That feeling when you were little. Your parents have been gone for HOURS and you’re home with your siblings. Suddenly you hear the door open.

TIME TO PANIC!! The house looks like a tornado went through it because you’ve been playing a game that got out of control. Your little sister is crying. Your brother is “playing” with the cat. The cat is not amused.

As a planet, we’ve been playing the game of Capitalism for a bit too long. RIGHT NOW we’re in the last round. If we keep playing people will die. For real. When nations can’t get along, citizens of the planet need to overrule them. In every act of war, innocent people are killed. We are hereby revoking a country’s right to murder. The clock on the wall says Mother Nature and Father God will be here any minute. How would you like them to find the planet they’ve given us?

All of us were born into the system we have. We were all making the best choices we could from the options we were given. The blame goes to an invisible non-entity which has been influencing our behavior without us realizing it. Or if we did realize it, we didn’t have any way to change it. As of today, there is a way.

We can stop playing the Capitalism game any time we want. It’s not that hard. Regardless of the fear of punishment, It’s just not fun any more. The game; our game; the game we invented — isn’t working for any of us. If we keep playing there won’t be a planet for us or our children.

There are two ways the game of Capitalism can end:

1. Nuclear war, where everybody dies. We go out in a blaze of glory. Exciting! The movie ends. The screen goes dark. There are no credits. We awake in our seats wondering, what just happened?

2. Humanity divides itself permanently into Have’s and Have-Not’s. The Have-Not’s are born into economic slavery and die in economic slavery. They are treated like cattle and have no more rights than we give a cow. The Have’s live in physical comfort and psychological torture. They experience constant guilt and permanent fear because they could lose their privileged status at any time. A revolution would be impossible as every person with enough influence to do something would be working against his or her interests, and has every reason to betray a troublemaker.

May I suggest a third option? We have an opportunity. An opportunity which has never happened before in the history of the world: We can play a different game. Who is Capitalism working for, anyway? The one percent? If you earn more than $34,000 a year, you are the 1% globally. Is Capitalism working for you?

Is Capitalism working for politicians? You mean the people who are forced to sell their soul to get elected and forced to re-write their good proposals until their work is as effective as soggy oatmeal before they can bring their proposal for a vote?

Is Capitalism working for bankers? The millions of people who live, breathe and die in accordance to the whims of a stock market no one controls or understands?

Is Capitalism working for business owners, who watch their profits disappear down the tax hole to pay for things they despise?

Is Capitalism working for laborers, who are buried under mountains of debt with no relief in sight?

Is Capitalism working for scientists, whose research must show a profit to get funded?

Is Capitalism working for doctors, who took an oath to do no harm? Does medical debt do harm? Does a lack of medical care do harm?

Is Capitalism working for teachers, who are told to teach like school is nothing more than a factory for future inmates, laborers and tax dodgers?

Is Capitalism working for students, who if they are lucky work their asses off for the privilege of taking a job they hate to pay back a student loan before they can even start to think about retirement?

Is Capitalism working for the mayors, governors and presidents of the world? Most governments are in an unrecoverable financial tail-spin. They are unable to put into place the policies they KNOW will help their people, because they can’t figure out how to make the numbers or the politics work.

The reality is the planet is bankrupt. We’ve known this for over 50 years. Planet-wide, total debt is increasing at a rate of a billion dollars a minute. And our GDP has been slowly falling since the sixties. If you earn $34,000 a year your portion of the planet’s debt is $102,000. How will you retire? How will your children retire? As long as we keep playing the game of Capitalism, recovery is not possible. The game is over. The rich won. We concede. Capitalism was never intended to be fair. Every effort to make it fair is working against the nature of the system.

What do you say we play another game? A game that is fair. A game where everyone wins. A game where we un-jam our political systems and remove the invisible economic burdens we all carry? Let’s play a game which values human dignity over pretend money, where every person is educated to his or her preference. Let’s play a game where we clean up our environment, end poverty, end war, end corruption and send people to Mars? If you were to ask your deity, what would he or she say? Even if your deity is Capitalism itself, the economic efficiency of the game I propose should warm your heart.

Do we work for our systems, our institutions? The pieces of paper and computer code stating that money exists, a business exists, a charity exists, a city exists, a state exists or a nation exists? Or do those unseen systems work us? Your experience may be different, but those systems haven’t been working for me for a very long time. Will we continue to serve our systems? The systems we created? The pieces of paper with no conscience and no remorse? The systems that don’t serve us?

Our systems have given us a false choice: They ask, “Would you prefer:

Door #1 Nuclear war, in which we all die, or

Door #2 A planet-wide company town, in which we wish we were dead?

Perhaps we should try Door #3? Door number three is a global organization of PEOPLE determined to take control of the systems that haven’t been working for anyone, and make them work FOR us. Even our systems have their own global unions. OPEC, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, etc. Are any of these systems working? Do they even work for the people who operate those systems? Everyone in a position to make these proposed changes would be on board if they knew there was another way.

There is literally no on opposing us. Even the .0001%-ers have families. They want a better planet for their grandchildren too. Maybe there are at most — a couple dozen people with no family, whose religion is Capitalism AND Capitalism is actually working for them. Why are we all forced to follow their abusive religion? Whose permission do we need to ask to make life better for everyone alive, for their offspring and for the planet itself?

Once we’ve organized, we can discuss what changes we can make to our planet’s systems to get them to work properly. We should talk about the best ideas and their potential benefits. Then we should vote on it and make the changes we agree upon.

My suggestions for changes are:

1. Build and deploy a new social media website.

2. Institute approval voting for all representative elections.

3. Change our currency to a time-based crypto-currency.

I’m convinced these three simple adjustments can make all the change necessary to make the planet livable and much more pleasant for the foreseeable future. All the changes I’m proposing are digital. It’s like a software upgrade for the whole planet. And it appears these changes will solve just about every problem people have been complaining about for decades. Sure I could be wrong. But I think it’s a conversation worth having, don’t you?

Regardless of the changes we agree on, there’s a plan to institute those changes: We continue to use Capitalism until a date we agree on. We set aside one day to make the changes. We start our new game the day after.

Is the world worth saving? Do people still protest? Do they go to work on Monday? Do they plan for the next election? Why would they do these things unless they believe the world IS worth saving?

Let’s not give ourselves a Darwin Award. Wouldn’t we be embarrassed if God or aliens came to Earth to discover we destroyed a perfectly good planet over something as trivial as a software update?