January 1982 RAIN Page 5 what we were talking about. Well, years went by, and I experimented quite awhile with new and innovative ways of trying to explain the nature of money and energy and behavior, and in just the past year a development has occurred in my life that I find extremely exciting and nearly unbelievable in its implications. It has to do with the "Community Alert" poster and what's about to happen to it. Let me run this down for you, because there's a lot of lessons that we've learned that have extreme implications for people who are trying to influence public policy. Just before the end of the Carter Administration, Diane and I were asked to put together that poster for the U.S. Department of Energy and National Council of Churches. This was partly because In the Fortune 500 there's tremendous talk of nuclear war. the State Department and the Defense Department jointly felt that it was a near certainty that the United States could lose oil from the Middle East because of the increasing turbulence in that part of the world and there was no preparation at the community level in this country to deal with that implication. We reviewed the emergency plans (if you can call them that) of every state in the Union. I would say that if you had to stake your personal stability on the sanctity of those plans, you'd have lots of problems. The cities assumed the states had something in place. The states assumed the Federal Emergency Management agency had something in place. The feds assumed the states had something in place. There is really no preparation. It hasn't been taken seriously and the challenge put to us was how do you begin to communicate to people en masse about the need to get their act together quickly in such a way as not to cause panic and make it socially acceptable to begin to do things. We resorted not to a format of scientific analysis, but to a childhood book illustration in extraordinary detail. We tried an experiment: we told a variety of people, "put the picture together." We assumed the Reagan Administration would not be interested in the picture because it stood for decentralization and all the thiAgs which are at least outwardly opposite to the philosophy coming out of the White House. The project just about died, so we asked for the copyrights in the hope we might do something with it. About April of this year I visited the governor of Oregon, Vic Atiyeh, who is a moderate/conservative Republican. I showed him the picture and talked about it in great detail. He liked it quite a bit and wrote a nice letter. I thought "well it's nice to have a good letter from the governor; I think I'll take that letter and generate more." So I went on a fact-finding mission to the administrators of Oregon's major state agencies. An amazing thing began to occur. They weren't simply writing endorsement letters, they were becoming very honest! They were saying things in writing on official letterheads that they don't usually say. The language was very emotional and they were extremely optimistic. In fact, the picture was used as some kind of cultural Rorschach test of the future. For example, the labor commission looked at it and said that if communities started behaving that way it would create more jobs, and people would have something to look forward to instead of something to dread. The director of environmental quality said that we would be using fewer fossil fuels, and so we would simply have a cleaner place to live. The administrator of state corrections said that he felt strongly that the major cause of crime is lack of identity, lack of community identity, lack of purpose, lack of neighborhood, and if communities began to behave the way they behave in the poster there would be an absolute reduction of the overall crime rate. The welfare director said it would give hope to people on the low end of the economic scale. The public utility commissioner said it would put a lid on escalating utility rates. It went on and on. We had some 20 letters from state agency administrators, each from his or her own point of view, saying if communities began to behave this way, it would only do good things. Now, for me that was astonishing, because I've had an interesting history in the Oregon state government and I guess I had given up on their learning process. The stress of the times, the information that's available is so extraordinary right now it's caught up with everyone. I thought, "why, this is just astonishing information." So I went to Washington, D.C. and I met with a variety of members of Congress—Republican, conservative members of Congress. I went to the White House recently (in fact, that was a marginal experience for me, partly because I was dressed in jeans and had to be checked out with the F.B.I. just to get in the gate even though Senator Hatfield had arranged the appointment for me. There were a few tense moments when I began to wonder "hey, you know, is this going to be like back in the 60's," but everything was fine). What I found in the White House was extraordinary receptivity to all this information. I found that the White House is essentially under seige. It's a very unpopular place with just about every special interest group in the U.S. In fact, the cab ride to the White House was pretty amazing. The driver was a grandmother about 60 years old, black, who said, "I don't mean to be disrespectful to the President, but if this don't get straightened out soon, there's gonna be guns in the street, baby." That was my opening line when 1 met with the White House people, and I found that messages like that are pouring into the center of government. There's an enormous amount of concern, a terrific amount of discontinuity among advisors who don't really know what they're doing. Many of the people making economic policy now are not experienced business people. It's a very insecure environment right now. I found terrific opportunities and potentials coming out of that bastion of government, believe it or not, because the business community in the U.S. is very, very unhappy about the untested, puzzling decisions that are being made and are producing paranoia and uncertainty in so many millions of people. In New York City I met with the heads of several major corporations in the Fortune 500. Some of those corporations have had tremendous increases in profits in the first quarter of the year, and you'd think they'd be Now is the time to do it. You can't be too outrageous. really happy but they're not. They're very upset, and there's tremendous talk about nuclear war. The water systems are failing. New York City now has 36,000-40,000 homeless people, and on and on and on. Their concerns are very real. I came back to Oregon, and with the help of a very dear friend, Norma Paulus (who, for those of you who are not Oregonians, is secretary of this state) went to visit primary businesses in the state to raise money to distribute the poster. The question which I put to corporate leaders in Oregon was if they would take a decentralized picture of society with all that's on that image and help us put many copies in the 1,500 schools in the state, all public libraries, all the city halls, all the college libraries, all the county seats. Recently, two Oregon private utilities and the Nike Shoe Company began the venture.* I frankly was very puzzled that the utilities first agreed to do this. Here in the state, food companies, all kinds of major mainline industries are now saying "we want our name to go on that picture because that is the future that makes sense." One inter- *Since Joel made these comments nine other corporations have signed on as sponsors of the poster.
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