Personally, I'm against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! devoted her hour long show yesterday to Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday, which was celebrated in grand style in Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Seeger whose life has been dedicated to social activism through music is an unusual celebrity. He purposefully avoided the limelight, but it consistently found him.

As she and guests chronicled Seeger’s many achievements—his pivotal, though often understated roles in the labor movement, civil rights, the environment—what struck me was how he slowly and with great determination tackled big issues in very small ways. A case in point: His singing of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers show in January 1968.

Controversial at the time, this unassuming appearance now seems to have accelerated the changing mood in the country. In March, Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek another term as president, and, on October 31, he announced that the US would cease “all air, naval and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam.” Such a view substantially rewrites history—Seeger’s act was just another drop in the bucket that, when filled to the brim, eventually changed US policy.

“Too many things can go wrong when they get big,” as Pete Seeger stated. Like banks and other institutions that are “too big to fail?” while smaller banks are allowed to go under. By concentrating on institutions that have acquired disproportionate influence over the country, we have allowed smaller organizations—banks, businesses, entrepreneurial start-ups—to fail. This policy is not only unwise; it also counterproductive in that it strains against the counter-intuitive cultural Zeitgeist of early 21st century America.

This Zeitgeist is counter-intuitive only because most of the ways we have conducted business since the ‘50’s at least are being inverted, subverted, or changed in radically new ways. A few examples: Google and its wiki adherents that offer core products for free and make money through the back or side door. A global economy where local and regional products have found greater favor. Millions of online writers, journalists or hacks with their own blogs, videologs, or websites supplanting large daily newspapers, magazines, and television. More later.

Change is afoot in every aspect of our lives, and it will arrive in the aggregate actions of individuals and small organizations that can now wield enormous power helped in part by new technologies. Small is the new big.

To quote Frances Moore Lappe, who wrote Diet for a Small Planet (cited earlier) and her daughter Anna Lappe’s definition of their Small Planet Institute:

We believe that ideas have enormous power and that humans are capable of changing failing ideas in order to turn our planet toward life. At the Small Planet Institute, we seek to identify the core, often unspoken, assumptions and forces — economic, political, and psychological — now taking our planet in a direction that as individuals none of us would choose. We disseminate this deeper understanding of root causes. With a grasp of root causes, citizens no longer disparage their actions as “mere drops in the bucket.” Once we’re able to see the “bucket,” we realize our drops are quite spectacular; the bucket is actually filling up.

The So-called Benefits of the Great Recession

Maybe it was the simple fact that my parents were, on average, a good ten years older than most of my peers' parents and I was born when my mother was nearly 40. But, for me, The Great Depression informed nearly every minute of my childhood and teenage years—from the “turn off that light. What do you thing we are? Made of money?” to the constant depression-glass lens through which every experience was viewed.

Growing up, I often felt that my parents had more in common with my friends’ grandparents than their parents. They were, after all, in their early 20’s during the Thirties. My father had ridden the rails, working at jobs anywhere he could find them from construction work in San Francisco to building carnival rides and barnstorming with the Eyerly Brothers in his home town of Salem, Oregon. My mother had travelled to the alluring West from the northern, frozen North Dakota plains in search of love and work in that order. At home, we canned, baked bread, sewed our own clothes, and repaired everything. But, then, we were “lower middle or working class,” a term that seems to have disappeared in the economic halcyon days that followed.

Laying my rather peculiar past aside, most of us boomers did have parents who grew up and survived the depression, remembering the scarcity and the deprivation, which was then followed by the war years. But what lessons did we take away—from them, then and now? Very few. It might even be said that we tried very hard to avoid those lessons. Although the Green Movement may have grown out of the social activism of the ‘60’s, most boomers were not socially committed at the time and very few continued along the social activism pathway, except perhaps where it involved social, sexual and personal freedom. Lots to be argued with here.

Mostly, we boomers and our children have experienced over-abundance and have relished in it. I cannot count the number of times people have said to me lately that they could never have conceived the economy turning downward the way it has. Having to cope with less for many of us has seemed like an early death sentence. I am supposed to be enjoying these years. Isn’t that the American Dream?

Now, so many commentators have pointed out that we as a Nation may finally be learning our lessons—about having enough, about frugality, about sustainability, about valuing experiences and people over labels and stuff—that I have lost track. I actually believe, on the other hand, that the current Great Recession is actually only building up pent-up demand among many people. The minute conditions ease, we will probably see ourselves returning to our old ways.

Only this time, we can’t afford such self-indulgence, if we ever could. The abundance we thought we enjoyed was actually a delusion. Remember those books we all bought in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s—Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet and Steward Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog. Their messages have even greater relevance, urgency, and poignancy today. Ignoring them now is not auguring a symbolic early death sentence, but tolling a death knell for the planet.