Friday, December 18 2009
Children ask - Why?
The Rich - The Poor...
The Powerful - The Powerless...
Why is one child born into prosperity, comfort and opportunity,
while another is born into poverty, suffering and despair?
Has it always been so?
Must it always be so - rich and poor, powerful and powerless?
Why?
Children ask why, why, why? We give children answers that deny reality.
Sometimes we tell them there is no answer - or the equivalent - "It's God's will".
Or, some offer "Karma" as the cause and explanation for these terrible inequities.
I believe we give empty answers, not because we are evil, or wish to mislead them, but because we cannot accept the truth ourselves.
I believe there is an honest and accurate explanation... I believe that the truth is so unspeakable, that we dare not acknowledge it to ourselves, or God forbid, reveal it to our children.
To even think the truth causes too painful a realization. To even think the truth wreaks havoc on our ideas of who we are. It tears apart our individual and collective self-images. The truth spotlights the results of our complacency and "self-service" as our prime objective.
In answer to an innocent child's inquiry "Why are those people poor and suffering, and dying, and we are not?" What parent could utter these words:
"Darling, it's because I allow it".
Friday, December 18, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Forgive me, but....
Ok... Right up front, I admit to being less than enthusiastic about "holiday" cheer. Having said that, let's take a look at what we're about.
A well meaning soul sent this to my e-mail.
http://www.sparkleball.com/intro.htm
You've just gotta see this to believe it. I don't know how to enable a link here, so please copy and paste it - look it up before you read any further, so that what I'm going to address, and why, might make sense.
Thank you, I assume that you've now seen the site on "Sparkleballs". I just don't seem to be able to avoid feeling the sad irony of this. I've come to define the condition/disability I suffer from as DIS "Denial Impairment Syndrome". Sparkleballs with their giddy distraction value, won't be the cause of our species' demise. But, they are yet another of thousands of examples that represent our persistent commitment to the inane.
In our world today there are many, frankly overwhelmingly relevant issues that need our direct and immediate attention. I find the "Sparkleball" phenomenon so sadly reflective of our times and the condition of our consciousness...
First. Note the quote at the top of the Sparkleball page...
"Making a light ball out of plastic cups won't change your life, but it will make everything a little sparklier."
Well thank god, yes! We wouldn't want to change our lives. That's hard. That requires self-examination, humility and the "C" word - Change. Our predominant, collective choice is to ramp up the level of sparkliness around us - to maintain our ever escalating commitment to making everything "a little sparklier". Yes, please... Sparklier is the secret to success, to happiness, to fulfillment. Sparklier is the key to a consciousness that might save our ignorant species from extinction! Sparklier! Yes! Gotta have it! Can't afford it? Put it on the credit card.
So, making our lives a little sparklier, requires a commitment. To embrace this enhanced level of sparkly meaning and purpose requires only that we acquire and consume more fossil fuel based plastic cups (and all that it implies), strings of electric lights designed to light up our robotic response to Hallmark Holidays, and use up more electricity to build and drive these symbols of our insanity.
If you follow along the Sparkleball page... the people involved in this amazing contribution to the human experience have also found a commercial niche. Apparently people who don't have the time or dexterity to build them, can buy them from the sparkleball wizards. There seems to be no shortage of humansdes who share a deep hunger for a sparklier sense of lifes' meaning. Please check out (if you haven't) the Global Sparkleballers Map (yes it's really there) at the bottom of the website. You'll discover, (I'm shocked!) that Americans are leading the world by an enormous margin, in Sparkleball wisdom.
Ok, so call me a scrooge. Call me what you will, but again, the opening quote says it all...
"Making a light ball out of plastic cups won't change your life, but it will make everything a little sparklier."
Maybe all that's left for us. Our noble destiny is to sit and stare at the sparkely lights. Perhaps sparkelballs are the symbols for our deliverance from the pain of realizing what we've done with our species, our planet, and our helplessness to correct it. Maybe a sparkelball would be the kindest, most effective distraction for a frog - while we boil him. Or someday, perhaps the human population will awaken to another way of thinking - a reexamined focus of resources and consciousness - perhaps something along the lines of:
"It won't make everything "sparklier", but it'll sure change your life".
A well meaning soul sent this to my e-mail.
http://www.sparkleball.com/intro.htm
You've just gotta see this to believe it. I don't know how to enable a link here, so please copy and paste it - look it up before you read any further, so that what I'm going to address, and why, might make sense.
Thank you, I assume that you've now seen the site on "Sparkleballs". I just don't seem to be able to avoid feeling the sad irony of this. I've come to define the condition/disability I suffer from as DIS "Denial Impairment Syndrome". Sparkleballs with their giddy distraction value, won't be the cause of our species' demise. But, they are yet another of thousands of examples that represent our persistent commitment to the inane.
In our world today there are many, frankly overwhelmingly relevant issues that need our direct and immediate attention. I find the "Sparkleball" phenomenon so sadly reflective of our times and the condition of our consciousness...
First. Note the quote at the top of the Sparkleball page...
"Making a light ball out of plastic cups won't change your life, but it will make everything a little sparklier."
Well thank god, yes! We wouldn't want to change our lives. That's hard. That requires self-examination, humility and the "C" word - Change. Our predominant, collective choice is to ramp up the level of sparkliness around us - to maintain our ever escalating commitment to making everything "a little sparklier". Yes, please... Sparklier is the secret to success, to happiness, to fulfillment. Sparklier is the key to a consciousness that might save our ignorant species from extinction! Sparklier! Yes! Gotta have it! Can't afford it? Put it on the credit card.
So, making our lives a little sparklier, requires a commitment. To embrace this enhanced level of sparkly meaning and purpose requires only that we acquire and consume more fossil fuel based plastic cups (and all that it implies), strings of electric lights designed to light up our robotic response to Hallmark Holidays, and use up more electricity to build and drive these symbols of our insanity.
If you follow along the Sparkleball page... the people involved in this amazing contribution to the human experience have also found a commercial niche. Apparently people who don't have the time or dexterity to build them, can buy them from the sparkleball wizards. There seems to be no shortage of humansdes who share a deep hunger for a sparklier sense of lifes' meaning. Please check out (if you haven't) the Global Sparkleballers Map (yes it's really there) at the bottom of the website. You'll discover, (I'm shocked!) that Americans are leading the world by an enormous margin, in Sparkleball wisdom.
Ok, so call me a scrooge. Call me what you will, but again, the opening quote says it all...
"Making a light ball out of plastic cups won't change your life, but it will make everything a little sparklier."
Maybe all that's left for us. Our noble destiny is to sit and stare at the sparkely lights. Perhaps sparkelballs are the symbols for our deliverance from the pain of realizing what we've done with our species, our planet, and our helplessness to correct it. Maybe a sparkelball would be the kindest, most effective distraction for a frog - while we boil him. Or someday, perhaps the human population will awaken to another way of thinking - a reexamined focus of resources and consciousness - perhaps something along the lines of:
"It won't make everything "sparklier", but it'll sure change your life".
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Making Amends
Making Amends:
The Tao Te Ching says:
A great nation is like a great man,
when he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
Every person, every nation, makes mistakes. Making amends can be a noble act, and is ultimately a necessary one. Noble, if no one is forcing us to do it. We choose to recognize our mistakes and correct them. Ultimately necessary, because the universe simply doesn't support imbalance for long. It just doesn't work that way. Making amends is a pro-active measure toward balancing our universal books before the universal IRS, with icy, non-negotiable indifference, does it for us. The magnitude of a mistake influences the difficulty of correcting it. We have some very difficult amends to make, and thus far, we're failing miserably. I intend to examine some of the reasons for that.
Born in the USA, post WWII , we perceived ourselves as the most righteous, most powerful, and most noble people on earth. We were the “Good Guys”, the “White Hats”. As we grew, we learned that our wealth, power and comfort was afforded us by imposing oppressive poverty, suffering, indignity and death upon billions of less fortunate people on every continent. We came to recognize that we weren't so very “White Hat” after all. For many of us, the need to make amends is a persistent, unavoidable awareness. Unfortunately, for internal and external reasons, making these amends seems virtually impossible.
One powerful obstacle is the inertia of our deeply internalized sense of entitlement. We may care about the oppressed billions, past and present, but to make any significant correction calls for sacrifice. It calls for broad, unconditional sharing of the wealth - genuine generosity. We're not much good at that. We're willing to care, we're willing to share, but generally, only if it doesn't disrupt our personal comfort groove. We instinctively resist any interference with the lifestyle we've come to believe we're entitled to. Making amends may impact our level of convenience and comfort. That concern alone justifies setting our responsibility on the back burner. With further consideration, we to turn the burner off.
Another potent and legitimate obstacle, is the ineffectiveness of charitable organizations. Charitable contributions are frequently mismanaged by the organizations who claim to serve the needy, but primarily serve their own boards, consultants and vendors. Additionally, contributions are frequently stolen by the leaders of the most desperately impoverished peoples. Adding salt to the wound, these are commonly leaders that our government have or do currently support. This knowledge dissuades us from contributing and further disables our efforts to terminate our complicity in the our governments intentional and systematic abuse of humanity.
And what of the needy and the suffering in our own neighborhoods, in our own country? We know that the poorest of our poor are better off than the poor of other nations. Additionally, we know that laboring within our economic system, binds us (through taxes and tacit acceptance)to actively and passively enabling the very system that's responsible for the wrongs against humanity at home and abroad, that we're attempting to remedy. We increase the number of poor - we prolong and exacerbate the harm. We're putting out fires with gasoline. So, in our genuine pursuit of making amends, that door too slams shut in our faces.
Understandably frustrated , with no apparent way to correct our wrongs, we can only deny or suppress the instinct to make things right. But, that pesky instinct doesn't go away. We live with it everyday. It manifests cyclically in small reminders followed by attempted repression of the feelings. We suffer from feelings of wrong doing and hypocrisy. We suffer from our apparent helplessness to correct it. As our options for redemption are systematically eliminated, guilt, shame, grief and anger grows within us. Unable to effectively withdraw from the creation of the suffering, we default to salving our spiritual distress in the best ways we know. Ironically, those “ways” reinforce the problem we feel helpless to address.
For example, we often dive headfirst into a distraction fueled, self service frenzy. We redouble our efforts to make and keep more money. We work desperately to attain and hold power, status, and righteousness. We deny the suffering we create. We simply stop paying attention. We rationalize our choices. With sufficient denial, we can temporarily mask the symptoms of gnawing guilt. But it tends to resurface. We treat the dis-ease we feel with distraction, denial and self-medication – all of which are self-punitive, self sabotaging and ultimately self-destructive. Sometimes we default to the perverse paradox of minimizing, dehumanizing and demonizing those we wish we could help, but can't. If we can deny their humanity, we can deny our obligation to help. We even deny something so obvious as our own deep, inner dis-ease. The problem with denial is that it doesn't work. Denial doesn't solve the problem. Denial doesn't make amends. It doesn't relieve our dis-ease.
