Adopted worldwide through the United Nations to improve lives and reverse ecological degradation while promoting sustainability, the effort has recently come under attack for systematically taking away our right to private property. (The Constitution states the right to, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”)
In “The Kaleidoscope Effect,” I described the “Collective,” as an integral part of the lives of extraterrestrials seeking to find life like ours over vast reaches of space. Some of my readers expressed great concern about my describing something they consider to be socialism or communism.
The Collective was composed of the thoughts of all the passengers on the spaceship seeking universal truth or knowledge, collected by a type of Wi-Fi far advanced from that with a kind of Google universal access to individual thinking. Individual thinking was highly encouraged to keep The Collective growing and vital. But group thinking multiplied the ability to solve the problems they face on such a long journey.
Agenda 21 is a result of overpopulation, over-consumption and degradation that occurs when free-market activity seeks the low hanging fruit and leaves the rest for future generations to clean up. The idea of private ownership and individual freedom came out of taking land from Native Americans by shooting them or rounding them up and putting them in concentration camps and the fact that, if you messed up and spoiled your nest (played out your farm), you could always pull up stakes, move further west to mess that up or get rich or whatever–you were free to do it without too much harm to the vast continent.
Delaware is like Europe, older with a much more developed community lifestyle. I have experienced that in several places but not in Houston. Yet Houston seems to be the place to be because of all the business growth. There is a lot of urban sprawl, but, little sense of community except for a few venues downtown hard-to-reach by public transportation that is considered to be low class, anyway. There is very little you can walk to except the local stop & shop and strip center. Everything is in flux and it's all about location, location, location. Not friends, family, and community.
Teddy Roosevelt got it dead right when he set aside the most beautiful parts of the country for the people. Lake Tahoe is a good example of a place that wasn't set aside for the people. If seven or eight billion people are going to live together on this planet without anarchy, some private property must be set aside for the common good so that future generations will not have to buy private membership to enter some of God's green earth. If waterways were owned, we’d have tolls the entire length of the Mississippi.
The ignorant fear brutal totalitarian states which bear no resemblance to democracy (town hall style), yet embrace the idea of community (communism has the same base root) and social responsibility (Thousand Points of Light—socialism has the same base root).
I do not fear the loss of private property because I do not, and have not, accumulated a great deal of it. I don't see how private property makes any of us any happier because holding onto stuff consumes a great deal of one's effort and gathering more stuff than the other guy or one can use is really simply a greedy activity that nobody seems to mind in the cult of the boss. The fact that most candidates for national office are filthy rich or getting filthy rich through donations and cronyism seems to bypass most citizens. But then, I have always said that we are too ignorant to understand even ourselves, let alone Bigfoot.
Copyright 2011 © Ronald W. Hull
12/16/11
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