My "50-Year" Rule

A Yardstick for Change?

 

As I try to keep up with the stupendous events that surround us (and the cacophony of "crap" our Media "covers" them with), I rely on something from my Drucker class notes from the 1980s.  Peter taught that major changes in human affairs happen in cycles of about 50 years in length.

Every ten cycles (half a millennium) brings stark, and permanent change.  Harkening back ten cycles brings us back to 1513, about the time Cortez invaded Mexico.

 

Not all of us start and stop our cycles in the same year.  Those who manage to "land" on the "white" side of this planet's divide, are on cycles different from the rest of us.  About five hundred years ago, people of color who befell Europeans, became "property"; and have struggled to free themselves of that designation ever since.  Since the time of Cortez, Western interests have benefitted from "wealth" that is ultimately traceable to the womb of a non-white woman.  The entire world is struggling to escape the "property" curse; to this day!  Robots are the wet dream of many of today's Capitalists; robots are hoped to become the "ultimate" in property, it appears.  They can be "taught" to produce all goods and services, most inexpensively, and people will have to find "other things" to do.  Until that day arrives, exploitation of "cheap labor" will proceed on this planet.

 

More valuable than all the gold and silver extracted in the New World; the value of that event when the sperm of a non-white male invades the egg of a non-white female may be beyond calculation!  From Chattel Slavery through Colonialism, and their ghosts, that still haunt this planet; we struggle forth.

 

Black citizens of this country completed, last month, 50 years of "progress" in their version of that struggle.  Fifty years before, brings us back to 1913; around the time of World War I, and the "New Negro" Movement, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Negro  Fifty years hence will bring us to 2063.  The road from here to there is strewn with some scary challenges; both here and abroad.

 

Stay Vigilant!  Are you feeling more, or less, like a robot these days? 

 

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