Beware the Corporate Expansionist catch-cry :
"YOU CAN'T STOP PROGRESS!"
(taken from Marcus Bussey's pieces at www.malenyvoice.com)

" A Pilgrim's Progress
Whenever you hear the word "Progress" linked with development, as it has recently been in Maleny, you should become suspicious. The word is deceptively simple, yet it is a highly charged political weapon in the war on community, the environment and those who would resist the rampant expansion of big business and government into local contexts and environmentally sensitive areas.

Western society has had a passionate relationship with progress but it has been something of a poisoned chalice and we now weigh each gain in terms of physical comfort, personal wealth, convenience, increased speed, and technological capacity against, patent loss of individual meaning, erosion of rights and liberties, environmental degradation, social and personal stress, wide-spread cynicism and a loss of belief in the future. The future has in fact been colonized ahead of us by a toxic and aggressive form of progress that purports to serve community when it serves corporate capital and authoritarian forms of governance.

Progress as we (and others) have experienced it, has been a mixed blessing. It was progress that lead Europeans across the waves to new lands at great cost to their indigenous populations. Yet it was also progress that challenged the power of monarchs and brought about new forms of democratic government. It was progress that built factories and belched out pollution wrecking the lives of generations of people and degrading the environment. Yet again, it was progress that gave us electricity and a range of treatments to many of the world's ills.

At this level of analysis we can easily be distracted into point scoring, yet this litany misses the point. At all times when real advances have been made their has been a positioning by specific groups to maximize advantage and direct energy into forms of social organization that create passivity in the populace, a compulsive obsession with choice and change, and huge wealth for a privileged few. This preferred vision of 'progress' has been well marketed and many accept it unquestioningly, unaware that it effectively robs their children of a future we could feel proud of.

This brand of progress has been naturalized: many can think of no other form of development than increased commerce, increased expansion of the market globally and locally and an increased range of techno-toys to both amuse and facilitate commerce and globalisation. Many feel captive to this image of the future. This is an image that has direct implications for the present when groups, such as the one in Maleny resisting Woolworths, are marginalised by a combined rhetoric of progress and property rights and many who might join their ranks shrug their shoulders with a premature sense of defeat in the face of a triumphant progress.

Many such would-be supporters from middle-Maleny cannot see a way out. It is this socioeconomic group that a recent study lead by Dr Richard Eckersley, from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the ANU in Canberra, found to be suffering great stress. A moral tension lies at the heart of their lives because they behave in ways contrary to their beliefs. Why? It seems that they feel caught – they believe they need to keep up with the pace of change which feels highly unstable and therefore they struggle to create their own safe haven to keep the unpredictable out. Interestingly, Eckersley also found that many were changing life-styles in an attempt to break the cycle they are caught in. I am one such individual, a pilgrim in search of a different, more inclusive 'progress' that flies in the face of the current logic implied in the catch-all of corporate expansionism "You can't stop progress!"

The point of this letter is that we may not be able to stop progress, but we can certainly choose what kind of progress we want. We in Maleny have the choice between a form of progress that degrades community and the environment while channeling profits out of the local area into huge corporations, or a form of progress that embraces the communal and builds local economic and social diversity and strength. The choice is ours, yet it is being taken away from us. We need to remember that we are ancestors of the future and that our legacy will one day be weighed and measured. As it stands, there is little doubt that many of us will be found wanting."


Cheers! R-J