beyond anger and protest
Yes to the encampments. Yes to protesting injustices. But “Green” should raise our vision toward “A Better World Is Possible” and so include much in the way of positive and constructive messaging.
The left has been Red with Anger for two hundred years. The socialist movement dates from the 1820s. Two hundred years later the world has not exactly turned socialist. The Green politics movement arose in response to the failure of that paradigm of social change:
https://greenhorizon.sites.community/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GHM48-Spring-2024.pdf
There has been inequality, social injustice, and war since the rise of states and empires five thousand years ago. It’s intolerable and we need to offer solutions. But “Green” is based on a sense that we’re experiencing something profound, the start of a “Great Turning” in our time. The distinctive Green ideology gives a vision of opening pathways toward a new and better direction . . . the “greening of society” . . . extended democracy, social and ecological sustainability, demilitarization, communitarianism.
Speaking personally, I’m fully aware that the current society sucks, but my motivation for our work is not primarily anger. David Korten wrote about how the malaise of our time is a consequence of the converging crises of millennia of misguided civilizational trajectories. Yet we can draw encouragement, hope, and pride from the idea that the Great Turning has started. We should be part of it. We should be its advocates.
People are hungering to hear about a radically positive way forward.
