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INTRODUCTION - OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS The Annapolis area is home to nearly sixty thousand people. Slightly more than half live in the City of Annapolis. Anne Arundel County is presently home to roughly half a million, including residents of the Annapolis area. What's in question here is the same unknown as anywhere else. Will the Annapolis of tomorrow be an extension of the Annapolis of today? Will the Anne Arundel County of tomorrow be an extension of today's? If this area is changing, will it change for the better? Or change for the worse? And how will our actions influence the communities we live in? I believe we have the capacity - working together - to bend the course of events in a positive direction. Human society has so many resources to draw upon today, so many more than in the past. So many generous and motivated people who participate in our community as volunteers, as employers, as employees, as public servants, as members of churches and synagogues and mosques. A society that's smart enough that heart transplant surgery is now a matter of routine, a society that's smart enough to create computer chips able to perform a hundred trillion calculations per second, is surely smart enough to work itself free from all sorts of difficulties that we've inherited from the past. What this means, I believe, is that an extraordinary era of reform is about to take hold. The purpose of the twenty-first century can be positive. There's no good reason that it shouldn't be. To be sure, the deeper questions are not easy ones. Power questions - what's the proper balance between the strong and the weak? Tolerance questions - are we ready to welcome the idea that God's love is truly for everyone, regardless of faith or ethnic background? Prosperity questions - is prosperity just for the strong, or is it for everyone? Technology questions - do we want to build human prosperity on a technology platform that harms Mother Nature? Or one that protects nature? Social questions - Can women and men enjoy equal rights and equal status? Can peoples of different cultures and races enjoy equal rights and status? Civic questions - can the culture of democracy be one that affirms everyone's worth, one where integrity is the widely shared norm? Questions of old evils and how they are to be left behind - are we ready for a post-imperialist world that leaves behind both the evils of imperialism and the evils of an often-vicious anti-imperialism? Questions on humanity's relationship to Nature - are we prepared to be stewards of a healthy planet? Now? And for all generations to come? In short, are we ready for a future in which we - we humanity - consciously transcend the flaws of the past? I think we are. I think we're ready to see ourselves with new eyes, sense our purpose with a new heart, reframe our path forward with a renewed sense of purpose, and put our energies into projects that bring out the best in who we are. As we do, we will find ourselves sorting through all the technologies that support our prosperity, asking which ones damage the earth and which don't. Just as the dawn of the automotive era was a time of remarkable innovation, the dawn of our Clean Technology Era will produce a flood of bold improvements and brand new inventions that open vistas of a Clean Prosperity Era as well. We will find ourselves re-inventing our homes, our subdivisions, our landscaping methods, our farming methods, our sewer systems, our waste treatment systems, all with the goal of once again enjoying rivers that are clean, fish that aren't sick. As we focus on a renewed purpose, we will find ourselves re-inventing some of our most important social organizations. School systems that today don't know how to educate children from low income neighborhoods will find themselves learning new paradigms, enjoying new successes. The extraordinary professional growth that comes from living by a superior paradigm will change much of public education to its core. We will learn to see differently, and we will learn to see ourselves in a new light. Our peripheral vision will widen. Our foresight will be greater. Our ethical allegiances will be stronger. Shaping a future that's not broken is essentially a giant work party. The old is gathered in bags, taken away, and put in the composter. The new is shaped and fitted and smoothed. There's laughter and calluses and bruised thumbs and refreshments and stories, fellowship and memories, architects' designs and the thrill of bringing the new into being. We all know there's stuff sitting here in the present that hasn't been dealt with for awhile. After two hundred-some years of celebrating an Industrial Revolution without worrying too much about its consequences, humanity has sat itself up, looked around, and discovered that Global Warming means arctic melting. And arctic melting - as Greenland and Antactica shed their ice - means Higher Oceans and Seacoast Flooding. An ocean that's twenty feet higher? That's what some experts predict. With a bit of foresight, we start to realize how Global Heating can put the entire Naval Academy under