Perhaps the most damaging long term effect is that for "denial as remedy" to be effective, we must dumb down. We must ratchet down our awareness of self and others, mute the voice within, blind ourselves, ignore our conscience. We must deny that we have the power to stand for what's right. We force ourselves into a state of helplessness. Effective denial requires that we become less conscious, less aware, less compassionate and less connected.
This leads to atrophy of the prime motivator, the innate drive to expand our comprehension of reality, including ourselves as part of humankind. We cannot simultaneously expand and contract our awareness. Consciously or unconsciously we choose - we expand, or we shut down. If we shut down, we acquiesce to accepting a small and impotent version of life. In choosing helplessness, we guarantee that we'll soon occupy the hell we've created for others. In dumbing ourselves down, in denying our responsibility we increase the depth and breadth of the destructive panorama. Paradoxically, we somehow manage to simultaneously accept and deny, our freakish commitment to self destruction on the personal and global stage. We become internal wells of denial, indignity and suffering. The internal toxicity expands within and around us. This testifies to the veracity of the timeless adage – As within, so without.
In our endeavor to “balance the universal books” we encounter overwhelming resistance. We must accept overwhelmingly uncomfortable self-examination . If we choose to dumb ourselves down, to entertain ourselves into oblivion, if we fail to confront it, the results will be almost unthinkable.
Yeah, it's right about now, that denial and distraction start sounding pretty good. We can just pretend we never think about these things, and neither does anyone else. We can just have a drink and some witty, distracting dialogue about the “important” stuff . Your place or mine? We can plop down in front of the electronic narcotic, share a soothing big plasma mind melt and have another drink. A good solid alcohol brain bath will help us pretend it isn't there. It'll go away all by itself. God Bless America., or God Help Us. We must find a way to correct the suffering and the grotesque, murderous inequity we've visited upon the rest of humanity. If we don't, rest assured that soon we'll hear our own collective, desperate, shrieking plea “God Forgive Us” emanating from beneath the crushed white hat of a shattered America, on a devastated planet.
The Tao Te Ching says:
A great nation is like a great man,
when he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
Every person, every nation, makes mistakes. Making amends can be a noble act, and is ultimately a necessary one. Noble, if no one is forcing us to do it. We choose to recognize our mistakes and correct them. Ultimately necessary, because the universe simply doesn't support imbalance for long. It just doesn't work that way. Making amends is a pro-active measure toward balancing our universal books before the universal IRS, with icy, non-negotiable indifference, does it for us. The magnitude of a mistake influences the difficulty of correcting it. We have some very difficult amends to make, and thus far, we're failing miserably. I intend to examine some of the reasons for that.
Born in the USA, post WWII , we perceived ourselves as the most righteous, most powerful, and most noble people on earth. We were the “Good Guys”, the “White Hats”. As we grew, we learned that our wealth, power and comfort was afforded us by imposing oppressive poverty, suffering, indignity and death upon billions of less fortunate people on every continent. We came to recognize that we weren't so very “White Hat” after all. For many of us, the need to make amends is a persistent, unavoidable awareness. Unfortunately, for internal and external reasons, making these amends seems virtually impossible.
One powerful obstacle is the inertia of our deeply internalized sense of entitlement. We may care about the oppressed billions, past and present, but to make any significant correction calls for sacrifice. It calls for broad, unconditional sharing of the wealth - genuine generosity. We're not much good at that. We're willing to care, we're willing to share, but generally, only if it doesn't disrupt our personal comfort groove. We instinctively resist any interference with the lifestyle we've come to believe we're entitled to. Making amends may impact our level of convenience and comfort. That concern alone justifies setting our responsibility on the back burner. With further consideration, we to turn the burner off.
Another potent and legitimate obstacle, is the ineffectiveness of charitable organizations. Charitable contributions are frequently mismanaged by the organizations who claim to serve the needy, but primarily serve their own boards, consultants and vendors. Additionally, contributions are frequently stolen by the leaders of the most desperately impoverished peoples. Adding salt to the wound, these are commonly leaders that our government have or do currently support. This knowledge dissuades us from contributing and further disables our efforts to terminate our complicity in the our governments intentional and systematic abuse of humanity.
And what of the needy and the suffering in our own neighborhoods, in our own country? We know that the poorest of our poor are better off than the poor of other nations. Additionally, we know that laboring within our economic system, binds us (through taxes and tacit acceptance)to actively and passively enabling the very system that's responsible for the wrongs against humanity at home and abroad, that we're attempting to remedy. We increase the number of poor - we prolong and exacerbate the harm. We're putting out fires with gasoline. So, in our genuine pursuit of making amends, that door too slams shut in our faces.
Understandably frustrated , with no apparent way to correct our wrongs, we can only deny or suppress the instinct to make things right. But, that pesky instinct doesn't go away. We live with it everyday. It manifests cyclically in small reminders followed by attempted repression of the feelings. We suffer from feelings of wrong doing and hypocrisy. We suffer from our apparent helplessness to correct it. As our options for redemption are systematically eliminated, guilt, shame, grief and anger grows within us. Unable to effectively withdraw from the creation of the suffering, we default to salving our spiritual distress in the best ways we know. Ironically, those “ways” reinforce the problem we feel helpless to address.
For example, we often dive headfirst into a distraction fueled, self service frenzy. We redouble our efforts to make and keep more money. We work desperately to attain and hold power, status, and righteousness. We deny the suffering we create. We simply stop paying attention. We rationalize our choices. With sufficient denial, we can temporarily mask the symptoms of gnawing guilt. But it tends to resurface. We treat the dis-ease we feel with distraction, denial and self-medication – all of which are self-punitive, self sabotaging and ultimately self-destructive. Sometimes we default to the perverse paradox of minimizing, dehumanizing and demonizing those we wish we could help, but can't. If we can deny their humanity, we can deny our obligation to help. We even deny something so obvious as our own deep, inner dis-ease. The problem with denial is that it doesn't work. Denial doesn't solve the problem. Denial doesn't make amends. It doesn't relieve our dis-ease.
Perhaps the most damaging long term effect is that for "denial as remedy" to be effective, we must dumb down. We must ratchet down our awareness of self and others, mute the voice within, blind ourselves, ignore our conscience. We must deny that we have the power to stand for what's right. We force ourselves into a state of helplessness. Effective denial requires that we become less conscious, less aware, less compassionate and less connected.
This leads to atrophy of the prime motivator, the innate drive to expand our comprehension of reality, including ourselves as part of humankind. We cannot simultaneously expand and contract our awareness. Consciously or unconsciously we choose - we expand, or we shut down. If we shut down, we acquiesce to accepting a small and impotent version of life. In choosing helplessness, we guarantee that we'll soon occupy the hell we've created for others. In dumbing ourselves down, in denying our responsibility we increase the depth and breadth of the destructive panorama. Paradoxically, we somehow manage to simultaneously accept and deny, our freakish commitment to self destruction on the personal and global stage. We become internal wells of denial, indignity and suffering. The internal toxicity expands within and around us. This testifies to the veracity of the timeless adage – As within, so without.
In our endeavor to “balance the universal books” we encounter overwhelming resistance. We must accept overwhelmingly uncomfortable self-examination . If we choose to dumb ourselves down, to entertain ourselves into oblivion, if we fail to confront it, the results will be almost unthinkable.
Yeah, it's right about now, that denial and distraction start sounding pretty good. We can just pretend we never think about these things, and neither does anyone else. We can just have a drink and some witty, distracting dialogue about the “important” stuff . Your place or mine? We can plop down in front of the electronic narcotic, share a soothing big plasma mind melt and have another drink. A good solid alcohol brain bath will help us pretend it isn't there. It'll go away all by itself. God Bless America., or God Help Us. We must find a way to correct the suffering and the grotesque, murderous inequity we've visited upon the rest of humanity. If we don't, rest assured that soon we'll hear our own collective, desperate, shrieking plea “God Forgive Us” emanating from beneath the crushed white hat of a shattered America, on a devastated planet.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Here It Comes Folks
The Chicago Model of Militarizing Schools
Monday 29 June 2009
by: Brian Roa, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
For the past four years, I have observed the military occupation of the high school where I teach science. Currently, Chicago's Senn High School houses Rickover Naval Academy (RNA). I use the term "occupation" because part of our building was taken away despite student, parent, teacher and community opposition to RNA's opening.
Senn students are made to feel like second-class citizens inside their own school, due to inequalities. The facilities and resources are better on the RNA side. RNA students are allowed to walk on the Senn side, while Senn students cannot walk on the RNA side. RNA "disenrolls" students and we accept those students who get kicked out if they live within our attendance boundaries. This practice is against Chicago policy, but goes unchecked. All of these things maintain a two-tiered system within the same school building.
This phenomenon is not restricted to Senn. Chicago has more military academies and more students in JROTC than any other city in the US. As the tentacles of school militarization reach beyond Chicago, the process used in this city seems to serve as a model of expansion. There was a Marine Academy planned for Georgia's Dekalb County, which includes 10 percent of Atlanta. Fortunately, due to protest, the school has been postponed until 2010. Despite it being postponed, it is still useful to analyze the rhetoric used to rationalize the Marine Academy. Many of the lies and excuses used to justify school militarization in Chicago and Georgia may well be used in other cities as militarism grows.
Not for Recruiting?
A favorite lie used to defend the expansion of military academies is that they are not used to recruit for the military.
"This is not a training ground to send kids into the military," Dekalb Schools' Superintendent Crawford Lewis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March. Those same words could have come straight from Col. Rick Mills, director of military academies and JROTC in Chicago, who explained away recruitment in a similar fashion.
"This is not a recruiting tool, but a way to help students succeed at whatever career they might choose," Mills told the Chicago Tribune.
Yet military academies receive money from the Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD would be derelict in its responsibilities were that money not spent as an investment in future soldiers. Accepting the claim that there is no recruiting in military academies makes about as much sense as allowing gangs to fund and operate within schools, on the assumption that they won't recruit on school grounds.
Moreover, since military academies are staffed with ex-service members (many don't even require valid teaching certificates), students are likely to receive career advice that favors a military path.
There are more blatant examples of recruiting at RNA. The cadets - the label applied to students at military academies - have taken a school-sponsored field trip to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Furthermore, last year the school hosted Adm. Michael Mullen, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen told the cadets that the Navy was a "great career choice." RNA has hosted ten admirals in their short four-year history.
