systems. Our planetary system, called "Sol", could consist of Earth, Mars, Venus and some minor settlements. Earth would have a planetary government, composed of 5 continental governments, one of which is America. America would have a number of states, one of which is Argentina. This state would have a number of provinces, divided into departments and those into municipalities. One of these municipalities is called "La Quiaca".
Government (as we know it) presupposes that it receives information from all members at a center and that decisions go from that center to all members. The time required for a radio or light message to travel from the border to the center would be about 20 years. It seems obvious that the information about the laws and decrees of the municipality of La Quiaca and of all other municipalities cannot reach the department, the province, the state, the continent, the earth government, the planetary system, the zone, the galactic sector and finally the galactic government. The mass of information is too much. But information from all members has to reach the center, and vice versa for a government to function. One possibility is that a summary of information is made at every level and the final summary reaches the galactic center.
The same would be true for information in the other direction, from the center to the periphery. The galactic government cannot dictate the specific laws and decrees for all municipalities of the galaxy, local conditions vary too widely, moreover the time required for making a local law would be too long. So the creation of laws has to be delegated. The basic law making function would be at the municipality. All municipalities of a department would have to agree to make a departmental law. The laws of each super society would be created using parts of laws common to at least 75% of the member societies. We propose that each law becomes effective when more than 75% of the members approve it. Again all departments would have to agree to make a provincial law, and so on until all galactic zones agree to make a galactic law.
Once a law of a superior level of society is approved it becomes binding to all the lower level member societies. The member societies have to adjust their laws accordingly. At each level of government the laws at that level are adjusted to conform to the next higher level laws, and finally those laws and decrees that a municipality applies are adapted laws and those strictly local laws that it made for itself. After 25 years (one generation) local law becomes invalid. The same law, or preferably an updated and improved version, can be voted again (Galactic laws, which take a longer time to be created should have a longer life span, possibly a 100 years, those of intermediate levels should have intermediate life spans).
Due to the time involved for information from the most distant municipality to reach the central government, and for a new law to reach this municipality, laws of the central government can only be about the most general matters, these laws, due to the travel time of messages require at least 40 years to be made and received. They could only be about such basic matters as a unified currency, fundamental units and measures and possibly those of capital crimes and attacks of one subsociety on another.
What can we learn from the above? At present we do not have a galactic government. But in the last 200 years bigger and bigger political groupings appeared. We will shortly reach the point (or have we reached it?) where these groupings become unmanageable by a central government. Layers of government and laws, as described above, become necessary. This would also solve the case of unsatisfied minorities. They would have their own government and their own laws.
Who pays for the services of these governments? Who collects the taxes? The central governments could never have a sufficiently great population to sent representatives to all municipalities. Even hiring local help would be unwieldy. It seems that a reasonable way out would be for the local population to pay the expenses of the municipal government. The municipalities would contract for the services of the next higher government and pay for these services, the amount to be fixed by law, and so on at each level, until finally the government of the galactic sector pays for the services of the galactic central government. The idea here is that a service is received and paid for. The higher government provides a service for the lower government and finally the municipality provides a service for the population. Also the maximum of expenses by government should be limited to a certain percentage, maybe 8% or 10% (excepting social dividend, see below). History shows that government expenses tend to grow, and being unproductive they can stifle all economic activity and thus lower the standard of living.
From all this it seems to follow that a government that covers vast areas should be structured in sub societies that repeat similar functions and government structures at all levels. This system of subsocieties with similar functions has a great advantage. It permits the practical training of governors at each level. Only governors at the next lower level would be eligible for the next higher position. This means that only a person with experience as a planetary governor would be eligible for governor of a galactic zone, and only one of those would be eligible for governor of a galactic sector. With this system it would be impossible that John Smith, a likable person with a good TV personality, but with no experience in government could become the galactic governor.
Another great advantage would be that it would be easy for one government to associate itself with another. Since each level of government is identical in function, an area that would like to associate with others could do this automatically once the agreement to associate exists (with this system the USSR probably would not have dissolved itself).
The government of a society should be voted for service for a limited time. It should concern itself with the creation of the minimum amount of laws necessary and the protection of its members. It should not participate in commercial ventures of any kind (including railroads, post office, generation of electricity and water). The "armed forces" (police or military) shall protect the members from each other and from non members.
For maximum stability and to avoid the misuse of power, we suggest that the sum of lower level power and forces should be greater then the next higher level power and force. Also the higher level power and force should be greater than that of any individual, lower level, member. Most political power should be, as far as possible, at the lowest level, with only a delegation to the next higher level, of those functions that locally cannot be done efficiently. The lower level society will delegate these functions but should always maintain control, and check that the next higher level society executes their functions correctly.
http://www.anice.net.ar/intsyst/betgov.htm
** Margriet , Northern BC, Canada **
My vision is for a world, where everyone excepts one and other for what they are. We will live in a world where all cultures will have equal voice. There will be a coming together of all cultures to solve the world's problems. We will realize how insignificant we are as individuals and only when we all come together can we evolve to the next level. Our new world will provide sustanance to all. All problems that effect the whole will be solved by the people as a whole. There will be peace and we will all know the meaning of unconditional love. We will carry this love in our hearts and it will keep us from harm. We will help our neighbour in distress, we will help light the way for those lost. We will do so without judgement or hatred. Ours will be a peaceful planet. We will respect all living things and we will realize that we need Mother Earth to sustain us. We will show Her respect and we will help heal Her. We will know one and other as we now know our friends and family, even though we have never met. There will be no need for games or lies, since we will not be judged there will be no need to cover up our indeficiencies. Those who do not understand or can not understand will be nurtured and forgiven. They will be shown the way, even if they remain lost. The bible teaches us to turn the other cheek and we will do this. We will learn the true meaning of Love and we will each harbour this feeling deep within ourselves. When we achieve this, humanity will be at peace and ready to evolve into beings beautiful beyond imagination. We will be at one with ourselves and each other. We will have no need for jealousies and hate. There will be love and respect for all living things.
** Flemming Funch, 11 years old, 1970, Denmark **
Well, my mother is visiting for christmas and she brought some of my old essays and stories I had written in elementary school in Denmark, and that is kind of fun reading. Let me translate one of them here, about "The Future", written 27 years ago. Note that this is written long before the personal computer or the Internet was invented, and by an 11 year old. I would obviously say a few things a little different today.
"THE FUTURE"
It is July 18th in the year 2005 in the city Europolis, which is the biggest city in the world. All of Europe has long since been united and there isn't such a thing as war any longer.
J.P.Jefferson is on his way home from his work, which is to control the manufacture of superhydromolecular engines. All factories are placed deep under the earth's surface and they don't pollute any longer. Jefferson is being transported in a big comfortable computer controlled hovercraft vehicle. All cars are nowadays controlled from a big computer central, and there are never any accidents. After a few minutes he is home, where he gets out of the car and lets it drive down into the underground parking garage by itself. He himself steps into an M-7 elevator, which is a kind of tube where one gets sucked up by some special magnets.
His wife is in the middle of preparing dinner, but actually only because it is her hobby. Normally one only has to push a few buttons and you get exactly what you want. While his wife is making dinner Jefferson tunes his TV in on the daily newspaper. Paper is hardly used any longer, and it isn't really necessary, as the newspaper comes up on the TV screen. You change pages just by clicking a button. You don't need books either, as they have all been recorded on video. If you want to read a book you just connect with the Library and request the book. A moment later you see the first page on the screen. If you want you can get the book read aloud by selecting which voice you want. If, for some reason, you'd rather have the book or the newspaper in print, you just push a button and it comes out on a printer that is connected with the TV. There are also thousands of regular TV programs that you can choose from, and if you don't find anything you want, you can order something else from the program library. You can also do shopping through your TV screen. Either you can browse through the list of goods on the screen, or you can have a camera scan through the shelves of the supermarket and then you can order what you want. The purchase will then be sent by tube mail directly to your home.
Jefferson's kids are now also coming home from school. They only go to school 4 hours per day, as they're learning much more than they did 30 years ago. They are mostly getting their education from computers. Now they're all getting their daily exercise and then they're going to swim in the pool. When one has that many technical conveniences one has to make sure that one gets exercise as well.
If humanity hadn't stopped the pollution in time, maybe nobody would be alive on earth today. In the 1970s there were already large cities where people started to walk around with gasmasks and had to buy clean air in cans and bottled fresh water. More and more people died from lung cancer and the fish died in the oceans. But then the pollution was stopped by law and a lot of money was used to clean air and water with, so now there is almost no pollution left.