water, flood all the City Dock neighborhood, submerge St. Mary's, City Hall, and perhaps First Presbyterian Church, and drown waterfront properties along the entire length of Anne Arundel County. These forecasts warn us that we have our work cut out for us. What we haven't absorbed yet is the promise that's ahead, if we choose to follow a path that takes us toward a future that's not broken. If, that is, we choose a path based on the merging of ethics, energy, and imagination. It's time, in other words, to reinvent human prosperity so that it works properly for everyone. Time to recognize that the breadth of vision with which Washington and Madison and Franklin and Hamilton came together in Philadelphia in 1787 is needed again. It's time to recognize that the generations alive today also have a calling. A calling to a festival of inventiveness that replaces Dirty Technologies with Clean Technologies. A calling to stitch together a master framework for environmental survival and environmental sustainability. A calling to promote social justice and leave behind social injustice. A calling to leave behind gated prosperity and embrace inclusive prosperity. A calling to leave behind a civic life of irresponsible partisanship and embrace a civic life in which we respect reason and respect one another. Nice words. Better still when they define a work party. Those who participated in that extraordinary paradigm shift known as the Quality Revolution have a better sense of what is to come than almost anyone else. The old paradigm was like water to a fish. No one knew there was a different way of doing things. Until jobs started disappearing. And rival manufacturers began taking away market share, aided by their experience in a new paradigm. Once American companies caught on, there was a scramble. I was with Cummins Engine Company, at its Jamestown Engine Plant in western New York. We sent at least two planeloads of people from our factory to Lincoln, Nebraska, to tour the Kawasaki Motorcycle plant so we could see its "Pull Manufacturing" system for ourselves. We watched Hewlett-Packard's hilarious Just In Time skit on video. We visited other factories for ideas, we hosted visitors as well. Working with the folks on the line, we videotaped every operation on our Ten-Liter assembly line and encouraged them to find ideas for reducing waste. We attended lectures on Total Quality and Just In Time in dimly lit factory rooms, where professors who knew something about Japanese manufacturing principles put transparency after transparency on the screen in order to teach us what it would mean to give up an old mindset and adopt a new one. Some people learned, and adapted. At Cummins, the Jamestown Engine Plant is still in business. Some didn't learn. Many companies went under, many good jobs were lost. And now all the world is up against a similar decision. If we choose the old paradigm, we will live by the mindset that things are always broken. And, alas, should we stay with our old mindsets, things indeed will remain broken. If we choose the new paradigm, we'll aim for a future that's no longer broken. We'll join hands to create a new and stronger foundation for human prosperity, a foundation that gets the basics right as early in the process as possible. We won't just pass laws that reduce the amount of mercury our power plants pump into the atmosphere, we'll use our ingenuity to create an energy system that's fully earth-friendly. We won't push poor people into ghettoized neighborhoods and then wring our hands over educational failures and high crime rates. We won't choke business leaders with regulatory minutiae. We'll get the rules right and then we'll make sure they're as simple as possible. We won't label political rivals as "enemies" simply because they think differently; we'll listen respectfully, find the nuggets they have to offer. And they will respect us as we respect them. We will own up to past injustices as a way of laying the groundwork for a fairer way of doing business tomorrow. A civic integrity future. An inclusively prosperous future. A socially just future. A clean technology future. A healthy environment future. None of that arises from old paradigm thinking. All of it is fully possible if we're willing to make a paradigm shift in our civic thinking. Willing to make the sort of paradigm shift, that is, that millions of Americans have already made when they learned to let go of an old quality paradigm and embrace a new one. I invite you to examine the data on the pages that follow as though you were trying to make sense of an optical illusion. What do you see? A vase? Or a pair of faces in profile? Do the data tell a story of a society that will always be flawed, because it's always been flawed? Or do the data lead you to see the promise of a truly reformed civic life? Do you see in them the story of a 21st century whose purpose is one of ennobling all humanity? On the pages that follow, the numbers are the numbers. But the meanings that you give them? Well, that's up to you. Tomorrow's Annapolis, tomorrow's Anne Arundel County, will be shaped - in part - by the meaning you decide the numbers should carry. Steve Johnson |