We can never know what could have been, but we can certainly do better in all of the disasters to come.

I sure hope so, Christy. But there’s a loud contingent that believes You’re On Your Own

Sadly, yes. But I’ve been thinking lately that we really have to be the change we want to see and hope that some folks just wake up to what is decent as opposed to what’s in it for them.

btw, morning all. Just finished brewing the coffee. Ahhhhhh…

As per your comment Christy, wonderfully inspiring story from today’s Raleigh paper.

http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/1666842.html

Wow — that is really impressive. What a wonderful way to pay it forward, eh? And what a wonderful tribute to her mother that she’s dedicated herself to doing that. Thanks so much for sharing it.

How are things going with you? Seems like I haven’t gotten a chance to catch up with you in ages. Hope all is well.

Hi Christy.

My sense is that as a society we cede much of the big expressions of compassion to organized efforts which seem to have bigger “shoulders” and can accomplish more. It makes sense since I can fly a relief plane of supplies I might have on my kitchen shelves to tsunami victims in SE Asia.

So we contribute to a common effort and are expected to feed these institutions consistently when no emergencyu exists., like giving blood… paying taxes because HELPING PEOPLE IS A ROLE OF OUR GOVERNMENT.

We can also participate by voting, and writing letters and sending emails and so forth. These are the day to day things which we can do to support a COMPASSIONATE agenda in our society.

I can’t fly sorry for the typo

Christy,
I’ve been battling cynicism for a long time and most of the time it wins out. I have to say that the past couple of days listening to the outpouring of stories and emotions about Ted Kennedy and his legacy I’ve been saying to myself, who am I to be so cynical when this man, with all the losses and tragedies of his life brought so much hope to so many people? Hearing the stories in last night’s memorial was inspiring and I hope I can hold on to a piece of it as we move forward and continue to fight for decent affordable health care for all and the myriad of other things that need fixing.

Now I have to write the sermon that got side tracked between Teddy and a visit to the emergency vet with our Toby last night. (high fever but hopefully that’s all).

Hugs to you and Toby. Hope it’s a fleeting issue and things get back to normal soon.

Sadly some people make a business out of compassion, such as the head of the American Red Cross who apparently paid herself something like $500k a year.

Sad, how money became so important in this culture. It has perverted everything it touches. And sadly too few with too much will use it with compassion.

Have been lurking. My daughter’s wedding is next Saturday (and she’s already back in class.) It’s been crazy.

Outfitting mother for this soiree has been the biggest challenge. Hope to find the last piece in that puzzle today. Tomorrow I will wheel out the new four wheeled walker (with seat and basket) and start “training” her on that.

Am very fortunate. I can leave midweek for the wedding and her neighbors will take her to Durham on Friday. No matter how challenging the preparations are, am old enough now to truly treasure the idea of a happy family gathering.

Now if my ex’s current wife would be just the least bit cooperative. Guess there’s a reason the kids are getting married during a full moon weekend! *g*

Greed does seem to have permeated pretty much everything these days. It isn’t how I was taught to behave toward others growing up, but then I was around my granny and my parents who grew up with very little.

My granny especially faced some very hard times in her lifetime, and taught me to always think about what I could do for others who had larger needs than my own. And that I was no better than anyone else, nor were they better than me just because of what they had in their wallet — it was how they lived their lives and helped others that counted.

I fear that folks may not be learning that lesson given the examples set by so many others in “leadership” positions these days. And I worry about how to teach those lessons to The Peanut as she grows.

RevDeb,

The noblesse oblige is not felt by all the well off. But what is MORE amazing is not that someone who has no read “survival needs” can devote their life to others, but those who live on the edge of poverty and struggle from day to day or choose a life with no material comfort and devote themselves to helping others – they are the amazing people.

I would not diminish the good work of any who do it. But I can assure you if I had hundreds of millions of dollars I would devote my life to using it and my time to help the less fortunate and try to alleviate suffering.

