It may be increasingly culturally popular to say one is part of a Movement rather than a party. In fact, during and since the Great Recession, more movements have arisen than I can count: Occupy Wall Street leading all the way to Black Lives Matter. In between bookends are movements in LGBT equality, women’s equal compensation, Common Core education and the ubiquitous environmental movements and the new healthcare movements toward precision medicine using human genomes. But to look at the actual political movements occurring on left and right, it’s a challenge to say it’s all politics. Bernie Sanders started a neo-socialism movement and Donald Trump a new Republican movement and oddly enough, both sides mutually share anger either at corporate or government institutions.

It’s no wonder American’s are angry and traditional party affiliations are floating to the atmosphere; our culture is a conglomerate of Movements. I have often pondered the next US president’s role as Movement Leader. I also believe one factor that may keep all movements from sparking all-out-revolution in our streets like the Arab Spring is the revolution that already is occurring: the technological production of humanly impossible amounts of information to interpret. The digital technology revolution cannot be managed as long as business, institutions and organizations keep producing and analyzing more data hoping to gain control over competitors as well as narratives in all these societal movements. People are already information distracted and will remain distracted to the degree that to begin any socio-political street-level revolution there would need to be more data.
Robert P. Waters

Go to the farthest horizon and you will fall off the earth. Centuries ago people believed this and had every reason to believe it. So, when ships sailed out of sight and headed toward the falling-off moment, they really fell. And today, we still sail to the earth’s edge and we are still falling; it’s just that humanity has mastered the state of free-falling.

We fell in love with adventure, the whole earthly environment, the idea that we had inherited what we didn’t create, that in between the visible-to-the-eye celestial world and the dark world below the seas there we were left to exist. There are just as many people in love with the flat world as there are adventurers; they ground us from falling too fast and too often. After all, many ships met their fate on the seas as nature proved its power. They were claimed as they set out with the purpose of claiming. And for those who keep pulling us over the edge, they need not try to take the whole world with them. Maybe their personal risks and love for adventure and discovery will inspire the next generation – that alone is the risk of falling.

Robert Waters, 2016. From, "The Prophetic Backbone"