The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

GULF SHORES, Ala. — It’s 65 degrees and sunny as I stand on a bridge looking south over the Gulf of Mexico with only seven days to go before Christmas.

An acid flashback is not necessary for me to see a vision of the future from here. Although the big picture might be more in focus if I was looking out instead on the world’s largest ocean from a bluff in California.

Maybe it’s the weather that has me in an upbeat and unusually optimistic mood today. Or maybe it’s the updated book and business plan I’m working on to help usher in the next phase of human civilization and democracy.

They say some people look at the glass of water as half empty. Others see it half full. I find myself seeing them both simultaneously with an unusual clarity today.

We seem to be poised on the sharp, knife-edged brink of annihilation, as a species as well as a democracy. There is much to be concerned about. There is much yet to fight for.

But the sea seems calmer today, since President Donald J. Trump and his team of rat-fuckers all seem more likely to be headed to prison than a successful political future.

They say you have to understand the past to avoid repeating the mistakes. Roughly one-third of the population of the United States are clearly focused on the past, not to try to understand it but to try to go back and relive it. One of the smartest journalists I know is as we speak working on a book on the goddamned Civil War. I say it is about time to let it go.

They also say the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I am as sympathetic to this point of view as was Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Barack Obama, who often said it was his favorite quote from history. And I am as impatient as the next poor American sitting around waiting for this day to come.

Only I am not sitting around waiting for it to come. Ever since I first jumped on the bus and started covering news in this democracy, I have worked my brain to the breaking point to understand everything I need to succeed, including history, technology, communications, etc., always keeping an eye on the future.

Now after all these years, after understanding as much history as humanly possible in the age of Google and Facebook and getting more than my share of justice, I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Sure, there have been dark days when I thought all was lost. Not just for me professionally, but for American democracy and the planet.

Today is not one of those days. I don’t know why exactly. I don’t put any stock in Mayan calendars, Biblical prophets or sooth sayers. I just think we are on the verge of figuring some key things out by let’s say 2025.

I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong many times before, although I’ve also been right, much of the time.

Ever since I first jumped on the opportunity bus I have often felt like I was ahead of my time. Now I think I’m about to hit the timing perfectly.

I gave newspapers a chance back in the day but had to sue one in federal court to make them pay reporters a living wage. For that they black-balled me, but paid some of my friends better, and I found a way to fight my way back.

They laughed and thought they destroyed me. I opened the first newsstand, bookstore, coffee bar on Birmingham’s Southside before the big chain bookstores took over the book selling business and Starbucks took over the coffee business.

I was one of the first newspaper reporters hired in the 1980s to cover the environment as a specialty beat. The CIA and the Republicans managed to get rid of me after I kicked their ass on story after story. They laughed and thought they had me licked again.

I went back to grad school just as the internet and the web were being pioneered, and started one of the first magazines published online. Many college professors then thought the internet was a fad like the hoola-hoop. I knew they were wrong. They laughed.

But they’re not laughing now.

Yes, history moves forward in fits and starts, often taking two steps forward and one step back. The dot com bubble burst in 2000, but that did not stop the advance of internet publishing. I published one of the first headline news links pages and then one of the first blogs on the back end of it, converting to a magazine-themed Word Press news site nearly 10 years ago.

The mainstream news media (MSM) professional class laughed, until the Bush Great Recession hit them hard, forcing the closure of many newspapers. They even abandoned new buildings they had just built in 2004 on the basis of projections by bookkeepers who were cooking the books as bad as Richard Scrushy at HealthSouth. Scrushy went to prison. The newspaper editors and publishers were retired with golden parachutes, many never to be heard from again.

I wonder where they are now? Sitting on the balcony of a beachfront condo I bet, drinking themselves to death and wondering what might have been — had they only had the foresight to look down the road and try to see the future instead of always bringing up the rear and counting on the past to repeat itself.

If you are standing on a similar bridge and can only see backwards, no doubt your outlook must be pessimistic. From where we are today, the view can only be seen as bleak.

But I see a day in the not too distant future when enough people are going to get mad as hell and not take it anymore.

I don’t see much of a future for Donald Trump and his nationalist white supremacist buddies who think we are going back to the slave economy before the Civil War. While it looks like that’s where we are headed, we’re not going to let that happen. There are way too many of us. And we are fucking smarter than they are.

But I am not all cozy and optimistic today. I am tired of waiting on people who are standing in place. The world is changing fast. We need to get going on this plan.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, they say. Stay tuned. We’re working on the solution to the problem. Won’t you jump on the bus with us and help? You will be glad you did.
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