It’s amazing how the so few wealthy people and well off people could care less about suffering.

congratulations diablesseblu

and hugs for ((Toby))

Oh my! I remember that last minute rush from my wedding and how crazed everyone was about it. I was a sea of calm on my wedding day — just so happy to be marrying Mr. ReddHedd that I didn’t care if the flowers arrived or where the cake was in transit — I just knew it would all work out, and it did.

Would that I could reach that zen state in the rest of my life. *g*

Christy, you and Jane and many others we have encountered here on the web are examples of compassionate living and should and I suspect are inspiration to so many others. Whether or not you political “agenda” is about compassion, ultimately that is what a good government should be – a mechanism to provide a better life for the people and that is one that removes suffering and acts with compassion.

This is why universal health care is such a test for what our government is. Is gov simply a mechanism to celebrate the (supposed) free market to provide the alleviation of suffering or is it the role of government – we the people to be the ACTUAL mechanism for compassion and alleviation of suffering.

If this is lost we have a failed government which cannot serve the people it represents.

I think that Teddy could have easily said “screw it all, I’m going sailing for the rest of my life” after his two brothers were murdered and no one would have blamed him for doing so. That he became even more dedicated and was decidedly not a toady for the corporations (yes, he didn’t need their money but most of his colleagues in the Senate don’t either) was to his credit.

But was I was touched by were the stories of him reaching out and being with people whether he was asked to or not. He’d help people and from that relationships would develop. Lots and lots of layers to that man.

2 weeks ago Dana Gould did a brilliant piece on health care for Real Time. He contrasted the crazies at the health care forums who were nothing but angry and the poor folks showing up for the Remote Area Medical clinics who lived with hope.

It’s been hard to scrape together lots of hope lately. I need to work harder to do that.

Morning all
In God we Trust
God comes in $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 denominations

He’s now on his third course of antibiotics since we brought the kittens home. I won’t tell you about the vet bills! I sure hope this passes soon.

Thanks for the hugs. We worry about them as if they were our children—which of course, they are.

Many of the refugees from Katrina came here to Austin to our convention center. I volunteered from the beginning. I requested the same aisle in the rows of cots every day so I’d be working with the same people. The first day I spent getting to know people and seeing what they needed. I got one a wheelchair so she could get over to the clinic to treat her injured knee. I got the diabetics over to the clinic and so they could get what they needed. Got help for the little boy who wouldn’t eat because he was so traumatized. I’m starting to cry remembering how downtrodden the people were and how low their expectations were. Even when people could walk, they wouldn’t go by themselves. They were too scared they’d be considered demanding.

I’ve written gazillions of political letters to the NYTimes. They’ve never considered publishing one. The one I wrote during this experience they published. One of the results of that letter in the Times was that I got a phone call from New York. A man who said he was a doctor said he’d like to sponsor two families for a year until they got jobs and got on their feet. He wanted to know if I had some recommendations. He was clear that Texas couldn’t absorb all the refugees we were receiving. When I checked him out to make sure he wasn’t an axe murderer, he turned out to be head of pediatrics at a New York area hospital.

GM, Christy.

We’ve had a couple of terrible tragedies in our neighborhood this summer. The most recent, on Aug. 4, a beautiful historic apartment building burned, leaving all of the tenants on the street. Most of the animals did survive, but one cat died in the fire.

My neighborhood immediately began a “relief effort” and arranged for storage and then used the internet (mostly) to organize donations for these people, mostly young, who have lost everything.

They have been coming to the storage a couple of times each week to look at stuff and try to begin to put their lives back together. Last week we had a bbq potluck for them.

I think what they have appreciated the most is just the idea that a community has come together to support them and they have had opportunities to bond themselves through these gatherings.

Of course, we are all also mourning the loss of a historic building that was also a very important part of our neighborhood.

