Time for some rabble rousing.

Change is accelerating, and it seems that in every little nook and cranny you peek into, there is another problem to be solved. Though politics is currently the general obsession, we are all otherwise pretty much zombied-out about a lot of the everyday things around us impacting our health, planet and communities.

We are covering our skin and hair with synthetic chemicals, parabens, formaldehydes and more that are affecting our bodies and cells in ways we don’t even know. We are trusting their makers to have our best interests in mind; they wouldn’t be allowed to make it if it wasn’t good for us, right? Wrong. Great, pure, natural ingredients are a lot more expensive than cheap chemicals, and who bothers to read the fine print? Will using it for one day hurt you? How about every day for 10 years? When we apply a popular dry shampoo, we’re spraying butane and propane all over our heads. Every day in the shower we’re slathering ourselves in sodium laurel sulfate. Why? Because it’s the status quo. Everybody’s doing it.

Rampant throw-away culture is filling our landfills and oceans with plastic and single-use disposables that will still be here 1,000 years from now. We reassure ourselves by re-using and repurposing and recycling but some things won’t recycle. We carry our reusable grocery bags into the grocery store and call it good. But it’s not good enough. The world economy seems to rely on American consumers buying every little thing we can. Planned obsolescence is the status quo – “throw it away and buy a new one” is how our world works.

The small independent businesses that create innovation and jobs and vibrant community are fighting to stay alive against the overwhelming competition of the multi-nationals driven by little more than the quarterly profit forecast. 55% of American households are members of Amazon Prime, embracing convenience for free overnight shipping over small business and community. Nothing’s free; there is a price for everything, sometimes it’s just unspoken and levied at a future date. What happens when the entrepreneurial mom-and-pop businesses are gone? It’s just the status quo, to be expected, right? Will we call it progress? What a boring world it will be. Time to wake up. We ALL value and honor our local non-profits, but what about our local small businesses too, that are often the lifeblood of those non-profits, of community engagement and participation.

CULT+KING is just one of the growing number of little companies all over the world trying to create change by offering consumers new choices, and the opportunity to embrace new values and habits. It’s going to take millions of small steps taken on a daily basic by millions of people to create the ocean of change we need.