The date is January 15, 2010.

We are at the outset of the greatest social crisis of my lifetime. (I was born on the eve of World War II.)

How we choose to respond, now, to this national and global crisis will determine if we wither or we thrive anew here in Vermont.

The crisis, described by most as a near-global “recession” – a term that was conjured up after WW II to replace the former more-honest term, “depression” – is far deeper and broader than a mere recession, or depression. None of us will part from it unchanged. To be reborn, we must first die.

Manifesting first as a crisis of confidence, then of faith, it will soon become a crisis of belief. More is involved than capitalism, representative democracy, freedom of markets, perpetual material growth for all, and the supremacy of the individual self. This is a crisis of cultural identity: Who am I? What gives my life meaning? What kind of society do I want? To whom do I owe my loyalty? What, where is my homeland?

The crisis has been precipitated by bitter truths still debated, denied, and ignored. As climate activist Adam Sacks has wisely observed, “Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths.” The exact same words could be spoken in relation to peak oil, or to the military-industrial-Congressional complex.

The human world is at last discovering its limits. Not its spiritual or intellectual limits, which are more or less boundless, but its material limits. Most of the world’s people live in nations that are at the beginning of their ascent into the Dream of the Imperial West. They are furiously, mortally engaged in the West’s game of fossil-fuel-based growth, and they are growing fast. And so we are all now arrived atop the “bumpy plateau” of Peak Oil, Hubbert’s infamous peak, where the world’s demand for oil keeps growing but the supply does not. And, as a result of the uncertainty over the supplies of the world’s most precious and indispensable commodity – its “keystone” resource – the price bumps up and down until we reach the fateful downslope.

On this bumpy plateau we have very little time to answer life-and-death questions, existential questions, and make huge new commitments as to how we are going to live in the future. The globalized system’s tipping point has arrived.

“We’re on a journey  — and we don’t yet know it — back to a nation of communities where your character really matters, and where character rests on whether your deeds comport with truthfulness … [where] the estranged spirits of our national character await a reunion with us: fortitude, patience, generosity, humor” (James H. Kunstler). We are about to be transformed from what Chris Hedges calls “a country of child-like adults” into mature human beings. This is the fruit we may hope for.

The world system is not in our hands. The United States leadership is no longer amenable to change through representational democracy. It is bent to the task of preservation of a doomed idea. Our elites are committed to full-spectrum dominance on the world stage, to a zero-sum game they are determined to “win” at any cost, at the cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars, in order to preserve for themselves a moribund “American Way of Life.” This not a situation you and I can control: these are tectonic plates moving inexorably on a collision course.

These plates are nonetheless human: belief moves them. Belief in the god of eternal economic growth.  A jealous god whose reign now spans our planet.

We come to the heart of the matter: Do you believe in this god? If you remain faithful to the god, you will continue to pledge your allegiance to the United States of America. You will swallow the lies, the abuse, the legerdemain served daily to you by these “leaders” and their servants in the media, and you, your sons, and your daughters will continue to die in far-away lands with nary a trace nor murmur of protest. Because that is what your country’s zero-sum, full-spectrum dominance philosophy means and entails.

I believe this god is dying — in his death agony.

I believe allegiance to this god is now a fool’s bargain. And a bargain with the devil to boot.

Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence news journal will continue its mission to liberate our social imaginations, to develop our readers’ will to engage in innovation, and do the fundamental economic, political, and cultural reconstruction work that will enable us and our communities to flourish in a decentralizing, post-peak-oil world. As lead author Frank Bryan reminds us in this issue: “Vermont is free of the residues of the old system and may therefore immediately apply its energy to creating the future….” “Immediately” is the catchword.

Radical change is a nonetheless a stubborn question of belief. If you cling to the old system, believing that it remains reliable, safe, and secure, as most of our politicians here in Vermont do, then the recent report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that a host of indigenous renewable energy sources, including hydro, rooftop PV, and wind, can provide 152 percent of our state’s electrical needs at an average kWh cost of 5.7 cents, will not stimulate you to act. (Please read our new “Energy Optimist” column by Gaelan Brown, page 13, to learn more.) Nor will you notice that Daddy down in D.C. is bankrupt, and therefore you will not try to understand what Daddy’s bankruptcy means — to you.

The movement for a moral, sovereign, and sustainable commonwealth of Vermont towns inspired six years ago by Thomas Naylor, creator of the think tank the Second Vermont Republic, has spawned several activities now on the verge of bearing fruit. These include a group that will exercise oversight of Vermont government according to the principles set forth in the Vermont Constitution, as well as a larger group responsible for developing a detailed platform for achieving Vermont independence; a digital online music provider that features an entire library of Vermont musicians (Free Vermont Radio); a Vermont Currency Initiative group (which includes exploration of founding a Vermont Bank), and various smaller groups currently in formation around such tasks as grassroots organizing, tax revolt, collapse preparation, and not least, electoral politics.

On January 15, Vermont Independence Day, independent candidates and their supporters for all 30 of Vermont’s senate seats, lead by Dennis Morrisseau of West Pawlet, and two other candidates, one for governor (Dennis Steele of Kirby) and one for lieutenant governor (Peter Garritano of Burlington) will announce their campaigns and platforms at 2 p.m. at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Montpelier.

Be there.  Help us build a movement for social change.

Ian Baldwin
Publisher Emeritus