UNRECONCILED
Tuesday, July 26, 2021
Raw materials.
Finished goods.
Which are we?
If it’s a factory punching out parts, those are finished goods, but aren’t they often raw materials when they arrive at the customer’s loading dock?
And later, when they leave that customers’ shipping docks, aren’t they components in finished goods, destined for their customers?
In the economy, if we aren’t selling something or shipping something, we’re making something. It’s easy to see when Part A is put together with all the other parts, and you get something that looks like an IKEA assembly drawing. Then, when a building goes up, it’s not sand and gravel and trees – it’s concrete and lumber.
But what about the other commodities we trade in – those services, the money handling, the buying and selling and the transactions of governments and corporations, the ones that have no weight but plenty of heft? What about impact – not measured in volts or pounds or horsepower, but measured in collective pain, joy, empowerment or exclusion.
Sure, I could have written inclusion.
How’s that going?
We, as a country, are raw material – manipulated with money and votes, motivated to cheer, to sweat, to worry, to hustle, to mourn, to fight, to rescue, to build, and to demolish.
We are prisoners of our history for as long as we let ourselves be prisoners of our history. The legacy of parliaments, prime ministers, pioneers, and policy-wonks of past centuries are a tapestry of way too many fails and injustices woven among the raw materials. We’ve been hewers of wood and drawers of water for too many others for too long, willfully ignorant of the powder keg and the citizens we’ve marginalized for centuries.
Sometimes we have to demolish old things to build new ones. We can’t unwind the past, but we can demolish some old thinking and build something new in its place.
Oddly right now, we have a debate about who is right or wrong on climate change – but citizens and governments are putting enormous resources into fixes, cures, preventions and demolition of industries and thinking – to be replaced by newer high-tech swinging pendulums to save the planet.
Not all good, but undoubtedly well-intentioned. Progress is being made.
And that’s a relatively new problem – created by humans (or not?), with citizens and governments taking the bull by the horns and committing to bear the pain of change and pay the price of rethinking everything to right the environmental wrongs of 100 years.
Isn’t it a pity, during an election year, the major parties are focused on that rather than using than demonstrably contributing to restructuring an economy and to restructuring our society to right the wrongs of 500 years?
Raw materials, or finished goods, which are we?