What a week! U.S. credit downgraded from AAA to AA+, followed by a precipitous (if temporary) drop in the stock market. Thirty-five Americans killed in a seemingly endless—and some would say pointless — conflict in Afghanistan. Riots out of control in, of all places, London.
But what all this bad news signals to me is that, from government to the economy to defense to making sure young people have opportunities, we need a whole new paradigm – a different way of looking at and resolving our most pressing problems.
If there is a positive aspect to these depressing developments, it’s this: crises are usually the catalysts for real reforms. The type of pain we now seem to be experiencing on a daily basis is what it usually takes to begin rethinking our approach to everything. And the key, I believe, is simply to harness the 21st Century technologies now available to us.
Nearly lost amid all the bad news, for example, was this story: medical researchers have developed a new weapon in the fight against cancer – one that uses stem cells from patients that have been genetically altered to target the malignant cells involved. So far, the technique has only been tested on three patients in advanced stages of leukemia – but the results have been called extremely promising and exciting , with two of the patients becoming completely cancer-free, and a broader study in now in the offing.
If the technological resources now available to us can be utilized in this manner to find a new approach to fighting cancer, why can’t similar ways be found to eradicate the cancers eating at our society – solutions that transcend our old, outmoded methods of problem-solving?
Which brings me to a conference call on a particular type of recycling and material recovery that I participated in yesterday. The upshot was that the income involved was not high enough to cover the cost of the process. But this conclusion once again reflected the old model –not the new thinking that we will need to protect our natural resources and, in the process, create new jobs in our communities.
So let’s get busy using the technological tools we now have at our disposal to do what those mired in outmoded methodologies would have us think can’t be done.