In addition to these direct tactics, the academies use more insidious approaches. A military culture permeates these schools. Students dress in uniform, receive demerits, and are introduced to the military hierarchy and way of life. For example, I have witnessed students marching with fake rifles. This cultivation of a militarized mind is the best explanation for why 40 percent of all Naval Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program graduates wind up entering military service. This statistic is especially telling, considering that less than one percent of the population has served in the military at any given moment since 1975.
The Choice Argument
Military academies are promoted as an option within the public school system for parents. We heard it from Arne Duncan (ex-CEO of CPS and current secretary of education) and we hear it from Dale Davis, public information officer for the Dekalb County School System, who calls the military school "an addition" for parents to consider. Compare that with what Colonel Mills said in December 2007 in the Online News Hour: "The purpose of the military academy programs is to offer our cadets and parents an educational choice among many choices in Chicago Public Schools and to provide an educational experience that has a college prep curriculum, combined with a military curriculum."
We must dissect what kind of "choice" parents are given. If one's only choices are a school in desperate need of repair or a shiny new military academy, parents will often "choose" the "better" school.
The unbalanced funding presents an incredibly difficult decision for many parents, as Marivel Igartua, mother of a cadet inside the Naval Academy, told me. She didn't want to have to send her daughter to RNA, but she felt squeezed into the choice because her area school was in such bad shape. The unequal allocation of resources, which favors military academies, can serve as a form of economic coercion upon parents.
If public schools were given the resources they need to improve, then we could offer parents a more real choice.
Military pushers also argue that the academies are a popular option among parents. According to Mills, quoted in In These Times in 2005, "These kinds of programs would not be in schools if there weren't kids who wanted it, parents who supported it and administrators who facilitated it."
Arne Duncan claimed there were waiting lists filled with children hoping to attend a military academy. However, CPS has never released the so-called waiting lists, and concrete numbers tell a different story. RNA's goal for student enrollment for this year was 500-600 students. RNA finished the year with 376 students. Where's the demand?
Military Academies in the Context of Dismantling Public Education
Viewing militarization in the broader scope of "school improvement" can provide a helpful lens. In Chicago, military academies often represented one offshoot of a general plan to break down public education and replace it with charter schools and contract schools, siphoning public money to business people and "nonprofits." However, these "chosen" schools don't perform any better than public schools. A recent Chicago study compared ACT scores between charter schools and neighborhood schools, and no statistically significant difference was found. There was a difference in the number of English language learners and special-needs students accepted. Charters received fewer of both students. We see the same dichotomy with Senn and RNA.
What may be more problematic is that sometimes the charterization movement masks hidden agendas Sometimes the hidden agenda is union busting. Sometimes it's gentrification. Sometimes it is militarization. We have seen all of these hidden agendas in Chicago. We all agree that public schools are in desperate need of renovation and repair. But simply demonizing public schools as failing without giving them the resources to succeed - and replacing them with experimental schools - is unjust.
The push to destroy public schools and replace them with military academies and charter schools was further facilitated under the mayoral control of schools in Chicago. Mayoral control means that a city's once publicly elected school board is replaced by mayoral appointees partial to the agenda set forth by the mayor. In Chicago, it also meant replacing the school superintendent, who was legally mandated to have public education experience, with a CEO, who is only mandated by his scruples. Duncan served as the CEO for several years. He helped administer and finish off the largest militarization of a school system in the US, under the banner of "school improvement."
If we look at the history of Chicago's "school improvement" plan, we can see the hidden agenda pushed by the charter movement. According to Pauline Lipman, writing in Substance News in 2005, it is a plan whose blueprint was ripped from the Commercial Club of Chicago, a conglomerate of Fortune 500 companies in Chicago. Schools are closed and reopened while students are shuffled around to other schools, which are often performing worse than their original school. Little regard is paid to the education of the majority of students, almost all of them poor, black and Latino/a. Simply put, Chicago's plan is not a school improvement plan. It is the dismantling of a public good for the benefit of a chosen few. School militarization was accelerated as this plan was being implemented in Chicago.
The pushing of similar plans can be expected throughout the US now that Duncan is secretary of education. With the stimulus bill's $100 billion in emergency aid for public schools and colleges, Duncan is in an incredible position of power. He could use it to promote renovation and increase resources to existing public schools. Or he could spend it on costly privatization and militarization, squandering our tax money and endangering our children's futures.
--------
Brian Roa is a science teacher at Chicago's Senn High School and a member of CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators), a caucus in the CTU which works for equitable education for all students and against the charterization schemes in Chicago.
Monday 29 June 2009
by: Brian Roa, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
For the past four years, I have observed the military occupation of the high school where I teach science. Currently, Chicago's Senn High School houses Rickover Naval Academy (RNA). I use the term "occupation" because part of our building was taken away despite student, parent, teacher and community opposition to RNA's opening.
Senn students are made to feel like second-class citizens inside their own school, due to inequalities. The facilities and resources are better on the RNA side. RNA students are allowed to walk on the Senn side, while Senn students cannot walk on the RNA side. RNA "disenrolls" students and we accept those students who get kicked out if they live within our attendance boundaries. This practice is against Chicago policy, but goes unchecked. All of these things maintain a two-tiered system within the same school building.
This phenomenon is not restricted to Senn. Chicago has more military academies and more students in JROTC than any other city in the US. As the tentacles of school militarization reach beyond Chicago, the process used in this city seems to serve as a model of expansion. There was a Marine Academy planned for Georgia's Dekalb County, which includes 10 percent of Atlanta. Fortunately, due to protest, the school has been postponed until 2010. Despite it being postponed, it is still useful to analyze the rhetoric used to rationalize the Marine Academy. Many of the lies and excuses used to justify school militarization in Chicago and Georgia may well be used in other cities as militarism grows.
Not for Recruiting?
A favorite lie used to defend the expansion of military academies is that they are not used to recruit for the military.
"This is not a training ground to send kids into the military," Dekalb Schools' Superintendent Crawford Lewis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March. Those same words could have come straight from Col. Rick Mills, director of military academies and JROTC in Chicago, who explained away recruitment in a similar fashion.
"This is not a recruiting tool, but a way to help students succeed at whatever career they might choose," Mills told the Chicago Tribune.
Yet military academies receive money from the Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD would be derelict in its responsibilities were that money not spent as an investment in future soldiers. Accepting the claim that there is no recruiting in military academies makes about as much sense as allowing gangs to fund and operate within schools, on the assumption that they won't recruit on school grounds.
Moreover, since military academies are staffed with ex-service members (many don't even require valid teaching certificates), students are likely to receive career advice that favors a military path.
There are more blatant examples of recruiting at RNA. The cadets - the label applied to students at military academies - have taken a school-sponsored field trip to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Furthermore, last year the school hosted Adm. Michael Mullen, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen told the cadets that the Navy was a "great career choice." RNA has hosted ten admirals in their short four-year history.
In addition to these direct tactics, the academies use more insidious approaches. A military culture permeates these schools. Students dress in uniform, receive demerits, and are introduced to the military hierarchy and way of life. For example, I have witnessed students marching with fake rifles. This cultivation of a militarized mind is the best explanation for why 40 percent of all Naval Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program graduates wind up entering military service. This statistic is especially telling, considering that less than one percent of the population has served in the military at any given moment since 1975.
The Choice Argument
Military academies are promoted as an option within the public school system for parents. We heard it from Arne Duncan (ex-CEO of CPS and current secretary of education) and we hear it from Dale Davis, public information officer for the Dekalb County School System, who calls the military school "an addition" for parents to consider. Compare that with what Colonel Mills said in December 2007 in the Online News Hour: "The purpose of the military academy programs is to offer our cadets and parents an educational choice among many choices in Chicago Public Schools and to provide an educational experience that has a college prep curriculum, combined with a military curriculum."
We must dissect what kind of "choice" parents are given. If one's only choices are a school in desperate need of repair or a shiny new military academy, parents will often "choose" the "better" school.
The unbalanced funding presents an incredibly difficult decision for many parents, as Marivel Igartua, mother of a cadet inside the Naval Academy, told me. She didn't want to have to send her daughter to RNA, but she felt squeezed into the choice because her area school was in such bad shape. The unequal allocation of resources, which favors military academies, can serve as a form of economic coercion upon parents.
If public schools were given the resources they need to improve, then we could offer parents a more real choice.
Military pushers also argue that the academies are a popular option among parents. According to Mills, quoted in In These Times in 2005, "These kinds of programs would not be in schools if there weren't kids who wanted it, parents who supported it and administrators who facilitated it."
Arne Duncan claimed there were waiting lists filled with children hoping to attend a military academy. However, CPS has never released the so-called waiting lists, and concrete numbers tell a different story. RNA's goal for student enrollment for this year was 500-600 students. RNA finished the year with 376 students. Where's the demand?
Military Academies in the Context of Dismantling Public Education
Viewing militarization in the broader scope of "school improvement" can provide a helpful lens. In Chicago, military academies often represented one offshoot of a general plan to break down public education and replace it with charter schools and contract schools, siphoning public money to business people and "nonprofits." However, these "chosen" schools don't perform any better than public schools. A recent Chicago study compared ACT scores between charter schools and neighborhood schools, and no statistically significant difference was found. There was a difference in the number of English language learners and special-needs students accepted. Charters received fewer of both students. We see the same dichotomy with Senn and RNA.
What may be more problematic is that sometimes the charterization movement masks hidden agendas Sometimes the hidden agenda is union busting. Sometimes it's gentrification. Sometimes it is militarization. We have seen all of these hidden agendas in Chicago. We all agree that public schools are in desperate need of renovation and repair. But simply demonizing public schools as failing without giving them the resources to succeed - and replacing them with experimental schools - is unjust.
The push to destroy public schools and replace them with military academies and charter schools was further facilitated under the mayoral control of schools in Chicago. Mayoral control means that a city's once publicly elected school board is replaced by mayoral appointees partial to the agenda set forth by the mayor. In Chicago, it also meant replacing the school superintendent, who was legally mandated to have public education experience, with a CEO, who is only mandated by his scruples. Duncan served as the CEO for several years. He helped administer and finish off the largest militarization of a school system in the US, under the banner of "school improvement."
If we look at the history of Chicago's "school improvement" plan, we can see the hidden agenda pushed by the charter movement. According to Pauline Lipman, writing in Substance News in 2005, it is a plan whose blueprint was ripped from the Commercial Club of Chicago, a conglomerate of Fortune 500 companies in Chicago. Schools are closed and reopened while students are shuffled around to other schools, which are often performing worse than their original school. Little regard is paid to the education of the majority of students, almost all of them poor, black and Latino/a. Simply put, Chicago's plan is not a school improvement plan. It is the dismantling of a public good for the benefit of a chosen few. School militarization was accelerated as this plan was being implemented in Chicago.
