Living in a Reactive Society

As opposed to Proactive Society. We're constantly on the defensive.. reacting to products - governments - policies - developments. We're so busy reacting that we don't take or spend the time to be proactive with creative innovative solutions to create what we want. We're bombarded with information, pressures, products, advertisments, and misinformation!
An example if community development - we are reacting to the fact that Wal-Mart wants to come to Worcester, Massachusetts.
But if we had a mechanism in place for proactivity - we would have council of representations continuously work on a 5 or 10 or other year plan - where we want to go. Then the community is involved in deciding how the community will progress and can ask for bids from companies to come and fulfill the needs they decided they have - not an outside organization deciding for you.
There's soemthing fundamentaly unsustainable about the mechanisms we have in place for faciitating development whether it's the top-down approach or the problem of spending millions of dollars on an environmental impact assessment of a project that will happen anyways and is oftentimes inherently unsustainable due to it's resource use.