AMID DESTRUCTION, TRUTH EMERGES UNDAUNTED

We can thank the destructive forces let into the heart of Democracy for showing us the truth of our founding principles among which are consent of the governed and the rule of law.

We witness an attempt to overthrow our government by a despot and the foolish people who follow in his path. Mostly, it is a party of grievances against the restraints imposed by principles established at our founding. These establish how we treat each other and live together.

Individuals who throw off the restraining standards of behavior toward one another and detest those principles of decency, respect and caring for each other are tyrants.

Further, neglect of the Earth from devouring forces that eat at her heartwood, not only rob our children of a future but imperil all life on the planet.

Our collective culpability is grave.

Unbridled capitalism is on display in the highest offices of the land, elected by unknowing citizens concerned with the costs of living while forgetting our responsibility to elect leaders who are grounded in the virtues that our founders asserted as a restraint on the forces of tyranny.

Let us join the choir of truth tellers emerging everywhere as our nation awakens to what we have done: we let a fox into the henhouse. This is not political but our individual responsibility to conduct ourselves with respect for each other.

The preservation of our republic is of vital importance today for another reason: the mounting threat to life on Earth. We are a nation that has forgotten that we live here only by the grace of Earth’s living, breathing body and spirit. For too long we have plundered the Earth for coin.

And now we have put a despot at the helm when the Earth is teetering on massive changes which may not include life as we know it. The entire planet is in flux. Even when we watch our fellow Americans fleeing raging fires, epic floods and death, and temperatures that render farmlands barren, this despot denies even his own body and thus imperils all of us.

The first step out of this dilemma is to admit the truth of our present reality. From there, we must resist every attempt of the now unrestrained actions of a man filled with anger and hair-brained ideas detached from the truth.

We may at a time not too far from now have to make bold decisions and risk all to stop him and the hoard who follow hoping for power, money, or at least to duck his vicious nature. If we don’t, we’ll not appear in any history book as standing up for a nation of free people but for the fact that no one will be around to write that history.

Emerging Resources for Citizens Searching for Truth and Community:

The Contrarian

Civil Discourse

Letters from an American

Public Citizen

Emergence Magazine

Capitol Building Rotunda, Photo by Susan Feathers

A Book for Our Time: The Crystal Beads, Lalka’s Journey

A mother and child in 1939 Poland are talking. This is our way into a new book—The Crystal Beads, Lalka’s Journey written by Pat Black-Gould and illustrated by Katya Royz. It is a book written for children but is for any age and as I will show, particularly for today.

The time and place alert adults immediately to the context but for children they are gently led into the experience. A mother has found a way to gently guide her seven-year-old daughter on a safe path while terror stalks right outside their door. She asks her daughter to trade her Star of David for crystal beads – a rosary.

The author guides readers along with the illustrations driving the narrative and lending emotional texture. Tension builds with a terrifying encounter with Nazi interrogators. What might happen? We anticipate the worst. The terrifying men leave and we can breathe again. Lalka asks a question of the Mother Superior. It is not just any question: it is the question yet unresolved among us. Which of these is better: the Star of David or the Rosary?

Pat Black-Gould weaves a story of trust and love confronted with evil and brilliantly captured in Katya Royz’ art.

When I finished reading the story, my first thought was of Leo Tolstoy’s parable The Bear. Written for children, it has lasted through the centuries as a warning about the perils of oppression. Tolstoy showed how the bear became immured in a prison of its own thinking. It performs everyday for its master who has tethered it to a stump. Not until the bear is reminded he is endowed with the strength to break his bonds does he free himself from his oppressor.

I foresee The Crystal Beads will find its place among stories that illuminate dark times with truth. Everyone is endowed with his or her own right to be free and to pursue his or her own dreams. Each person is as valuable as the next. All faiths promote that and it is the soul of democratic governance.

The Nazis vilified the Jews leading to unspeakable crimes against humanity. This old dark root has risen over the last decade in many forms of hatred toward “the other.” Anger and hatred pit people against each other, playing out this old and tragic story about the human race. It must be illuminated for what it is: evil in many forms. We must be ever vigilent to guard against it for it can happen anywhere strong men’s manipulation of followers who, like the bear, are imprisoned by their own misperceptions and thinking.

I am so glad for the publication of The Crystal Beads. Pat Black-Gould is a practicing psychologist, playwright, and fiction writer. Perhaps this is why her book is so vital. The author has created a timeless story for all ages. The book has already garnered many awards.

Study guides for children and for adults are included.

Replenishing the Earth – Wangari Maathai

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2004

Wangari Maathai grew up in her homeland in Kenya, living close to the earth and learning traditional Kikuyu values and practices. Her memoir, Unbound, describes her daily activities as a child, her mother’s teachings, and how her people regarded the streams and forests in a land where the balance of nature is delicate, not to be abused without serious consequences for its inhabitants.

In Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, Maathai’s wisdom is distilled onto each page, every sentence the next drop in the flow. Wangari describes herself as working practically to solve problems she learned about in discussions with communities and among women’s groups. Their need for clean water, and for access to earn a living, were her daily concerns. Eventually, Wangari and the women she served established the Greenbelt Movement that planted over 30 million trees in Kenya.

In Replenishing, Wangari’s concerns about the destruction of the environment in Kenya are examined in light of the world’s sacred traditions. Always a practical perspective, her observations and reflections give readers much to consider often through humor. For example she writes that God in his wisdom created Adam on Friday. If he’d created him on Monday he’d have perished for lack of food!

Wangari Maathai’s clarity of thought is invaluable in this age where massive destruction of oceans, rivers, wildlands, and forests have imperiled life the world over. She and the women of Kenya remind us of the earth-shaking power of people to replenish the earth, if we choose to do so.

Listen to an interview with Wangari Maathai on OnBeing.org.

To gamble well, study God

Update: In a discussion about the making of the film Lincoln, Doris Kearns Godwin, Tony Kushner, and Steven Spielberg identify their favorite scenes in the movie, Steven talks about the ability to accept a great idea from the “other side”: this illustrates the point of this post!

God rolls the dice, shuffles the deck for endless possibilities, knowing not how anyone of us creatures of Earth may respond – ignore, expire, excel. But, rolling and dealing endless possibilities is the key to God’s success.

Trees know this for through God each tree grows thousands of seeds in all shapes and configurations but in the end it releases them to the wind, to hitch a ride on the fur of a passing creature or fall into the fast moving stream nearby. Will a seed find rich soil? Will it be nourished to survive? Will it fall upon concrete? Or be gobbled up, later to be excreted with a wrapping of fertilizer?

With all the possibilities, each with its potential outcomes, some seedlings will grow. And, IF there is enough sunlight and just the right amount of moisture and warmth, it will grow into a mighty tree and someday throw its own possibilities into the winds of the future.

The Creator exerts patience and rationality: a kind of detachment that allows all possibilities to emerge.

That’s where we come in. Will we respond or ignore an opportunity, or more often, doubt ourselves? God observes. We might get another “hand” or not. I think the Creator must love the folks who take a chance knowing they might fail. Because that’s what the Gambler must do: keep rolling the dice, keep open all the possibilities for a winning hand! Indeed, all great things require it.

Therefore, let us consider all the possibilities rather than spend our time criticizing ideas, even despising the source of them; let us work broadly and earnestly to solve our common problems: climate change, war, peaceful relations. etc. by keeping many ideas and strategies in play.

What if together we just might play a winning hand?

Observation Deck of the USS Pandemic

FROM THE OBSERVATION DECK OF THE USS PANDEMIC

Report Submitted March 31,2020

Skies clearing; increased visibility; waters clearing, increased depth perception.
Fault-lines in leadership and economic security readily observable.
Man in the White House teeths on the Presidency; ingenuity and capacity for loving from American families and citizens observed. Leadership flipped: mayors, governors, and institutional leaders rise to the top.
The youth of America sing in their nests like spring fledging ready to fly into their new lives and destinies.
The elders reflect on time past, time of their parents, of the great war, the depression, and the war of the world. They search for its lessons. They fear death for the virus has found a particular berth in their cabins. They await the outcome.
Sunrise at 6:39 a.m. EST and Moonset at 1:29 a.m. EST. Birds and mammals move free and unburdened. They build their nests and hunt on soft paws among the trees. Bees appear, rotund and smeared with yellow pollen. Dolphins rise.
Humans huddle in their homes waiting, wondering, mourning, and angry. It is their turn. The viral hordes rage with insatiable greed and ambition, good capitalists all.
Doctors, nurses, emergency technicians, receptionists, firemen, and all the frontline warriors are risking their lives with no time to wonder about it.
Nets of commerce are tangled on the waves for all to observe. Barrels line docks; mountains of boxes press upon the earth; an eerie silence encompasses the market places. All those lampshades, trash baskets, ric rac, thumbtacks.
The landfills grow as humanity burns through it’s useable goods.The top layer is PPG: effluvium of the pandemic. The next layer isTP and hand wipes.

The warning whistle blows. The crew awaits the captain’s call. Will it be new coordinates to awakened ports of call?