The pushing of similar plans can be expected throughout the US now that Duncan is secretary of education. With the stimulus bill's $100 billion in emergency aid for public schools and colleges, Duncan is in an incredible position of power. He could use it to promote renovation and increase resources to existing public schools. Or he could spend it on costly privatization and militarization, squandering our tax money and endangering our children's futures.
--------
Brian Roa is a science teacher at Chicago's Senn High School and a member of CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators), a caucus in the CTU which works for equitable education for all students and against the charterization schemes in Chicago.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
National Service
This is the one to watch for folks...
As unemployment figures skyrocket in the coming months, watch for the development of "National Service" programs...
During the "Great Depression" FDR created "works projects" to employ millions of Americans.
These projects:
The Civilian Conservation Corps - CCC
The Works Project Administration - WPA
The Tennessee Valley Authority - TVA
These government sponsored programs enabled millions to escape the devastating unemployment and poverty of the times and accomplished great infrastructure development in our country. These "camps" were largely commanded by ex-military officers and structured and operated by military standards and procedures.
While these programs succeeded in employing so many and accomplishing so much, their accomplishments were achieved at the expense of deepening the deficit. The American economy only truly recovered from it's deficit and vast unemployment when the nation geared up it's manufacturing and recruiting for the military and engaged fully in World War II. The stock market that crashed in 1929 (for the same reasons it's crashing now) only returned to it's highs of the 1920's after the war.
While campaigning for the office, our now "President" Obama made on several occasions, references to "National Service".
It may seem an odd coincidence. The government's "non-response" to the housing crisis, and completely mis-directed bailout policies for banks and other financial institutions, have not eased the stress on our economy nor the accelerating free-fall in job losses.
Could it be that the intent of our benevolent corprastocracy is to allow/generate enough hardship, fear and despair that Americans will "volunteer" by the millions for the as yet undefined "National Service"? If creating such a dynamic is not our corporate driven government's intent, then at best, they're failing magnificently at their purported commitment to righting the economy and saving/creating millions of jobs.
In a world where those who control the levers of power, create what serves them best, my argument is that we're being led toward a National Service Program.
In some civilized countries, "National Service" is a requirement that's generally positive and accepted. Unfortunately, it was also utilized as a primary recruiting tool for organizations like the Nazi Party during the depression that followed WW I.
Will it be a volunteer program? Will it be the form of "unavoidable volunteerism" spawned by the choice between eating and starving - between being homeless and having a cot in a barracks? Or will it become a mandatory obligation that all of us will, by law, be required to fulfill? Will this form of "National Service" create a standing (or kneeling) labor reserve for direct and indirect support of the US military?
During the Great Depression, tens of thousands of those employed in the military style New Deal Works Projects Camps, segued directly from the camps into the military.
Does this sort of malevolent manipulation seem unlikely? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
So, National Service? Watch the trends and directions that government policies encourage. I urge you, for your sake, and the sake of your children and grandchildren, to remember your history - connect the dots - keep your eye on this one.
As unemployment figures skyrocket in the coming months, watch for the development of "National Service" programs...
During the "Great Depression" FDR created "works projects" to employ millions of Americans.
These projects:
The Civilian Conservation Corps - CCC
The Works Project Administration - WPA
The Tennessee Valley Authority - TVA
These government sponsored programs enabled millions to escape the devastating unemployment and poverty of the times and accomplished great infrastructure development in our country. These "camps" were largely commanded by ex-military officers and structured and operated by military standards and procedures.
While these programs succeeded in employing so many and accomplishing so much, their accomplishments were achieved at the expense of deepening the deficit. The American economy only truly recovered from it's deficit and vast unemployment when the nation geared up it's manufacturing and recruiting for the military and engaged fully in World War II. The stock market that crashed in 1929 (for the same reasons it's crashing now) only returned to it's highs of the 1920's after the war.
While campaigning for the office, our now "President" Obama made on several occasions, references to "National Service".
It may seem an odd coincidence. The government's "non-response" to the housing crisis, and completely mis-directed bailout policies for banks and other financial institutions, have not eased the stress on our economy nor the accelerating free-fall in job losses.
Could it be that the intent of our benevolent corprastocracy is to allow/generate enough hardship, fear and despair that Americans will "volunteer" by the millions for the as yet undefined "National Service"? If creating such a dynamic is not our corporate driven government's intent, then at best, they're failing magnificently at their purported commitment to righting the economy and saving/creating millions of jobs.
In a world where those who control the levers of power, create what serves them best, my argument is that we're being led toward a National Service Program.
In some civilized countries, "National Service" is a requirement that's generally positive and accepted. Unfortunately, it was also utilized as a primary recruiting tool for organizations like the Nazi Party during the depression that followed WW I.
Will it be a volunteer program? Will it be the form of "unavoidable volunteerism" spawned by the choice between eating and starving - between being homeless and having a cot in a barracks? Or will it become a mandatory obligation that all of us will, by law, be required to fulfill? Will this form of "National Service" create a standing (or kneeling) labor reserve for direct and indirect support of the US military?
During the Great Depression, tens of thousands of those employed in the military style New Deal Works Projects Camps, segued directly from the camps into the military.
Does this sort of malevolent manipulation seem unlikely? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
So, National Service? Watch the trends and directions that government policies encourage. I urge you, for your sake, and the sake of your children and grandchildren, to remember your history - connect the dots - keep your eye on this one.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Humility
How elusive is humility?
One thing I have learned in a long life, that all our science,
measured against reality, is primitive and childlike.
- Albert Einstein
One thing I have learned in a long life, that all our science,
measured against reality, is primitive and childlike.
- Albert Einstein
Saturday, January 31, 2009
A Voice in the Wilderness
I don't have much to say that means very much.
Here's a recent blog post by a guy who does.
James Howard Kunstler:
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/
State of Cringe
January 26, 2009
Just as Mr. Obama has danced into the oval office, we've arrived at a moment when a lot of people have a hard time imagining the future. This includes especially the mainstream media, which has reached a state of zombification parallel to that of the banks. But even in the mighty blogosphere, with its thousands of voices unconstrained by craven advertisers or pandering managing editors, the view forward dims as a dark and ominous fog rolls over the landscape of possibilities.
For at least a year several story-lines have been slugging it out inconclusively for supremacy of the Web-waves. The main event has been the Deflationists versus the Inflationists. The first group basically says that so much "money" is being welshed out of existence that it dwarfs the new "money" being shoveled into existence in the form of bail-outs, tarps, and office re-decoration stipends. The Deflationists see the tattered remnants of the consumer credit economy auguring ever deeper into a hole until it is buried so far down that all the back-hoes ever sold will not be able to dig it out. The competing Inflationists say that the massive truckloads of shoveled-in "money" will soon overtake vanishing "wealth" and, in the process, make the US dollar worthless.
Some of us see both outcomes in sequence: the deflationary "work out" of bad debt currently underway -- of loans that will will never be paid back, of acronymic paper securities revealed as frauds, of "non-performing" contracts entering the swamps of foreclosure, of banks pretending to still exist, of hallucinated "wealth" rushing into the cosmic worm-hole of oblivion -- can only go for so long before everyone who can go broke will go broke. Then, just as we find ourselves a nation of empty pockets, the tsunami of shoveled-in "money" designed to "reboot the consumer" (created not from productive activity but just printed recklessly), will start churning through the "economy," chasing products and commodities that became scarce during the deflationary phase -- and the result is hyper-inflation, the eraser of debt, destroyer of fortunes, and suicide pill of feckless governments.
I guess the basic difference is that the hardcore Deflationists seem to think that their process can go on forever. The society just gets poorer and poorer until we're back at something like a scene out of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Inflationists see a fork in the road leading to more overt destruction, especially political turmoil as a lot of negative emotion joins the work-out orgy and overwhelms government.
But in this moment, the week after a new president's inauguration, the deadly fog has rolled in and absolutely everyone dreads what lurks on the other side of it, without being able to discern the path through it. For example, the "bail-out fatigue" being reported suggests that congress may just call a halt to money-shoveling. Where would that leave Mr. Obama's urgent call for "stimulus?" Not to mention further TARP injections for redecorating bank offices.
I've been skeptical of the "stimulus" as sketched out so far, aimed at refurbishing the infrastructure of Happy Motoring. To me, this is the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable -- since car-dependency is absolutely the last thing we need to shore up and promote. I haven't heard any talk so far about promoting walkable communities, or any meaningful plan to get serious about fixing passenger rail and integral public transit. Has Mr. Obama's circle lost sight of the fact that we import more than two-thirds of the oil we use, even during the current price hiatus? Or have they forgotten how vulnerable this leaves us to the slightest geopolitical spasm in such stable oil-exporting nations as Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, Libya, Algeria, Columbia, Iran, and the Middle East states? And we're going to rescue ourselves by driving cars?
I know it is difficult for Americans at every level to imagine a different way-of-life, but we'd better start tuning up our imaginations, because endless motoring is not our destiny anymore. The message has not moved from the grassroots up, and so at this perilous stage the message had better come from the top down. Mr. Obama needs to go on TV and tell the American public that were done cruisin' for burgers. He could do that by drastically reviving his stimulus proposal as it currently stands.
Putting aside whether this "stimulus" represents reckless money-printing in an insolvent society, let's just take it at face-value and ask where the "money" might be better directed:
-- We have to rehabilitate thousands of downtowns all over the nation to accommodate the new re-scaled edition of local and regional trade that will follow the death of national chain-store retail of the WalMart ilk. Reactivated town centers and Main Streets are indispensable features of walkable communities. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU.org) ought to be consulted on the procedures for accomplishing this and for rehabilitating the traditional neighborhoods connected to our Main Streets.
-- We have to reform food production (a.k.a. "farming"). Petro-dependent agri-biz will go the same way as the chain stores. Its equations will fail, especially in a credit-strapped society. That piece of the picture is so dire right now, as we prepare for the planting season, that many crops may not be put in for lack of front-money. This portends, at least, much higher food prices at the end of the year, if not outright scarcities and shortages. And the new government wants to gold-plate highway off-ramps instead? Earth to Rahm Emanuel: screw your head back on.
-- As mentioned above, we have to get passenger rail going again because the airlines are going to die the next time there is an uptick in oil prices, or a spot shortage of oil. Let's not be too grandiose and attempt to build expensive high-speed or mag-lev networks -- certainly not right now -- because they require entirely new track systems. Let's fix those regular tracks already out there, rusting in the rain, or temporarily replaced by bike trails.
