As someone who recently voted with my feet and for many reasons immigrated to Canada (not far from Ronald Wright's stomping ground near Salt Spring) I am both heartened and brokenhearted by what is all too true in what he writes. The question is: How to frame, communicate, translate the knowledge of these realities into a form where the urgency and imperative for action are heard and heeded- by politicians, by teachers, by our neighbors, our children, by the very core of who we are and how we live? How do we shake our cages loud enough to get even our own minds awakened enough to wrapped our primitive capacity for reason around the enormity of the challenges we face in trying to turn back the tide, change the course of our headlong rush toward oblivion? I am, though it would not appear from what i say, by nature an optimist, but, hey, we are a dying breed- all of us...unless we can translate/discover/articulate and embrace a veritable conceptual universal understanding- akin to finding a new Rosetta stone and redefine the most basic precepts of what we believe-our assumptions about life. what we believe we need to be happy, what gives our lives meaning. Maybe we do need to- in at least an exploratory abstract sense- need to go back to living in caves- we need to question and question and question the very idea of what progress is.

ps- I'm homeschooling a high school age son. He is reading Wrights book on Progress. Does anyone know where Wright may be speaking sometime on Vancouver Island or how to get in touch with him? Thanks- 4clover@telus.net