Essay: Chasing Change Is The Constant

08/22/2005

Paul Munnis

In our personal lives the divorce rate is high as Americans change marriage partners to suit themselves. Changing partners is also a reflection of how change effects society.

For example: for many years the operating system on a personal computer was the king of business. If you developed a software application and you wanted to sell it then you wrote in a language such as C++ and you compiled it for a variety of operating systems. Then you tested on a platform like Apple and when the application was running smoothly you marketed it to a variety of operating system platforms. That made a lot of people like Bill Gates rich.

The Operating System of choice has changed to become the Internet. The language of choice has become HTML and there is no need for multiple implementations, just an awareness of browser compatibility by the application developer.

This has markedly changed the method of marketing software.

The result is a rush to product quality and ease-of-use are just about the only things left to use to differentiate the offerings. The matter of availability by platform is now pretty well gone except for corporate software vulnerable to hackers.

We see a chain of causality here. Since personal computing is no longer about the OS platform that you elect, then the equipment that you select is even of lesser interest. As long as you can get to the Internet and have decent performance and security then just about anything will do and price becomes the key driver for platform selection.

This has profound implications for manufacturers, investors, and technologists. It drives deeply into the roots of the proposed Knowledge Based Economy. It drives youth to the brink of madness as they try to make decent career choices. It is a harbinger of more change and adaptation for the America economy too.

For politicians and for citizens, no less than the wealth of nations is undergoing change as technology changes from one format to another and as nations are whipsawed into chasing societal change brought about as a result of technological change.

As one wag put it: “Change is the only constant left in society today.” This observation seems to be right on and it has profound consequences for American society.

The message is that while technology is seminal the rate of change is high, obsolescence rates are also high, change comes rapidly hurting those who are not nimble and something that is safer is needed to base the future of a nation upon.

Yet while the eye of the American public has been on changing technology the eyes of our government planners has been on our military.

Militarism for America was the choice made by U.S. government planners after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Build a large Army and thus dictate the terms of trade, commerce, and banking to the rest of the world is a simplified interpretation of the choices that were made.

There are two ways to use militarism as policy, one a matter of subtle diplomacy and the other ham-fisted demand making. The Bush Administration chose the latter approach acting like the school-yard bully and with devastating results for America. Bill Clinton had used subtle diplomacy with good results.

The problem with militarism as the U.S. practices it is that we are unbeatable at conventional warfare but highly susceptible to a guerrilla style of warfare. It costs too much to deploy, maintain, and sustain large military operations for prolonged periods. With petroleum becoming increasingly scarce a redesign of the U.S. military is urgently needed. The cost of occupying nations has proven far too costly and both Iraq and Afghanistan are daily proofs of the high cost of warfare as practiced today by the U.S. The military and its costly superstructure is the biggest impediment to streamlining our armed forces. We are still locked into the horse-calvary of old and all of the baggage accumulated since then.

Either the U.S. military learns to change and adapt to modern warfare just in the same way as technology reinvents itself or it too will become obsolete and the basis of our society must then change to accommodate the new reality. Present U.S. military initiatives are on mighty shaky ground these days and change is avidly searched for. Bush blew the military thesis for America with an arrogant and ham-fisted foreign policy and that is a sad fact of history now. A foreign policy of first strike is obsolete while the policies of preemptive strike have been negated. This is leaving the world exposed to nuclear threats.

Let’s be frank: Socialism is Dead. Capitalism is in big trouble. Militarism is dying off rapidly. What is left? Do we loop and reinvent Socialism or reform Capitalism? Do we reinvent militarism? Do we morph onto a new track for America? If so, which one can we bet our future upon?

Choices that are made will effect all of us for the next millennium.

Just as software changed then America must change or settle for a second-rate place in the world. The Political Party that can choose a new foundation for America and articulate the future clearly while presenting intelligent choices that people can live with, these will become the future owners of wealth in America. Europe and the Pacific will be left to emulate the choice or else to counter it. We are in a contest of ideas and people have been concentrating simply on the wrong things. They have been chasing change instead of concentrating on what seminal choices will benefit mankind. The new challenge is to re-base American society and politics based upon a new paradigm for the future.

If as much energy had gone into choosing a new foundation for America as has gone into dealing with the Iraq War, we would have already had the choices made and presented. Ours is an electoral process to change America. We need to invent, characterize, communicate, debate, and elect an Administration that will embody change on a representative basis for the nation.

Let’s get on with it.