Office of Shared Solutions

It's amazing that in this country, we don't have a department in government that specifically looks at success stories and useful ways of confronting challenges around the globe. Just like scientific analysis, this department would logically analyze policies around the globe that have produced successful results, and creatively come up with brilliant solutions to our most basic problems. This would help create departments at every level of government focused on the creation of peace and the dissemination of information about what works to produce the highest benefit for humankind in every area of human endeavor. To date, the concept of Shared Solutions has not received much attention from humanity's power structures.

Solutions to our most basic problems are being created all the time, with many of them actually put into place and functioning effectively on the ground right now - but nobody knows about them. The result is that we continually have to "reinvent the wheel" from location to location, all around the world. Almost every human problem has been solved somewhere. Yet sharing solutions that have been created by our most imaginative minds is something humanity is not doing at anywhere near the level of which we are capable. The simple application of already existing technology would make it possible for the human race to map out functional strategies with which to approach virtually any challenge.

What might be the problem? Creating the best educational program possible - better than anything now being offered in almost all the places on the earth? It's already been done. Providing health care for all in an affordable and effective way? It's already been done. Eliminating starvation and deep hunger as a human experience, regardless of a person's ability to pay? It's already been done. So What Is The Challenge? Curing the most ravaging diseases of which we are aware? Done. Governing ourselves in a way that provides a high quality of life, equal opportunity, and maximum freedom of expression for all? Humanity's already done that. Reducing crime by cleaning up ghettos, and transforming the breeding grounds where criminal behaviors are born by creating new hope and real opportunity in the lives of those who would commit them? Been there, done that. We Know How To Do That. What is the challenge we think we cannot overcome, the problem we think we cannot solve?

Increasing tolerance and reducing conflict among people of differing cultures, races, beliefs, and histories? Humanity has already done that; we know how to deal with it without military intervention. The list of our ills is endless, and the list of solutions we have found is equally long. The problem is not that we have failed to find any solutions, the problem is that we have failed to share them - and in a startling number of cases we don't even know about them. Or, worse yet, we do know about a solution, but believe, for the flimsiest of reasons, that we cannot put it into place. And the reason we give? We can't afford it!

This is the economic model in most places on earth: that unless there is a financial profit to be made, we cannot bring ourselves to muster sufficient resources to solve our most difficult problems. Until most recently, people died unnecessarily all over the planet because they could not obtain certain medicines - because the prices required by drug companies placed those medications out of the reach of the poverty-stricken. Those same companies worked hard to prohibit generic drugs containing the same formulas from being introduced into the local marketplace, thus ensuring that their products would be the only curatives available. Only after being literally shamed into it did some of those companies finally begin seeking ways to work with people and governments in the world's economically depressed areas to make certain drugs available. Still, in our world, access to all the wonders and miracles of modern medicine is largely a matter of money, of how much one has to spend on such things as quality of life, and survival.

It seems to me that only when we see someone else's problems as our problems, and someone else's challenges as our challenges, will we see the benefit of establishing, in every country on earth, a National Office of Shared Solutions, and global office as well. It is remarkable that we haven't done so up to now.

--To see a good example of an effort to share solutions, go to http://www.evolve.org/