The Crisis... A Year Closer

In the year since I last posted to this blog, a whole slew of changes have occurred, both worldwide and locally. However, none of these contradict what I have been saying, all of them further reinforce the strength of the arguments I have laid out. People are more aware that "something is going on" today than they were a year ago. Also, many doomsayers are predicting a massive, global economic crisis within five years, an even more draconian time frame than the prediction of 20 years I had read about before.

I got stuck writing more, not because I had little to say, but because I had so much to say and it was so complex, I found the blog format difficult to "fence it in". Since then, I have had a number of opportunities to speak in public to these issues and to evolve my own understanding of how to talk about them, so I'm going to make another try to get down some of the impacts and issues that the process of "peripheralization", the term my colleagues and I have started to use to refer to the shift from orthodoxy to paradoxy, engenders.

Also, when I wrote up the blogs originally, I had identified a number of key sectors that would need to gain awareness of the changes in progress and learn new ways to function. These included the museum sector, in which I have become professionally active, issues in relation to the aging population, disability and identity, another area in which I have become professionally engaged, and the education sector, about which I have a lot to say that is urgent but have been unable to articulate clearly and neutrally. Because I work at a university, I have found I am emotionally caught up in the issues of education and that this makes it hard for me to step back and talk more neutrally about this area and the crisis that I believe is coming.

Like the doomsayers, I believe a major economic crisis is coming, but I think its scope is as much about social change as it is about economic change. I also believe the crisis is necessary to "get us past the hump" onto a different incline, a different set of dynamics. Crises are the means by which transformation occurs. They are always painful, but they are absolutely necessary to move past a knot. So I don't count myself among the doomsayers, who say crisis is inevitable, it is coming and it will be disastrous. I agree it will be painful, but that is it both useful and necessary.