It is Wednesday morning, and the Secretary of State of Ohio announces that John Kerry has won the state, and the presidency. What would that have meant?
For some now weeping, euphoria. For some now cheering, jeering.
But what would be different about the world?
Nothing much, at least not immediately. Just "Feelings ... nothing more than feelings ..."
War would continue in Iraq. Spiderman would still beat Doc Oc. The little squiggly line produced at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, the one that tells the world how much CO2 has accumlated in the atmosphere, would keep squiggling up.
Russia would still have already ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
Yes, some of you might say, but we would have a more internationalist president with better policies on energy. We would not be worrying about the Supreme Court. No, others might say, we will be weak in the eyes of the world and especially Osama bin Ladin, who taunted us in the days leading up to our election. These things matter.
Undoubtedly it matters who steers the world's only remaining, but arguably declining in super-ness, superpower. (By the way, it won't be long before we are talking about a bipolar world again, anyway, with China the emerging behemoth, the one with nifty space program and the most sustainability stuff.) Many things will be affected by the outcome of this election. Specific people will end up happy or sad, alive or dead -- and different people than would have been so affected under President The-Other-Guy.
What doesn't change, regardless of who sits in the White House, regardless of whether they vacation in Crawford or Nantucket, is the work of worldchanging. Suppose you are one of those who was greenishly sustainable back in 1992. Do you remember Vice President Al Earth-in-the-Balance Gore? Do you remember the US President's Council on Sustainable Development?
Instead of saving the Earth, Gore invented the Internet and hammer-bashed government (helping to balance the budget, give him that). Instead of changing US policy and creating a joint bus-gov-NGO consensus on an ambitious sustainability vision among its high-powered members, the PCSD, if you ever heard of it, held a number of fabulous networking parties. I wrote an article about one of their meetings titled, "They Came, They Saw, They Concurred."
(Before you blast me with nostalgia-mail, I know this last bit was unfair and simplistic, good things happened, yes yes, I am just making a rhetorical point here.)
The point is, worldchanging -- for sustainability, to claim my soapbox, but insert your own big agenda item here -- involves the advancement of very specific idea sets, actual technologies, discrete solutions. Some of these tasks would have been easier under a Kerry administration; and I submit that some of them would conceivably have been harder, especially if we saw a repeat of the post-'92 "We visionaries can all relax now, our man is in the White House, let's go make money instead" phenomenon.
The US President, despite the brou-ha-ha of the last two years, does not run the world. The US President is just a very powerful player. The President is just someone who makes important decisions that change the context for the long-term work of innovation, diffusion, and transformation -- the creation of a world that can work for everybody, and nature, over generations. The Great Work, as geologian Thomas Berry called it.
And you know what?
So are you.
