We don’t tend to think of investing as a primary tool for social change. We need to. Not just investing more conscientiously in the stock market. Something entirely different—steering some of our money as locally and directly as possible, in as grassroots a way as possible, with as little packaging as possible, as little financial mumbo jumbo as possible, as much affection, mutuality, cooperation, community, diversity, urgency and patience as possible. In the name of health and peace.
Now, before you go all Been There Done That when you hear the word counterculture—conjuring up the first photo of the earth rising over the moon, the first Earth Day, the assassinations, Vietnam, Women’s Lib, Woodstock, the Chicago Seven, the Voting Rights Act—let’s allow for a healthy dose of It’s Not About Us Anymore. The Me Generation must finally get out of the way and pass the baton to the Greta Generation. And do so with far greater gusto, seriousness and engagement than we’ve mustered to date.
Let’s admit it. Along the way, we got a bit befuddled, albeit enriched, by the computer revolution and the biotech revolution and the population explosion and other once-in-the-history-of-the-planet confluences of the standard-of-living-raising kind. Leading us to the place where we are now saying, “There’s too much money in politics,” while we pour more money into politics—as if, by some alchemy, “our good money” will, this time, finally trump “their bad money.”
As if this were our version of “This is the war to end all wars.”
None of which is the crazy part.
The crazy part is that there is, today, courtesy of the local food movement, something simple that we can do, something as simple as all the talk of history and science and politics is complicated: