Opinion Sur
Before the great global crisis exploded, growth seemed as vigorous as problematic: awesome technological development, emergence of new locomotive economies such as China, India and Brazil, marked inequality between countries and within them, persistent poverty in most parts of the world, unstoppable destruction of the environment, deviation of resources toward financial speculation, economic bubbles and blowouts, terrorism and violence, genocide and civil war, epidemics, …. The problems and antagonist confrontations stemming from the course and way of functioning we had adopted were not few.
Today, different “ways out” of the global crisis are being tried. Some of the solutions lead us to think that we are rebuilding the pre-crisis world instead of transforming it. Other efforts are focused on rethinking what we are and what we aspire to become in order to choose, from that perspective, a better global direction. The struggle that marks the beginning of this second decade of the 21st century will determine whether our course and way of functioning will be adjusted for everyone’s good or for the good of a few.
It will be critical to distinguish between what is important and what is subsidiary; what is essential and what is circumstantial; the interests of the whole from those of the sectors that profit at others’ expense. Certain courses are not sustainable no matter how much containment or repression is deployed; they incur huge human and environmental costs and jeopardize the efforts aimed to eradicate environmental destruction, international insecurity, increased fundamentalisms and dangerous criminal systems such as the trafficking in persons, drugs and weapons.
In this issue of Opinión Sur, with the humility the case entails, we state that our audacity and intelligence deserve a better fate than just profit seeking, social and environmental destruction, and the substitute alienated happiness behind which we hide. We are far from having managed to process and give meaning to the wealth of information we have all of a sudden accessed; it seems as though the avalanche of news, knowledge, multiple superficial relations swirled to increase our vulnerability to manipulation, thought homogenization, loss of strategic orientation.
We believe that it is possible to turn the way out of the crisis into an opportunity. The challenges to be faced are not few and they are diverse; among them we highlight a critical one that is worth reassessing at its maximum: standing tall above the tide and building a new referential utopia, a north that serve us all, a great driving project that help give direction and purpose to our multiple actions. In that effort we enlist.
Have a good 2010.
The Editors
