An almost impassable chasm stands between articulation and implementation

Between the articulation and implementation of a goal lies an almost impassable chasm.

We need to step back from the edge,
re-think our behaviour and choose a
wholly new direction.

The journey from promise to reality is pockmarked with disappointments, deceptions, social and economic difficulties and consequences, both unexpected and unintended.

Intertwined with this hazardous journey from promise to fact is the added confusion of ideologies, and although firmly believed by their protagonists, they frequently do little to help people break free of the many myths and fantasies that colour and confuse our lives.

The recent Federal Budget, and now the Victoria State election, ignited near endless ideological conversation about what will and won’t work, but rarely, if ever, are we able to judge anything without first reflecting on its economic cost.

That is understandable, but sad in the extreme and is the outcome of a market driven-life in which reward for effort is measured in money, with intelligence and influence is mostly attributed to those who have excelled in commercial life and have both burgeoning bank balances and life loaded with consumerist goods.

Our understanding of success in a life measured only by physical possessions and the instinct for gambling and craftiness that survival in our embedded market system demands is wrongheaded.

Rather than being slaves to the economy, we should be working hard for people, putting humanity first, and we are not.

Ideologues repeatedly tell us that until the economy is repaired, as is the chorus from the present Federal Government, Australia is not secure and cannot progress.

The latter are both subjective and beyond that are ideologically conditional and bound-up in myths and falsehoods sold to us as unavoidable realities.

Those “unavoidable realities” are nothing more than human constructs – we built them and so we can be re-build them with intent and effort equal to what it took to assemble them.

Post World War Two brought
burgeoning budgets, but the arrival
of the 2000s saw them fall away.

So the goal is that we build a life in which the rights and welfare of people are more important than profit, but between us and our destination lays that near impassable chasm and crossing it means a re-think, the fracturing of our allegiance to the military/industrial complex that feeds off conflict and human misery and the recognition that needs will always trump our wants.

The responsible men claim their ideological growth-driven pragmatism will ensure a re-birth of the post Second World War halcyon days when fossil fuels were abundant and cheap.

The game, however, has changed and never again will we see the once commonplace surging economies and so rather than dither on the edge of the chasm, we need to step back, re-imagine our lives and strike out in a wholly different direction, one in which we find contentment from collaborative communities; places where the economy again becomes a tool and a servant, rather than a template and the master.