Its 2050. We’re in a better, safer place than we were. It’s happened because all the positive trends that had been consistently fostered became integrated into a popular, global, wholesome whole: - A new culture. For example, and most importantly, recruits to the armed forces started joining up to rescue and protect, to learn civilian trades, to see the world, to test their growth, mental and physical - none of them any longer needed to learn how to destroy for lack of a personal alternative - they refused to destroy unless they chose to do so. Their bosses began to talk more of ‘gaining hearts and minds’. Co-operation not colonization has now become the rule – in politics and businesses alike. Large pieces of armoury stand rusting to be shivered at.
The new culture became because people began to think and act for themselves, to question and challenge inexorably, and to take responsibility for what they did and what they didn’t do. And by now they count costs in the round - and this liberation costs.
Its purchased by trillions of face-to-face communities sprinkled liberally over the earth, each of two hundred or so house-holds, being places dedicated to perpetual experimentation, to listening and watching – to being the social nurseries of each new generation; to being so small and so local that they can each address all aspects of society – political, educational, medical, agricultural, industrial … and can each study every person’s role in due turn as producer, customer, citizen, carer… giver and taker … to being places in which everybody is enabled to join in and flourish; to being familiar, useful, supportive places, links between the household and the greater world outside.
280 words
Author: Maureen Ukairo 0