That’s just fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing all of that. I can remember putting together a huge box of baby clothes after Katrina hit — there were refugees that they brought up from New Orleans to stay at a camp here in WV that was in the mountains just north of us — several of them had kids and I just knew they’d be freezing cold by the end of September. So I boxed up some of The Peanut’s precious baby clothes that were warmer and took them over to the camp.

And it was freezing up there. I was so glad I took them. The Peanut was too little to really remember it, but it left a lasting impression on me that we needed to do so much more.

The note I always sound over here at the lake is that money is at the root of all society’s ill. Capitalism with it’s way of “doing things” has perverted the human spirit for at its heart it pits the needs of a few “capital” against the needs of the many – “labor” and has falsely claimed that the market will provide solutions which lifts all boats- yachts and rafts and those clinging to floatsum are raised by the tide – of no consequence whatsoever.

The struggle for humanity is to reset the agenda away from the purssuit of wealth and consumerism. Our political system seems unable to address this problem for a few reasons. One is that it is now being controlled by the very money interest which need to be toppled, and America will not declare that property and more of it is not a worthy goal for humans.

There is no debate about this and trying to get the corruption out of the system is hardly the solution to the over arching problem. We simply have the wrong agenda as a nation.

G’morning all.

This post and comments address something that’s been grinding in my gizzard for some time.

My simplistic answer to “where did the compassion go?” is garage door openers and home air conditioning.

For years in the neighborhoods where I have lived as an adult, garage doors open in the morning, disgorging what now look like baby elephants. Doors close. The herd drives off to work. In the early evening, the herd returns, and one by one, drives into their garages and close the door behind them.

By and large, porch sitting and hand watering the posies seem to have gone by the wayside. Folks are busy, busy, busy transporting kiddos to their activities. Kiddos are glued to teevees and computer monitors (well, kiddos and adults) and don’t spill into the neighborhood to frolic and play.

I know I’m sounding like an old fart sounding off. Oh, I am! But community and its attendant compassion is tough to breed when we are so compartmentalized.

Simplistic as earlier noted. But it’s part of the whole. Apathy is easy living in isolation.

OT, turned on MSNBC to tune into what’s going on with the funeral and heard Buchanan’s voice. How dare they!?!?!?
Switched to CNN which isn’t much better but the idea of that racist sob commenting on the funeral of our liberal lion just makes my blood boil.

Whew! Glad to get that out of my system.

When they were ready to shut down the convention center, many of the people I was working with still hadn’t made arrangements, so then I was helping them get to relatives in other states or helping them get apartments and furniture and basics. Some of the ones left at the end were the ones who were the least capable of taking care of themselves. It was really heartbreaking. FEMA was NOwhere to be found. The only FEMA line that you could get through on was the line to report fraud. I called and reported them to them on a regular basis.

That was so good of you to help. It may well have saved some lives.

We’re lucky — that’s not necessarily true in our little neighborhood. I’m out in the yard a lot and chat with the neighbors pretty frequently, but we may be an anomaly.

Precisely.

I remember hearing —I can’t remember who, Moyers, Bill Coffin, someone of stature—saying that the beginning of the end of real neighborhood community was air conditioning. No porch sitting. Yep.

We’re pretty neighborly here where I live too. And thank God for the retired engineer who lives next door who is more than generous with his time.

Republican, conservative and libertarian philosophy is all about the “me” there is little if any place for the “we.” After 40 years of this propaganda by the right wing and their allies in the corporate media is there any wonder that the society is showing major fault lines that have the potential of destroying the “liberal experiment in democracy?”

I just switched too. Buchanan and Scarborough – what poor taste. Sorry about your Toby. Lots of vet issues here this week too. I can’t think of anything to help boost his immune system.

Speaking of “we” and “me”, Christy, you can pretty much know a person if you know how large a class is his “we” A conservative’s ‘we’ is a small group, liberals larger. Then there is the ‘we’ in ‘we primates’, we creatures and so on. How big is my ