THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

In 2WO, my folks moved to idaho to join some end-of-the-world
religious group. They kept trying to get me to move out there too, but
each time I went it was more and more clear that I would never really
fit in. I wasn't the right age and I didn't have kids. When I finally left,
the idaho Christian Fellowship (Kuna Community) wasn't too sad to
see me go. What was weird, though, was in my trips back and forth,
and in mail to the home back in San Francisco, I realized the exact
same thing was happening there. Everyone was locking themselves
up into tight little homogeneous communities, even the hipsters and
queen, and everyone was closing in on their own little niche.
Then came the Big Crash. I never really understood what the hell
brought down the whole house of cards of the old money game. All I
know is that n started with the banks in Japan going belly up on a
trillion dollar loss or something, and the whole thing was over before
they could even print the newspapers to talk about it. Nothing was
the same after that: governments, businesses, everything that
depended on international contacts got into trouble at the same time.
That there is the Americorps II bar-code - one of the last things that
central government managed to launch. Etzione thought of that, at
HUD, and the conservatives loved it. Kept track of us; kept us safe.
Kept us careful. Half of my house joined the Corps, even while we
worked at Microsoft. The Big Crash had left us all shaken up in some
way - jobs, friends, losing houses on mortgage payments, whatever -
and we all needed some way to work R out. I did on-line counseling.
That's why the Corps-code is blue.
For California, the cherry on the cake came when the Really Big
One hit. Almost everybody lost someone they knew. I was among the
lucky ones: that day I was out seeing some suppliers up in Sonoma.
That earthquake also closed the chapter on the relevance of
Washington bigwigs for us here. The Big Crash had loosened the