A Transformation from Silo to Train, "All Aboard"

Silos

If you are from the Midwest, you grew up with silos scattered across the landscape to store crops and protect them from the environment. Some crops are left to ferment slowly in the silo turning into silage to feed the livestock. Other silos are simply to store harvests for transportation later. They are good for what they do, but they can also be dangerous, producing deadly fumes. Their ultimate value is to use the content of the silo for something useful in the outside world.

More recently we have a more modern version of the silo as silo mentality, commonly described as separate entities that stockpile information and resources and effectively seal it in. It is in this context that I want to discuss the dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of organizations that are formed to combat perceived flaws in the current systems of governance and economics. I am referring to local, state and national groups formed to deal with environmental issues, or with social justice issues, or with political reform, or any number of very noble causes.

Within each of these groups you have like-minded, and often passionate people who are willing to work tirelessly on a particular issue hoping to make a significant change and to gather other supporters as well as financial and other available resources to move their cause forward. In order to have the most effect, they focus their attention on one issue, although they may care about several others that are also of importance. If they do not focus, they will simply become too scattered to be very effective. They build up an entire justification for the primacy of their cause.

Other causes and organizations operate in much the same way, and the result is that, in the communities in which they exist, every group is drawing from the same pool of resources, creating a sense of competition and perhaps even frustration.

Such a process has created a set of silos within the communities and across the state and nation. Silos supporting the same cause may communicate and perhaps share resources, but the communication between silos erected for other causes is not very good or very effective since they are in competition for the same resources. They are also in competition for the attention of the same decision-makers.

Now, it is easy to see that all of their issues are of importance and would make a difference in our lives if dealt with adequately, and each group probably feels that its cause should be the first to be dealt with.

Taking a step back, let us consider the larger problem confronting us. How can the 1% continue to dominate the 99% in terms of policy, direction and social consequences? If you stop to visualize the nation dotted with silos, you can see why. The 99% have separated into 99 different projects and each has their own isolated silo, or set of silos, trying to make what they see as the necessary changes.

Now step back even farther and see the total environment in which these silos are located. We are living in a political and economic environment that has been developed and established over several decades and is dominated by an economic elite in which value and worth are determined by economics and power. That system has existed for so long that it has become entrenched and is pretty much immune to any attempts at any substantive change. It now controls the economic life of the society, the politics, and the internal structure of nearly all of the institutions of the society. The system is enclosed in a protective wall. That wall is nearly impregnable and is built stronger every day as the elite find more ways to thwart any changes except those that give them more power or wealth.

This entrenched system even has an effective way to deal with those within the silos who are working so diligently for change. They commend those who want change on their hard and noble work and perhaps give them some small or partial victory. They also remind them that, in what they refer to as "our democracy", the other ways to get change have proscribed processes, one of which is to elect those who support that change in great enough numbers to be able to get a bill through Congress, have the President sign it and the Supreme Court sign off on it. They fail to remind us how completely they control that political process. They may even offer jobs or other rewards within their system, to some of the most effective leaders developed in the silo.

The existing system is based on abstract values of wealth and power and kept in place with propaganda, manipulation and intimidation. What all of these other issues are about is a return to a humanizing focus, which is the very heart of democracy

If you step even farther back, you may be able to see that there is a limit to the extent of that system, and, although they say the edges of that system cannot be crossed since nothing of value exists beyond those borders and life could not exist "out there". Perhaps you may glimpse something familiar "out there", or some of the older folks remember living "out there". They remember that life was different and perhaps better, "out there". You may even see that there are people actually living "out there".

The one thing that has, by now, become quite apparent is that numbers matter. Unions succeeded and created the American middle class by unified action that could not be ignored. This gave ordinary people, the workers, a voice that required attention politically.

Here comes the interesting part. How can we get all those noble causes coming together to travel in the same direction to make all of their causes realistically possible?

What is missing in the environment of the current system, is democracy. This is not an unknown idea in this nation. It has simply been ignored and weakened in the pursuit for power and control by an economic elite. The economic elite have built a nearly impregnable system to protect their power and have pretty much walled out the ordinary citizens, making decision-making an elitist project.

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