WORLDVIEW
We recently returned from a meeting with Governor Jos'e Calzada of Quer'etaro, Mexico, where we were invited to address 1,500 youth leaders from throughout his country. Mexico has more young people now than ever before in its history - over 40% of the overall population - and they are making some bold and intelligent moves to empower the youth. The Governor, a front-runner for the Presidency of Mexico, along with his cabinet of young people, consider the information in our film THRIVE, and the accompanying whole-systems Solutions Strategies, to be a critical part of awakening the next generation and wanted these youth leaders to join the more than 20 million people (in 24 languages) who have seen THRIVE since its release in November 2011.
Our meeting with Governor Calzada was a great and somewhat surreal experience: There we were in a formal meeting with high-level government officials talking naturally about UFOs and the transport technologies they use to travel through the cosmos - and how that informs new energy technologies on our planet. Topics like these, which are controversial here in America, are normalized in Mexico, as they are in a host of other countries where imperialist wars of aggression to maintain control over fossil fuels is not the overriding agenda.
We were reflecting on how what is controversial in one arena is taken for granted in another. Interestingly, the one topic that seems to inspire the most controversy is Liberty- more than ETs, or the conspiracy for global domination. One of the first times we publicly encountered the issue of Liberty was during the light brown apple moth spray issue here in Santa Cruz County.
INALIENABLE RIGHTS OR MAJORITY RULE?
After learning about the proposed spray program, we joined with others to introduce the 12-sector solutions model to help coordinate our efforts to stop the spray. The 2007 spray program was a billion dollar earmark by then-President Bush to spray ten chemicals, some of them known carcinogens and endocrine disrupters. The program proposed aerial spraying over an area inhabited by seven million people throughout northern California for nine months every year for up to 10 years - all supposedly to eradicate a tiny moth that was doing no damage. The coalition ended up successfully defeating the program, after just six months of coordinated effort. But at one point in the process, one contingent of the activists working to stop the spray suggested that we organize to put the issue on the ballot so people could vote on it.
This is where things heated up. We were not willing to support a vote on the issue. It felt to us like voting on whether or not the government should allow rape. Not only was there a very real chance that the vote would be rigged, but if they had a billion dollars for the campaign, they could certainly invest some of that into propaganda to convince people that it was a safe and necessary program.
But apart from that, we were prompted to ask: What about inalienable rights? What about the right we have not to be violated with toxins against our will? What about the right to clean air and water? It was a striking confrontation with the limits of "majority rule" because whether or not the majority could be convinced that the spray was safe, we believed that the right not to be violated was non-negotiable, and that this was a chance to lay claim to that.
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