Those are three biggies for moment and enough to keep this society busy for a couple of years. But more to the point of this blog, observers of all stripes are having trouble imagining any way out of our multiple predicaments. All the possible actions tried so far have have seemed absurd. Why even try to prop up inflated house values when the single most crucial need in this sector is for house prices to return to parity with incomes so the shrinking pool of ordinary people still employed can begin to think about buying one? Well, the obvious explanation is that politicians can't bear the pain of watching mass foreclosures and the ruination of families. This is pretty understandable, and it is tragic indeed. Frankly, I don't know of any political narcotic that can mitigate the pain that results from having made poor choices in life -- even if those choices were promoted and reinforced by the mighty ideology of "American Dreaming." Anyway, the foreclosures are well underway now, and perhaps the salient question is how long will the public's fury remain constrained while they hear about Wall Street executives buying $80,000 area rugs? Surely there is a tipping point of collective distress that is not too far from where we're at now.
In the realm of TARPS and other continued bail-outs aimed at the banks, the car-makers, and a host of other corporate special pleaders, I wonder if we have already reached the saturation point. But opinion on the Web is starkly divided and a prime manifestation is the debate over whether it was a terrible blunder or the right thing to let Lehman Brothers sink into bankruptcy. Both sides make valid arguments, but virtually all the other super-banks right now have lurched to death's door and we have no clear guidance on what we should do about them. Each one is touted as "too big to fail," as well as being interlocked with the others on credit default swaps that would bring them all crashing down if one counter party truly failed. It seems to me that this is what lies at the heart of the present situation. Nobody I've encountered in the sphere of opinion-and-comment thinks that these banks will survive, and this outcome beats a short path to the conclusion that the entire banking system is fatally ill -- leading directly to a super-major crisis of political economy in which the whole reeking, leaking system just crashes. I think this is what lies behind Mr. Obama's appeals for very urgent action.
But then we're back to square one: nobody, including Mr. O himself, has really proposed a set of actions that have not already been tried in the way of money-shoveling. So this will be a week in which, perhaps, some wise and intrepid figures -- perhaps even the president -- will articulate something we haven't heard before, perhaps even something like bearing our hardships bravely. It'll be a very interesting week, I'm sure.
Here's a recent blog post by a guy who does.
James Howard Kunstler:
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/
State of Cringe
January 26, 2009
Just as Mr. Obama has danced into the oval office, we've arrived at a moment when a lot of people have a hard time imagining the future. This includes especially the mainstream media, which has reached a state of zombification parallel to that of the banks. But even in the mighty blogosphere, with its thousands of voices unconstrained by craven advertisers or pandering managing editors, the view forward dims as a dark and ominous fog rolls over the landscape of possibilities.
For at least a year several story-lines have been slugging it out inconclusively for supremacy of the Web-waves. The main event has been the Deflationists versus the Inflationists. The first group basically says that so much "money" is being welshed out of existence that it dwarfs the new "money" being shoveled into existence in the form of bail-outs, tarps, and office re-decoration stipends. The Deflationists see the tattered remnants of the consumer credit economy auguring ever deeper into a hole until it is buried so far down that all the back-hoes ever sold will not be able to dig it out. The competing Inflationists say that the massive truckloads of shoveled-in "money" will soon overtake vanishing "wealth" and, in the process, make the US dollar worthless.
Some of us see both outcomes in sequence: the deflationary "work out" of bad debt currently underway -- of loans that will will never be paid back, of acronymic paper securities revealed as frauds, of "non-performing" contracts entering the swamps of foreclosure, of banks pretending to still exist, of hallucinated "wealth" rushing into the cosmic worm-hole of oblivion -- can only go for so long before everyone who can go broke will go broke. Then, just as we find ourselves a nation of empty pockets, the tsunami of shoveled-in "money" designed to "reboot the consumer" (created not from productive activity but just printed recklessly), will start churning through the "economy," chasing products and commodities that became scarce during the deflationary phase -- and the result is hyper-inflation, the eraser of debt, destroyer of fortunes, and suicide pill of feckless governments.
I guess the basic difference is that the hardcore Deflationists seem to think that their process can go on forever. The society just gets poorer and poorer until we're back at something like a scene out of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Inflationists see a fork in the road leading to more overt destruction, especially political turmoil as a lot of negative emotion joins the work-out orgy and overwhelms government.
But in this moment, the week after a new president's inauguration, the deadly fog has rolled in and absolutely everyone dreads what lurks on the other side of it, without being able to discern the path through it. For example, the "bail-out fatigue" being reported suggests that congress may just call a halt to money-shoveling. Where would that leave Mr. Obama's urgent call for "stimulus?" Not to mention further TARP injections for redecorating bank offices.
I've been skeptical of the "stimulus" as sketched out so far, aimed at refurbishing the infrastructure of Happy Motoring. To me, this is the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable -- since car-dependency is absolutely the last thing we need to shore up and promote. I haven't heard any talk so far about promoting walkable communities, or any meaningful plan to get serious about fixing passenger rail and integral public transit. Has Mr. Obama's circle lost sight of the fact that we import more than two-thirds of the oil we use, even during the current price hiatus? Or have they forgotten how vulnerable this leaves us to the slightest geopolitical spasm in such stable oil-exporting nations as Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, Libya, Algeria, Columbia, Iran, and the Middle East states? And we're going to rescue ourselves by driving cars?
I know it is difficult for Americans at every level to imagine a different way-of-life, but we'd better start tuning up our imaginations, because endless motoring is not our destiny anymore. The message has not moved from the grassroots up, and so at this perilous stage the message had better come from the top down. Mr. Obama needs to go on TV and tell the American public that were done cruisin' for burgers. He could do that by drastically reviving his stimulus proposal as it currently stands.
Putting aside whether this "stimulus" represents reckless money-printing in an insolvent society, let's just take it at face-value and ask where the "money" might be better directed:
-- We have to rehabilitate thousands of downtowns all over the nation to accommodate the new re-scaled edition of local and regional trade that will follow the death of national chain-store retail of the WalMart ilk. Reactivated town centers and Main Streets are indispensable features of walkable communities. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU.org) ought to be consulted on the procedures for accomplishing this and for rehabilitating the traditional neighborhoods connected to our Main Streets.
-- We have to reform food production (a.k.a. "farming"). Petro-dependent agri-biz will go the same way as the chain stores. Its equations will fail, especially in a credit-strapped society. That piece of the picture is so dire right now, as we prepare for the planting season, that many crops may not be put in for lack of front-money. This portends, at least, much higher food prices at the end of the year, if not outright scarcities and shortages. And the new government wants to gold-plate highway off-ramps instead? Earth to Rahm Emanuel: screw your head back on.
-- As mentioned above, we have to get passenger rail going again because the airlines are going to die the next time there is an uptick in oil prices, or a spot shortage of oil. Let's not be too grandiose and attempt to build expensive high-speed or mag-lev networks -- certainly not right now -- because they require entirely new track systems. Let's fix those regular tracks already out there, rusting in the rain, or temporarily replaced by bike trails.
Those are three biggies for moment and enough to keep this society busy for a couple of years. But more to the point of this blog, observers of all stripes are having trouble imagining any way out of our multiple predicaments. All the possible actions tried so far have have seemed absurd. Why even try to prop up inflated house values when the single most crucial need in this sector is for house prices to return to parity with incomes so the shrinking pool of ordinary people still employed can begin to think about buying one? Well, the obvious explanation is that politicians can't bear the pain of watching mass foreclosures and the ruination of families. This is pretty understandable, and it is tragic indeed. Frankly, I don't know of any political narcotic that can mitigate the pain that results from having made poor choices in life -- even if those choices were promoted and reinforced by the mighty ideology of "American Dreaming." Anyway, the foreclosures are well underway now, and perhaps the salient question is how long will the public's fury remain constrained while they hear about Wall Street executives buying $80,000 area rugs? Surely there is a tipping point of collective distress that is not too far from where we're at now.
In the realm of TARPS and other continued bail-outs aimed at the banks, the car-makers, and a host of other corporate special pleaders, I wonder if we have already reached the saturation point. But opinion on the Web is starkly divided and a prime manifestation is the debate over whether it was a terrible blunder or the right thing to let Lehman Brothers sink into bankruptcy. Both sides make valid arguments, but virtually all the other super-banks right now have lurched to death's door and we have no clear guidance on what we should do about them. Each one is touted as "too big to fail," as well as being interlocked with the others on credit default swaps that would bring them all crashing down if one counter party truly failed. It seems to me that this is what lies at the heart of the present situation. Nobody I've encountered in the sphere of opinion-and-comment thinks that these banks will survive, and this outcome beats a short path to the conclusion that the entire banking system is fatally ill -- leading directly to a super-major crisis of political economy in which the whole reeking, leaking system just crashes. I think this is what lies behind Mr. Obama's appeals for very urgent action.
But then we're back to square one: nobody, including Mr. O himself, has really proposed a set of actions that have not already been tried in the way of money-shoveling. So this will be a week in which, perhaps, some wise and intrepid figures -- perhaps even the president -- will articulate something we haven't heard before, perhaps even something like bearing our hardships bravely. It'll be a very interesting week, I'm sure.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Today, I Just Broke Down
Sometimes it just happens...
Monday, January 19, 2009
Today, I just broke down.
I listened to Amy Goodman's show "Democracy Now". She simply showed video and pictures and played excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr. speeches. I was so impressed that I e-mailed all my friends advising them to share in the joy.
I listened to the speeches again. I've always been inspired by his articulate clarity and courage. He was a master at calling it the way it is - kind, compassionate, uncompromising and pinpoint accurate - in the classic rhythm and the roll and thunder of a Southern Baptist preacher.
I was reminded of Bob Dylan's "They Killed Him" - remembering Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus. I listened to that beautiful song a couple of times.
Then without warning, I just split open - started bawling, sobbing, trembling, crying out.
I'm usually pretty good at keeping it in. Sometimes when I'm alone, it just breaks through. A terrible sadness, greater than I knew, breached the levee of my self-control and flooded across the plain of my being - rolling over me, blinding me with emotional pain, paralyzing me, tumbling me, knocking me off my feet and submerging me beneath the boiling flood waters of grief unleashed.
Then my son walked into the house. There was no hiding it. His father was breaking. I apologized, I wiped my face, I took a deep breath, I tried to pull it together, but I just kept crying. I couldn't hold it back. I apologized, took another deep breath - Then I kept crying - and then I cried some more.
Bitter words erupted from me, again and again:
We kill them - What's WRONG with us? - WE KILL THEM! - WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?
I cried and sobbed and the pain in me growled and moaned up and out of my animal guts, up and out burning through my raw throat and snotty running nose... Raw, searing grief... the smell and taste of tears and grief... and it just went on and on... until it stopped.
