American and Global Civil Wars

Dear Team:

Greetings again from beautiful Silicon Valley where high speed internet comes out of your ears everywhere. I was just doing a little research for Dongwei's " Inside America" English for Chinese series. I discovered a few insights so I will share them with you.

During the 60-80's two powerful trends were occuring in America. Politically and culturally a great de-centralization and fragmentation process was occuring. More groups were demanding their rights. Blacks, Hispanics, native Americans, Asians, women, gays, disabled people, and senior people.

The family was also fragmenting with higher divorce rates, more single parents, more people re-marrying, more people living alone, more people co-habitating without marriage, more children born out of wedlock.

At the same time the US government was getting bigger and more centralized. American corporations too. This strange push-pull between these two opposite forces signalled the struggle between the second and third waves of civilization squaring off against each other.

Also shorter cycles of consumer-led activity with a halt in real earning power led to desires multiplying while at the same time being denied. A high consumption ethos led by heavy advertising was clashing with an old Puritan work ethic.

Global militarization continued with increasing domestic impoverishment. The fragmentation of the family was paralleled by a high-tech consumer explosion and a culture faced with ADD. This is short-hand for Attention Deficeit Syndrome. A psychology based on a high-speed life-style with an increasingly short attention span in both adults and children.

Life was getting chaotic and less orderly as the old second wave industrial era started to unravel. Also all American institutions were becoming discredited even as more was demanded of them! Congress, the courts, the U.S. Presidency, schools, universities, and U.S. Corporations. We are still at this watershed now.

The soft media-based cultural civil war between the second and third waves in America echoed the more violent American civil war in the 1860's which led to the industrial era. This American civil war based on the struggle between an agrarian south and an industrializing north later had it's echo in the European civil war of 1914-18. This global civil war of the second wave finally climaxed in 1945.

It is my contention that the second American civil war of 1967-77 has led to a national transition with new cultural groups locked in bitter stand-offs today in America. National TV was the arena for this process.

Why is this important for the world today? Because CNN is now showing us all that the American experience in the 60-'70's is now going global. The 90'-00's has seen America become just another national arena for all kinds of cultural and national groups fighting on a global level not just the US. government, but the Multinational Corporations too.

The world entered the first global " third wave " war on 9/11. It was the planet's Sarajevo. The 1914 of the third wave. The inner war of the planet versus the outer " second wave " war of 1914. 1914 was indeed the beginning of the second wave climax. What kind of " inner " third wave war climax will we have eventully? No one can say.....Hiroshima was th climax of 1945.

Today the majority of Americans want gun control, enviornmental protection, and a national health insurance, but they cannot get it because of vested interests and because of contradictions in the old second wave system. More people are living longer in America and fewer people are being born to support them. This is true also in Europe and Japan and increasingly China.

Only a digital welfare society on a global level will solve this problem. Only global institutions can protect the earth's enviornment. But once more we have nothing, but contradictions. Americans and most people on the planet increasingly feel " entitled " towards more and more welfare. But the political will to solve these entitlement demands with new kinds of third wave technology and new kinds of social engineering is still lacking.

The 1980's was the transition point between the new American civil war and the new global one. That's why the Cold War ended in the 1980's. Soon 9/11 followed to usher in and warn us all of the new challenges to come.

We must all be systems thinkers now....we must all stop thinking with a 19th century mentality as we plunge into the 21st century.

Think about this.

Michael