Responsible long term outlook

I always get mad when I see our politicians shortsightedness who can barely think through their mandate and their reelection. This puts us in a world of short term thinking, of zigzagging policies and of reactive – instead of proactive actions. Some small communities do better than our big governments. In the US, it's not uncommon to have cities and counties try to plan ahead through “visioning” processes and attempt to guess or imagine how their communities will look like 20 years down the road and hopefully try to do something in anticipation of it.

Take our environment for instance. It's common place to say that we love our kids and grand kids so much that we want the best for them. The same idea applies to infrastructure, public debt and education, but its time span generally stops right at the grandchildren. We don't seem to give a hoot at our grand kids grandchildren and so on. It would seem just right to think through generations down the path, right? If our leaders had both the courage and foresight to dwell into this way of thinking they probably would begin by at least formulating a 50 year plan (why this number? Because it corresponds to two modern generations) followed perhaps by a 500 plan to tie everything together. While their ideology was totally flawed, the Soviet had it right with their “five year plans” as we have long given up to monitor our progress these days under the excuse that the world is changing too fast...

Such a mind set and such a planning exercise would finally bring serious issues into perspective like overpopulation, health-care, education, economic survival, environment, natural disasters and peaceful coexistence on this planet. This overview should guide an entire succession of governments with a flexible road map instead of having them try to re-invent the wheel at each unexpected surprise found in a new turn of the road. Who should take that lead? The United Nations for sure and every top elected official, but most importantly we, the people, should develop, promote and push that visioning attitude onto them.