Even now, 12 hours later, I'm still reconstructing a fragile, vulnerable self-composure. I'm functional but intermittently the tears start to come. I'm able to hold them back now. But I'm altered - shocked by the revelation of sadness so profound, churning just beneath my surface.
It was a release. I do feel lighter. At least now I'm conscious that it's there and conscious of how deeply it's been soaking into my soul.
I don't know the remedy for such a grief. Considering the source, there may no remedy. I don't know.
Today, I just broke down.
Grief volcano blew
red hot sadness poured its flow
now it sleeps again.
I'm usually pretty good at holding it back.
But sometimes when I'm alone.........
Monday, January 19, 2009
Today, I just broke down.
I listened to Amy Goodman's show "Democracy Now". She simply showed video and pictures and played excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr. speeches. I was so impressed that I e-mailed all my friends advising them to share in the joy.
I listened to the speeches again. I've always been inspired by his articulate clarity and courage. He was a master at calling it the way it is - kind, compassionate, uncompromising and pinpoint accurate - in the classic rhythm and the roll and thunder of a Southern Baptist preacher.
I was reminded of Bob Dylan's "They Killed Him" - remembering Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus. I listened to that beautiful song a couple of times.
Then without warning, I just split open - started bawling, sobbing, trembling, crying out.
I'm usually pretty good at keeping it in. Sometimes when I'm alone, it just breaks through. A terrible sadness, greater than I knew, breached the levee of my self-control and flooded across the plain of my being - rolling over me, blinding me with emotional pain, paralyzing me, tumbling me, knocking me off my feet and submerging me beneath the boiling flood waters of grief unleashed.
Then my son walked into the house. There was no hiding it. His father was breaking. I apologized, I wiped my face, I took a deep breath, I tried to pull it together, but I just kept crying. I couldn't hold it back. I apologized, took another deep breath - Then I kept crying - and then I cried some more.
Bitter words erupted from me, again and again:
We kill them - What's WRONG with us? - WE KILL THEM! - WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?
I cried and sobbed and the pain in me growled and moaned up and out of my animal guts, up and out burning through my raw throat and snotty running nose... Raw, searing grief... the smell and taste of tears and grief... and it just went on and on... until it stopped.
Even now, 12 hours later, I'm still reconstructing a fragile, vulnerable self-composure. I'm functional but intermittently the tears start to come. I'm able to hold them back now. But I'm altered - shocked by the revelation of sadness so profound, churning just beneath my surface.
It was a release. I do feel lighter. At least now I'm conscious that it's there and conscious of how deeply it's been soaking into my soul.
I don't know the remedy for such a grief. Considering the source, there may no remedy. I don't know.
Today, I just broke down.
Grief volcano blew
red hot sadness poured its flow
now it sleeps again.
I'm usually pretty good at holding it back.
But sometimes when I'm alone.........
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
A Sandpiper For You...
Everyone may have read this already, but just in case...
by Robert Peterson
She was six years old when I first met her on the beach near where I live.
I drive to this beach, a distance of three or four miles, whenever the world
begins to close in on me. She was building a sand castle or something
and looked up, her eyes as blue as the sea.
'Hello,' she said.
I answered with a nod, not really in the mood to bother with a small child.
'I'm building,' she said.
'I see that. What is it?' I asked, not really caring.
'Oh, I don't know, I just like the feel of sand.'
That sounds good, I thought, and slipped off my shoes.
A sandpiper glided by.
'That's a joy,' the child said.
'It's a what?'
'It's a joy. My mama says sandpipers come to bring us joy.'
The bird went gliding down the beach. Good-bye joy, I muttered to myself,
hello pain, and turned to walk on. I was depressed, my life seemed
completely out of balance.
'What's your name?' She wouldn't give up.
'Robert,' I answered. 'I'm Robert Peterson.'
'Mine's Wendy... I'm six.'
'Hi, Wendy.'
She giggled. 'You're funny,' she said.
In spite of my gloom, I laughed too and walked on.
Her musical giggle followed me.
'Come again, Mr. P,' she called. 'We'll have another happy day.'
The next few days consisted of a group of unruly Boy Scouts, PTA meetings,
and an ailing mother. The sun was shining one morning as I took my hands out
of the dishwater. I need a sandpiper, I said to myself, gathering up my coat.
The ever-changing balm of the seashore awaited me. The breeze was
chilly but I strode along, trying to recapture the serenity I needed.
'Hello, Mr. P,' she said. 'Do you want to play?'
'What did you have in mind?' I asked, with a twinge of annoyance.
'I don't know. You say.'
'How about charades?' I asked sarcastically.
The tinkling laughter burst forth again. 'I don't know what that is.'
'Then let's just walk.'
Looking at her, I noticed the delicate fairness of her face.
'Where do you live?' I asked.
'Over there.' She pointed toward a row of summer cottages.
Strange, I thought, in winter.
'Where do you go to school?'
'I don't go to school. Mommy says we're on vacation.'
She chattered little girl talk as we strolled up the beach, but my mind was
on other things. When I left for home, Wendy said it had been a happy day.
Feeling surprisingly better, I smiled at her and agreed.
Three weeks later, I rushed to my beach in a state of near panic. I was in no
mood to even greet Wendy. I thought I saw her mother on the porch and felt
like demanding she keep her child at home.
'Look, if you don't mind,' I said crossly when Wendy caught up with me, 'I'd
rather be alone today.' She seemed unusually pale and out of breath.
'Why?' she asked.
I turned to her and shouted, 'Because my mother died!' and thought,
My God, why was I saying this to a little child?
'Oh,' she said quietly, 'then this is a bad day.'
'Yes,' I said, 'and yesterday and the day before and -- oh, go away!'
'Did it hurt?' she inquired.
'Did what hurt?' I was exasperated with her, with myself.
'When she died?'
'Of course it hurt!' I snapped, misunderstanding,
wrapped up in myself. I strode off.
A month or so after that, when I next went to the beach, she wasn't there.
Feeling guilty, ashamed, and admitting to myself I missed her, I went up
to the cottage after my walk and knocked at the door. A drawn looking
young woman with honey-colored hair opened the door
'Hello,' I said, 'I'm Robert Peterson. I missed your little girl today
and wondered where she was.'
'Oh yes, Mr. Peterson, please come in. Wendy spoke of you so much.
I'm afraid I allowed her to bother you. If she was a nuisance,
please, accept my apologies.'
'Not at all -- she's a delightful child.' I said, suddenly realizing
that I meant what I had just said.
'Wendy died last week, Mr. Peterson. She had leukemia.
Maybe she didn't tell you.'
Struck dumb, I groped for a chair. I had to catch my breath.
'She loved this beach, so when she asked to come, we couldn't say no.
She seemed so much better here and had a lot of what she called happy days.
But the last few weeks, she declined rapidly...' Her voice faltered, 'She left
something for you, if only I can find it. Could you wait a moment while I look?'
I nodded stupidly, my mind racing for something to say to this lovely young
woman. She handed me a smeared envelope with 'MR. P' printed in bold
childish letters. Inside was a drawing in bright crayon hues -- a yellow beach,
a blue sea, and a brown bird. Underneath was carefully printed:
A SANDPIPER TO BRING YOU JOY.
Tears welled up in my eyes, and a heart that had almost forgotten to love
opened wide. I took Wendy's mother in my arms. 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,
I'm so sorry,' I uttered over and over, and we wept together. The precious little
picture is framed now and hangs in my study. Six words -- one for each year
of her life -- that speak to me of harmony, courage, and undemanding love.
A gift from a child with sea blue eyes and hair the color of sand
-- who taught me the gift of love.
by Robert Peterson
She was six years old when I first met her on the beach near where I live.
I drive to this beach, a distance of three or four miles, whenever the world
begins to close in on me. She was building a sand castle or something
and looked up, her eyes as blue as the sea.
'Hello,' she said.
I answered with a nod, not really in the mood to bother with a small child.
'I'm building,' she said.
'I see that. What is it?' I asked, not really caring.
'Oh, I don't know, I just like the feel of sand.'
That sounds good, I thought, and slipped off my shoes.
A sandpiper glided by.
'That's a joy,' the child said.
'It's a what?'
'It's a joy. My mama says sandpipers come to bring us joy.'
The bird went gliding down the beach. Good-bye joy, I muttered to myself,
hello pain, and turned to walk on. I was depressed, my life seemed
completely out of balance.
'What's your name?' She wouldn't give up.
'Robert,' I answered. 'I'm Robert Peterson.'
'Mine's Wendy... I'm six.'
'Hi, Wendy.'
She giggled. 'You're funny,' she said.
In spite of my gloom, I laughed too and walked on.
Her musical giggle followed me.
'Come again, Mr. P,' she called. 'We'll have another happy day.'
The next few days consisted of a group of unruly Boy Scouts, PTA meetings,
and an ailing mother. The sun was shining one morning as I took my hands out
of the dishwater. I need a sandpiper, I said to myself, gathering up my coat.
The ever-changing balm of the seashore awaited me. The breeze was
chilly but I strode along, trying to recapture the serenity I needed.
'Hello, Mr. P,' she said. 'Do you want to play?'
'What did you have in mind?' I asked, with a twinge of annoyance.
'I don't know. You say.'
'How about charades?' I asked sarcastically.
The tinkling laughter burst forth again. 'I don't know what that is.'
'Then let's just walk.'
Looking at her, I noticed the delicate fairness of her face.
'Where do you live?' I asked.
'Over there.' She pointed toward a row of summer cottages.
Strange, I thought, in winter.
'Where do you go to school?'
'I don't go to school. Mommy says we're on vacation.'
She chattered little girl talk as we strolled up the beach, but my mind was
on other things. When I left for home, Wendy said it had been a happy day.
Feeling surprisingly better, I smiled at her and agreed.
Three weeks later, I rushed to my beach in a state of near panic. I was in no
mood to even greet Wendy. I thought I saw her mother on the porch and felt
like demanding she keep her child at home.
'Look, if you don't mind,' I said crossly when Wendy caught up with me, 'I'd
rather be alone today.' She seemed unusually pale and out of breath.
'Why?' she asked.
I turned to her and shouted, 'Because my mother died!' and thought,
My God, why was I saying this to a little child?
'Oh,' she said quietly, 'then this is a bad day.'
'Yes,' I said, 'and yesterday and the day before and -- oh, go away!'
'Did it hurt?' she inquired.
'Did what hurt?' I was exasperated with her, with myself.
'When she died?'
'Of course it hurt!' I snapped, misunderstanding,
wrapped up in myself. I strode off.
A month or so after that, when I next went to the beach, she wasn't there.
