All I Need To Do Is Persuade One Billion People That They Love Life, Their Children and Their Planet More Than Wasting Their Lives On A Senseless Rat Race.

Photo by Roxy Aln on Unsplash

That’s my personal mission. Actually, more than a billion people already feel this way; they’ve just been distracted and fooled into feeling powerless.

Maybe I just need to find an opportunity to be heard by a really big audience. Because I am absolutely certain that the ideas I’ve chosen to fight for would get huge support—worldwide. Leaders everywhere in business and government and media would hate them. But everyone who loves their children and wants them to live on a habitable planet and have better lives than previous generations…

Well, they’d all be supportive, no—excited—about these ideas. They might still have doubts that they were possible, but I can prove that historically such things HAVE not only been possible, but big changes like I’m fighting for have happened. Many times.

Furthermore, those ordinary groups of people with no authority left blueprints of how to get it done. We can absolutely do this. The question is whether we will. And I don’t mean the other guy. The question is whether YOU will. Because others will follow if we simply get enough people and attention to be visible.

A Vision and An Attitude

Over the past year or so, I’ve been filling in the gaps to form a vision and a plan. The effort is ongoing, but there’s enough for us to see the promised land. The vision is an idea and a group called The Saners.

It’s interesting that, nowadays, politicians no longer do “the vision thing.” They don’t even pretend they have a plan or an objective. But WE do. And you can’t beat something with nothing.

The Saners core vision is this:

1. It is literally insane to destroy - or allow anyone else to destroy - the planet that you and everyone you love call home.
2. Anyone who has ever held power did so only with the active support of many, many people. When enough people (or a critical few) withdraw support, that leader is powerless.
3. The people we have been supporting - even nice people - are part of systems (economic, political, and often even cultural) that are ruining the climate and dooming our children.
4. We can and must stop cooperating and obeying and supporting the systems and leaders that are destroying everything we love.
5. If we gather and empower the most capable experts (especially climate scientists) to act on the climate crisis, they can develop the best possible worldwide emergency program to do so.
6. If we throw our support behind this emergency program and refuse to work for the old status quo, we can save the Earth.
7. If we decide to reject the values and behaviors of the old status quo - reject greed, and selfishness, and bigotry, and hatred, and violence, and power lust - we can replace this doomed society with a better one. We can create a sustainable and humane civilization.
8. Every great change in history started with an individual or a small group. We have started. We need momentum and visibility. We need to execute a series of escalating tactics to support an overall strategy.

The Saners exists. We have several hundred signed up members, and thousands of followers.
We have a pretty clear vision. We see a world of less labor and more time - and more time actually means more LIFE. We won’t go to work every day, producing mountains of commodified crap. Since work takes our precious time, our LIVES, we will do it only to create important and useful things that help people and our biosphere.

This will leave people everywhere with more time than they’ve ever had, to play, to create, to share with loved ones, to explore Nature, to think, to wonder. This is a compelling and realistic vision.
Yes, that’s right. OUR vision is realistic. There’s no law of nature that requires us to work and waste our lives producing, essentially, endless mountains of garbage. We only need what we need: food, medicine, shelter and the like. Producing only what’s needed would take a tiny fraction of the time that we work today.
The other way, what we are doing now, which is poisoning our planet, is completely unrealistic. This cannot go on - even if we never oppose it. Our leaders are stupid and incompetent and woefully unrealistic. Our systems are not only brutal; they are crazy.

Getting Bigger, Getting Seen

Starting small is fine. In fact, that is the only way. But growing to a certain size is essential for The Saners to succeed. And although previous movement have blazed a path and shown the way, following the blueprint is an art, not a science. We need some imagination and finesse.

At the moment, I think the best approach is to form small local groups - groups of people between 2 and perhaps 10. These groups should meet regularly, perhaps at a coffee shop, and talk about various simple tactics to get the message out, to recruit, to change the conversation. These can be tactics created and supported by the (international) Saners, or ones of their own devising.

We should all be looking for any big opportunities - to be on television or talk directly to a leader in a big crowd, or whatever can be widely seen - and be ready to tightly express the most powerful ideas of The Saners.

Although the group Occupy Wall Street did many things wrong, think about what they did right. They started with a tiny protest in a prominent location. Their cause - opposition to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few - was a nearly invisible issue. Few were talking about it publicly and it was not something covered by media.

Within a few weeks, there were Occupy encampments in nearly every major city in the world. Everyone was talking about the issue. A few visible protestors had become a worldwide movement. Nearly overnight.
WE need to do something like that. But in a completely different way. That’s the challenge we face. That’s something I contemplate every day. We need to strike that chord for our cause and for our movement.
These small local Saners groups should be informal and social, but what comes from their discussions and small actions could be world-changing.

If you haven’t done so, sign up for The Saners and get on our email list at WeAreSaners.org/join. Think about friends and others who care about the planet and who might have the guts to go first, to make a small stand now.

Then, go have coffee. World changing political events have been developed in coffee shops in Paris. This can happen for us, anywhere on Earth.