As the Dollar Falls and Fails Creativity will Rise

by NDK Creative Artist

Those who know how to make nothing into something are going to come into their own in the next few years.

This is really about the power of words. I remember when the current Bush administration came into office—I call it the Badministration because it’s bad, really bad. I also call it the Budministration because it’s a corporate crony thing. I remember Cheney saying one word that sent a shudder through the nation and the world.

“Recession.”

I knew then that we were in for a rough ride. That word was loaded and timed and given deliberate intolerable emphasis that came straight out of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I’ll never forget that moment.

Cheney’s pose and stance reminded me of Adolph Hitler. I could see and feel the relish with which Cheney delivered that word, as if he knew all that he was setting in motion, and in hindsight, I now know that he did in fact relish that moment.

It was one of his first speeches as Vice President. It was one of those defining moments in history, one that you remember, that niggles at you because you know it was important and it won’t leave your mind alone. It ties up attention in a knot that won’t unravel, but that you pick at anyway, determined to grok, and which with persistence and time you will connect to the right dots so that the full understanding occurs, and you finally realize its significance.

The Fall of the Dollar Empire is an excellent analysis of economic history over the last decade or so. I remember how buoyant America felt during the Clinton years—it felt like the American nation was finally going somewhere and that it would get there. There was optimism in the air that you could touch and hold and caress with confidence. One word destroyed that feeling. One word.

With one word Cheney defined what he was about to do with his bush-baby president, create a recession, a world-wide recession.

I wrote about the power of words recently. America is about to learn a hard lesson in humility that is going to have far reaching affects on the entire world.

So I want to say this:

In the face of doom, creativity—in all its positive and constructive forms—is the most important thing to nurture and support, for when everything becomes nothing, that is when creativity steps up and makes something from nothing.

You cannot create much of any use to anybody when you are in despair, so look to those things that offer hope, which lift spirits, provide levity and luster to an existence the weight of which would otherwise crush.

There is another side to globalization that is happening and it’s not all doom, it’s optimistic, it’s positive and it’s an alternative system to that which already exists. It’s all around us right now, an element here, an element there, a spark there, a flare over here, warmth in a cold and otherwise bleak moment. Those are the things that are going to pull humanity through what’s coming.

Create!

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