Feeling guilty, ashamed, and admitting to myself I missed her, I went up
to the cottage after my walk and knocked at the door. A drawn looking
young woman with honey-colored hair opened the door
'Hello,' I said, 'I'm Robert Peterson. I missed your little girl today
and wondered where she was.'
'Oh yes, Mr. Peterson, please come in. Wendy spoke of you so much.
I'm afraid I allowed her to bother you. If she was a nuisance,
please, accept my apologies.'
'Not at all -- she's a delightful child.' I said, suddenly realizing
that I meant what I had just said.
'Wendy died last week, Mr. Peterson. She had leukemia.
Maybe she didn't tell you.'
Struck dumb, I groped for a chair. I had to catch my breath.
'She loved this beach, so when she asked to come, we couldn't say no.
She seemed so much better here and had a lot of what she called happy days.
But the last few weeks, she declined rapidly...' Her voice faltered, 'She left
something for you, if only I can find it. Could you wait a moment while I look?'
I nodded stupidly, my mind racing for something to say to this lovely young
woman. She handed me a smeared envelope with 'MR. P' printed in bold
childish letters. Inside was a drawing in bright crayon hues -- a yellow beach,
a blue sea, and a brown bird. Underneath was carefully printed:
A SANDPIPER TO BRING YOU JOY.
Tears welled up in my eyes, and a heart that had almost forgotten to love
opened wide. I took Wendy's mother in my arms. 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,
I'm so sorry,' I uttered over and over, and we wept together. The precious little
picture is framed now and hangs in my study. Six words -- one for each year
of her life -- that speak to me of harmony, courage, and undemanding love.
A gift from a child with sea blue eyes and hair the color of sand
-- who taught me the gift of love.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Jackson Browne - Gotta love him - He never gives up
Yeah... He's still saying it - in his own great way.
Great, rockin' Jackson Browne song, "Drums of War", from his 2008 CD titled "Time the Conqueror". Give it a listen - with wonderful photo and album cover retrospectives.
(copy/paste)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc-i98oNQ5Y&feature=PlayList&p=ABA749A9A5C97C9D&index=13
Lyrics to The Drums Of War:
Roll out the drums of war
Roll up the cover of the killing floor
Roll out the drums of war
And let's speak of things worth fighting for
Roll out the drums of war
Time comes when everything you ever thought you knew
Comes crashing down and flames rise up in front of you
Roll out the drums of war
Roll back the freedoms that we struggled for
What were those freedoms for?
Let's not talk about it any more
Roll out the drums of war
Roll out the drums of war
If you know what your freedom's for
Whatever you believe the necessary course to be
Depends on who you trust to identify the enemy
Who beats the drums for war?
Even before peace is lost
Who are the profits for?
And who are they who bear the cost
When a country takes the low road to war
Who gives the orders, orders to torture?
Who gets to no bid contract the future?
Who lies, then bombs, then calls it an error?
Who makes a fortune from fighting terror?
Who is the enemy trying to crush us?
Who is the enemy of truth and justice?
Who is the enemy of peace and freedom?
Where are the courts, now when we need them?
Why is impeachment not on the table?
We better stop them while we are able
Roll out the drums of war
Roll out the drums of war
If you know what your freedom's for
Whatever you believe the necessary course to be
Depends on who you trust to identify the enemy
Who took this country to war?
Long before the peace was lost
Who are the profits for?
And who are they who bear the cost
And who lay down their lives?
And who will live with the sacrifice
Of our best and brightest hopes,
The flower of our youth,
Of freedom, and the truth?
Great, rockin' Jackson Browne song, "Drums of War", from his 2008 CD titled "Time the Conqueror". Give it a listen - with wonderful photo and album cover retrospectives.
(copy/paste)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc-i98oNQ5Y&feature=PlayList&p=ABA749A9A5C97C9D&index=13
Lyrics to The Drums Of War:
Roll out the drums of war
Roll up the cover of the killing floor
Roll out the drums of war
And let's speak of things worth fighting for
Roll out the drums of war
Time comes when everything you ever thought you knew
Comes crashing down and flames rise up in front of you
Roll out the drums of war
Roll back the freedoms that we struggled for
What were those freedoms for?
Let's not talk about it any more
Roll out the drums of war
Roll out the drums of war
If you know what your freedom's for
Whatever you believe the necessary course to be
Depends on who you trust to identify the enemy
Who beats the drums for war?
Even before peace is lost
Who are the profits for?
And who are they who bear the cost
When a country takes the low road to war
Who gives the orders, orders to torture?
Who gets to no bid contract the future?
Who lies, then bombs, then calls it an error?
Who makes a fortune from fighting terror?
Who is the enemy trying to crush us?
Who is the enemy of truth and justice?
Who is the enemy of peace and freedom?
Where are the courts, now when we need them?
Why is impeachment not on the table?
We better stop them while we are able
Roll out the drums of war
Roll out the drums of war
If you know what your freedom's for
Whatever you believe the necessary course to be
Depends on who you trust to identify the enemy
Who took this country to war?
Long before the peace was lost
Who are the profits for?
And who are they who bear the cost
And who lay down their lives?
And who will live with the sacrifice
Of our best and brightest hopes,
The flower of our youth,
Of freedom, and the truth?
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Children ask - Why?
The Rich - The Poor...
The Powerful - The Powerless...
Why is one child born into prosperity, comfort and opportunity,
while another is born into poverty, suffering and despair?
Has it always been so?
Must it always be so - rich and poor, powerful and powerless?
Why?
Children ask why, why, why? We give children answers that deny reality.
Sometimes we tell them there is no answer - or the equivalent - "It's God's will".
Or, some offer "Karma" as the cause and explanation for these terrible inequities.
I believe we give empty answers, not because we are evil, or wish to mislead them, but because we cannot accept the truth ourselves.
I believe there is an honest and accurate explanation... I believe that the truth is so unspeakable, that we dare not acknowledge it to ourselves, or God forbid, to speak it to our children.
Even to think it causes a painful realization of our individual and collective culpability. Even to think it wreaks havoc on our self-images, our complacency and our ability to honor "self-service" as our prime focus.
A child asks "Why are those people poor and suffering, and we are not?"
What parent could utter these words: "Darling, it's because I allow it".
The Powerful - The Powerless...
Why is one child born into prosperity, comfort and opportunity,
while another is born into poverty, suffering and despair?
Has it always been so?
Must it always be so - rich and poor, powerful and powerless?
Why?
Children ask why, why, why? We give children answers that deny reality.
Sometimes we tell them there is no answer - or the equivalent - "It's God's will".
Or, some offer "Karma" as the cause and explanation for these terrible inequities.
I believe we give empty answers, not because we are evil, or wish to mislead them, but because we cannot accept the truth ourselves.
I believe there is an honest and accurate explanation... I believe that the truth is so unspeakable, that we dare not acknowledge it to ourselves, or God forbid, to speak it to our children.
Even to think it causes a painful realization of our individual and collective culpability. Even to think it wreaks havoc on our self-images, our complacency and our ability to honor "self-service" as our prime focus.
A child asks "Why are those people poor and suffering, and we are not?"
What parent could utter these words: "Darling, it's because I allow it".
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Living on Borrowed Comfort
Borrowed Comfort...
A "credit-dollar" borrowed today - costs me two "debt-dollars" tomorrow.
A measure of "denial-comfort", borrowed today,
costs me two measures of "undeniable discomfort" tomorrow.
The interest payment, on denying an impending crisis,
is measured by the increased impact of the crisis.
The interest rate on denial-comfort never goes down - It always goes up.
Beware of compound interest.
A "credit-dollar" borrowed today - costs me two "debt-dollars" tomorrow.
A measure of "denial-comfort", borrowed today,
costs me two measures of "undeniable discomfort" tomorrow.
The interest payment, on denying an impending crisis,
is measured by the increased impact of the crisis.
The interest rate on denial-comfort never goes down - It always goes up.
Beware of compound interest.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Three Stages of Service
Three Stages in the evolution of Service.
1. Service to Self:
Gratification of Ego - Self Image/Esteem - Early in life (chronologically and/or spiritually)- the tendency to be motivated by direct ego fulfillment. A valuable form of service - a necessary step.
2. Service to Others:
Gratification of Ego - Self Image/Esteem - Purpose - Meaning - Immortality.
Adopting "service to others" as fulfillment (still ego). In most of us, still rooted in self-service/fulfillment - rewarding the self. A valuable form of service - a necessary step.
3. Service as "Way":
Service - as seamless state of being.
Service - not exceptional acts, practices or behaviors.
Service - an end unto itself.
Service - noticed, or unnoticed - irrelevant.
Service - without meaning, purpose, or reward.
Service - not driven - not drawn.
Service - without past, present or future.
Service - without intent, plan, or measure.
Service - without expectation - without disappointment.
Service - without fixed form or structure - as "Way".
Stage one is practically autonomic, is required for competent functioning as a human, and is necessary before stage two can become available as an option.
Stage two is a choice, and most often a natural outgrowth of and compliment to stage one. Stage two is important and valuable, but is not necessary for competent human function. Stage two is however, a necessary pre-requisite for stage three.
Stage three is seldom understood or experienced, yet may be essential to the survival of our species and our planet. Stage three service unfolds only of it's own accord, in it's own time and only as part of a comprehensive discipline that focuses upon acceptance of "what is". In it's purest form it cannot be described, but only experienced.
1. Service to Self:
Gratification of Ego - Self Image/Esteem - Early in life (chronologically and/or spiritually)- the tendency to be motivated by direct ego fulfillment. A valuable form of service - a necessary step.
2. Service to Others:
Gratification of Ego - Self Image/Esteem - Purpose - Meaning - Immortality.
Adopting "service to others" as fulfillment (still ego). In most of us, still rooted in self-service/fulfillment - rewarding the self. A valuable form of service - a necessary step.
3. Service as "Way":
Service - as seamless state of being.
Service - not exceptional acts, practices or behaviors.
Service - an end unto itself.
Service - noticed, or unnoticed - irrelevant.
Service - without meaning, purpose, or reward.
Service - not driven - not drawn.
Service - without past, present or future.
Service - without intent, plan, or measure.
Service - without expectation - without disappointment.
Service - without fixed form or structure - as "Way".
Stage one is practically autonomic, is required for competent functioning as a human, and is necessary before stage two can become available as an option.
Stage two is a choice, and most often a natural outgrowth of and compliment to stage one. Stage two is important and valuable, but is not necessary for competent human function. Stage two is however, a necessary pre-requisite for stage three.
Stage three is seldom understood or experienced, yet may be essential to the survival of our species and our planet. Stage three service unfolds only of it's own accord, in it's own time and only as part of a comprehensive discipline that focuses upon acceptance of "what is". In it's purest form it cannot be described, but only experienced.
