Occupy Southend - getting much publicity but the message just is not getting through.

Occupy Southend are getting badly misrepresented by the media (should we have been surprised?). Labels like 'anti-captialist' (sounds a bit worrying - like they are all SWP malcontents) and 'opposing social injustice' - a bit bland, it would be hard to find someone to disagree with that as being a noble aim but as social injustice has always been with us the natural reaction of most people is why is it worth disrupting everyone with it right now?

However the very first item on the Occupy LSX Initial Statement:

The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.

Occupy Southend has adopted the same statement terms with a few local variations. The fact that it starts with "The current system is unsustainable" is what groups like Transition Towns have been warning about for years. Serious problems caused by us trying to live an exponentially increasing lifestyle on a finite planet are no longer some problem for our grandchildren to solve by waving some magic wand of 'science', it is a doom we are ACCELERATING towards even though it is already in sight. 

This is a global emergency, we only have a very few years, maybe just months, to turn things around now. I am not just talking about global warming, although that will add its own problems to the mix. 

Is it that our leaders do not want widespread panic? Understandable but maybe a bit of genuine panic is what we need just now!

I do not have the solutions, as anyone with half a brain knows that there is no magic bullet for this. Turning round a global economy to be sustainable is going to take a massive effort of will and of self control.

I must admit though that it is driving me crazy that I can at least see the road we have to go down to find any chance of survival.

1. Get world leaders to come clean to their people that living on a finite world that is near running on empty for some resources is a genuine predicament.

2. Get a 'wartime spirit' of co-operation to find solutions to this, but WITHOUT finding someone to go to War against (like Iran) - we all live on this earth together, we are all in this together. A resource consuming war is what will seal our doom in double quick time!

3. Recognise that vested interests that stand in the way of this - within the '1%' need to be stripped of their power. We cannot have the salvation of the human race conducted as a 'for profit' activity. It is too urgent for all the attendant bickering.

I for one think the survival of the human race justifies slightly inconveniencing a few churchgoers!

Don't fancy this road? Ok, the most likely alternative is a series of ever more desperate wars as the increasing population fights to survive. As blowing stuff up and then building more of it at great expense will divert resources away from e.g. massive scale solar power deployment it spells DOOM for almost all of us.

Not interested in these? Want things to stay as they are, come on don't fool yourself you know things are just not going to go back to the way they were 10 years ago. Self delusion is very dangerous.