The crew stands All Hands A Deck

Our environmental practices make pandemics like the coronavirus more likely

HOPE

FOR MORE HOPE CLICK HERE

If I Were Elizabeth Warren

I wonder what Elizabeth Warren is doing right now? My hope for the leader I have backed with my money and political support is that she is in her pajamas taking it easy. If I were there, I’d serve her a good strong coffee and cook her an omelette and potatoes. Then I’d order her a bodywork specialist, and arrange for a manicure and pedicure, and lavish all manner of care upon her travel weary person. For Elizabeth is fighting The Good Fight in the American Political Arena.

Why did I support her? Elizabeth Warren has seen the truth about capitalism from very early in her career of public service: it works for the top few percent and less so as you go down the economic/social agency scale. The reason: there is a concurrent scale of opportunity shrouded by American society’s propensity to worship rich people and turn away from the poor – or rather, people perceived as poor.

Warren worked tirelessly in government to rectify that inequity. This is the Great Work. What did she accomplish? If you have credit cards, loans, bank accounts then you are benefiting today from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which she fought for over the years of her public service. She worked to create and sustain a Middle Class while making it possible for families with lesser means to educate their children for economic mobility. Warren was ever on that path to ameliorate free market economics to make it fair to all Americans. She kept kids in mind. Maternity and family leave, sick leave and medical care, a good education — these are fundamental rights of all Americans she believes.

Well, Elizabeth I bet is resting, but her mind is spinning on how to keep the Good Fight going. She has always been and always will be an American leader. As a voter and citizen I will do my part to see that she has a place in the new Administration if she wants it, a Vice Presidency or key cabinet position.

One key thing: she is persistent. Women have that. Endurance. And, our networks are ever stronger and larger. One day a woman will lead this country and we’ll be better for it. So rest, Elizabeth. And thank you from my heart.

Civil Disobedience for Climate Action

Democracy Now has been following the Fire Drill Fridays sparked by Greta Thunberg’s clear voice — a youth crying in the wilderness of world and national houses of legislation which remain deaf to the urgency of acting to protect the planet and life everywhere. Jane Fonda is busy stirring a national day of civil disobedience EVERY Friday on the steps of Capitol Hill. Listen in:

https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2020/1/13/jane_fonda_fire_drill_fridays_washington

World Waking Up to Climate Change

In the past few days we have learned that major investors and businesses are getting in step with climate action. BlackRock investing firm announced they would no longer invest in businesses that are not meeting climate change objectives.

“Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” Mr. Fink wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. “The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.” ~ New York Times 1-14-20

Microsoft announced a Net Negative carbon footprint plan to reduce its emissions and to eliminate its carbon footprint completely by 2030.

The scientific consensus is clear. The world confronts an urgent carbon problem. The carbon in our atmosphere has created a blanket of gas that traps heat and is changing the world’s climate. Already, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1 degree centigrade. If we don’t curb emissions, and temperatures continue to climb, science tells us that the results will be catastrophic. ~ Microsoft Commitment to Sustainability

COP 25 Comes to an Ignoble End: Not Surprising

The most recent Climate Change Summit (COP 25) came to an ignoble end with few agreements among the member countries on coordinated decrease in carbon dioxide and methane pollution. This in the midst of reports flooding media about new or more advanced warming impacts on ecosystems pole to pole, ocean to ocean.

Yet this sad result is not surprising, is it? With one of the largest, and longest contributors of CO2 to the atmosphere bailing out of the Paris Agreement (US), it has complicated and weakened the coordination and commitments of countries to less than 2 degrees Celsius warming by 2050.

What’s more ,the most vulnerable places, already experiencing life threatening changes in the earth, sky, and waters, can’t pay for the kind of adaptation necessary to assure some form of well-being, forcing migrations and/or conflicts. All results that are predictable due to a lack of responsibility for each other.

Regionalism and nationalism are dangerous in light of global problems that we can only solve or mitigate together. Why should Americans care that our President, White House, and half the voting public have chosen to turn their backs on the world of which we are an integral part? Because it is just ignorant not to recognize that the well-being of countries worldwide benefits us in terms of security, wealth, and health. Any grade school child can conjure that.

All political affiliations of voters must urge their representatives to get off the barge heading for annihilation and start building in the safe guards for what is already wide spread destruction. We are right now teetering on massive problems caused by ever greater warming.

Its great we have a strong economy, wonderful. We’ll need it. Let us not bury our heads in the sand. If Climate Change goes against your religion, I suggest you sit down for a long chat with God. I am sure our Creator does not want his progeny to kill life everywhere so that we can have more money in the bank.

A great country must be a wise one. A great citizenry must strive to use logic and prudence when playing with the very requirements for life. We cannot play God by tweaking the stock market. But, that is what we are doing. Chasing the Almighty Dollar, eyes shut, bellies full, and souls in tatters.

NPR Report on COP 25