Howard Zinn - December 8, 2008
Gotta copy and paste I guess...
Interesting presentation by Howard Zinn... He evaluates our current situation and looks at the prospects for the future under an Obama administration... Worth seeing.
Thank you Amy Goodman...
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/2/placeholder_howard_zinn
Interesting presentation by Howard Zinn... He evaluates our current situation and looks at the prospects for the future under an Obama administration... Worth seeing.
Thank you Amy Goodman...
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/2/placeholder_howard_zinn
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Happy Birthday Jesus
Christmas Eve 2011. For midnight prayers, the old church in the center of the park glowed warm with the light of what must have been a thousand candles.
The big man entered quietly, and was grateful to find a seat in the back, near the aisle. With half a dozen excellent rellenos and half as many cocktails in his belly, Jorge joined the prayer-service in progress.
Head bowed, eyes closed, he'd joined just in time to hear the solemn call for world peace.
He gave a reflexive nod to the concept, but war and suffering on the other side of the world weren't really his concern. In truth, Jorge gave no thought at all to world peace. His hands were full with the war and suffering in his own world - holding his own ground - keeping the wolves at bay. On a good day it was two steps forward, one step back. He hadn't seen too many good days lately. In his line of work, keeping the wolves from the door is no small achievement.
Half an hour later he rose to leave the church before the service ended. He detested obligatory chatter and intentionally avoided situations that would call for it. To Jorge, obligatory Christmas chatter merited it's own unique disdain. He stepped quietly through the doors, outside into the cold. He took a deep breath of cold air, felt the burning in his nose and lungs. It was good to be away from the humid shoulder to shoulder feeling of artificial intimacy that he felt in a church.
He stood outside for a moment, alone on the steps and checked his watch. If he hurried he'd make his rendezvous on time. Jorge knew he'd find his own peace, in a nightcap - or tonight, maybe two.
He carefully descended the slippery steps, then leaned forward, head down into an icy wind. He pushed across the park, unconsciously counting off the hundred and eleven paces to the cone of pale yellow street light that revealed his gleaming black Lincoln Navigator. For a big man, Jorge moved quickly and effortlessly through the shadows of leafless trees, aware only of the wind, the crunching of frosty-frozen grass beneath his boots - and his own troubled thoughts.
He stepped into the light, slipped into the Lincoln and settled into his pre-heated leather seat.
As the engine warmed, his eyes followed the parallel broken lines of his own foot prints, back across the icy grass, through the tree shadowed park, to the steps of the church. The stained glass windows above still shone rich and warm with candle light. Inside, he knew that with heads bowed, shoulder to shoulder, the dutiful still prayed. He sighed, relieved to no longer be among them. His breath fogged the drivers-side window. He grinned and whispered "Happy Birthday Jesus".
The big man turned up the heater and tapped the button bearing the defroster symbol. He eased the Navigator into first, checked his watch again, then pulled slowly away from the park - out of the light - into the night.
He hadn't noticed that in the back seat, just out of the rear view mirrors reach, sat a silent passenger. Jorge was not alone.
His headlights carved the image of a two-lane blacktop from the surrounding darkness. At twenty three minutes north of the church, he hadn't seen another vehicle. To be alone on this old highway was more common than not. As it was Christmas Eve, his aloneness on the road was virtually assured.
Jorge turned right, onto an unmarked dirt road. His destination, deep in the apple orchards, was a one hundred and fifteen year old, two-room adobe structure. It was known only as "The Cantina" and known to only a handful of patrons. The building stood at roughly the halfway point on a dusty one-lane road, that beyond The Cantina, looped almost aimlessly through seemingly endless orchards and opened onto a highway in the next county.
The proprietress of The Cantina, whose hair shone like polished silver was reverentially referred to as "La Viuda Plata". The Silver Widow never imposed. Her perfect expression of old-world grace and discretion generated the essence of The Cantina's unique atmosphere.
The Cantina was never closed. For her patrons, The Cantina was refuge from the world's madness. The Cantina was respite - simple elegance, warmth and security, the kind that the uncommon souls of uncommon men depend upon.
And so it had been for generations of such men - since the fathers of the fathers of The Cantina's current patrons, had themselves, been young uncommon souls.
The widow's role had, over time, afforded her considerable comforts. She'd, quietly financed seven grandchildren, and as of this Christmas Eve, eleven
great-grandchildren - through college and into positions of political authority.
Far beyond such appearances of power, the humble widow's fulfillment was in knowing that her many descendants, her progeny, her star seeds, were rooted deeply within the unseen, first sphere of power and influence - the cadre of beings that create human reality.
Jorge turned left, from the dirt road and onto the long, dust covered flagstone driveway that led to The Cantina. He was rolling to a stop near the front door and saw between barren trees, the unusually muted lights in the windows.
He didn't realize that in this instant, he was rolling through an invisible opening, passing through a tear in the fabric of time and space that forms the collective human perception of what we call "reality".
He didn't realize that when he opened the door of the Navigator
he'd step into a drastically altered version of reality - A version from which he would never return.
Jorge would realize however, in the next few moments, that he was not alone.
The big man entered quietly, and was grateful to find a seat in the back, near the aisle. With half a dozen excellent rellenos and half as many cocktails in his belly, Jorge joined the prayer-service in progress.
Head bowed, eyes closed, he'd joined just in time to hear the solemn call for world peace.
He gave a reflexive nod to the concept, but war and suffering on the other side of the world weren't really his concern. In truth, Jorge gave no thought at all to world peace. His hands were full with the war and suffering in his own world - holding his own ground - keeping the wolves at bay. On a good day it was two steps forward, one step back. He hadn't seen too many good days lately. In his line of work, keeping the wolves from the door is no small achievement.
Half an hour later he rose to leave the church before the service ended. He detested obligatory chatter and intentionally avoided situations that would call for it. To Jorge, obligatory Christmas chatter merited it's own unique disdain. He stepped quietly through the doors, outside into the cold. He took a deep breath of cold air, felt the burning in his nose and lungs. It was good to be away from the humid shoulder to shoulder feeling of artificial intimacy that he felt in a church.
He stood outside for a moment, alone on the steps and checked his watch. If he hurried he'd make his rendezvous on time. Jorge knew he'd find his own peace, in a nightcap - or tonight, maybe two.
He carefully descended the slippery steps, then leaned forward, head down into an icy wind. He pushed across the park, unconsciously counting off the hundred and eleven paces to the cone of pale yellow street light that revealed his gleaming black Lincoln Navigator. For a big man, Jorge moved quickly and effortlessly through the shadows of leafless trees, aware only of the wind, the crunching of frosty-frozen grass beneath his boots - and his own troubled thoughts.
He stepped into the light, slipped into the Lincoln and settled into his pre-heated leather seat.
As the engine warmed, his eyes followed the parallel broken lines of his own foot prints, back across the icy grass, through the tree shadowed park, to the steps of the church. The stained glass windows above still shone rich and warm with candle light. Inside, he knew that with heads bowed, shoulder to shoulder, the dutiful still prayed. He sighed, relieved to no longer be among them. His breath fogged the drivers-side window. He grinned and whispered "Happy Birthday Jesus".
The big man turned up the heater and tapped the button bearing the defroster symbol. He eased the Navigator into first, checked his watch again, then pulled slowly away from the park - out of the light - into the night.
He hadn't noticed that in the back seat, just out of the rear view mirrors reach, sat a silent passenger. Jorge was not alone.
His headlights carved the image of a two-lane blacktop from the surrounding darkness. At twenty three minutes north of the church, he hadn't seen another vehicle. To be alone on this old highway was more common than not. As it was Christmas Eve, his aloneness on the road was virtually assured.
Jorge turned right, onto an unmarked dirt road. His destination, deep in the apple orchards, was a one hundred and fifteen year old, two-room adobe structure. It was known only as "The Cantina" and known to only a handful of patrons. The building stood at roughly the halfway point on a dusty one-lane road, that beyond The Cantina, looped almost aimlessly through seemingly endless orchards and opened onto a highway in the next county.
The proprietress of The Cantina, whose hair shone like polished silver was reverentially referred to as "La Viuda Plata". The Silver Widow never imposed. Her perfect expression of old-world grace and discretion generated the essence of The Cantina's unique atmosphere.
The Cantina was never closed. For her patrons, The Cantina was refuge from the world's madness. The Cantina was respite - simple elegance, warmth and security, the kind that the uncommon souls of uncommon men depend upon.
And so it had been for generations of such men - since the fathers of the fathers of The Cantina's current patrons, had themselves, been young uncommon souls.
The widow's role had, over time, afforded her considerable comforts. She'd, quietly financed seven grandchildren, and as of this Christmas Eve, eleven
great-grandchildren - through college and into positions of political authority.
Far beyond such appearances of power, the humble widow's fulfillment was in knowing that her many descendants, her progeny, her star seeds, were rooted deeply within the unseen, first sphere of power and influence - the cadre of beings that create human reality.
Jorge turned left, from the dirt road and onto the long, dust covered flagstone driveway that led to The Cantina. He was rolling to a stop near the front door and saw between barren trees, the unusually muted lights in the windows.
He didn't realize that in this instant, he was rolling through an invisible opening, passing through a tear in the fabric of time and space that forms the collective human perception of what we call "reality".
He didn't realize that when he opened the door of the Navigator
he'd step into a drastically altered version of reality - A version from which he would never return.
Jorge would realize however, in the next few moments, that he was not alone.
Utah Phillips
Utah Phillips died in 2008. Often called "The Golden Voice of The Great Southwest", he was an articulate spokesman, social activist, singer, songwriter and storyteller. This is a link to a Democracy Now video of Amy Goodman interviewing him in 2004.
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2009/1/1
I guess you have to copy and paste this, as I don't know how to put a "click on" link here.
The following text is the Official Obituary of Utah Phillips....
The official Obituary as provided by the family. May 24, 2008
"Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California:
Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.
Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.
Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.
"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.
A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."
Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.
"It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."
A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.
Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.
Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.
The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org
-Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk (Molly Fisk, 530.277.4686 molly@mollyfisk.com Jordan Fisher Smith 530.277.3087 jordanfs@gv.net)
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2009/1/1
I guess you have to copy and paste this, as I don't know how to put a "click on" link here.
The following text is the Official Obituary of Utah Phillips....
The official Obituary as provided by the family. May 24, 2008
"Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California:
Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.
Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.
Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.
"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.
A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."
Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.
"It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."
A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.
Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.
Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.
The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org
-Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk (Molly Fisk, 530.277.4686 molly@mollyfisk.com Jordan Fisher Smith 530.277.3087 jordanfs@gv.net)
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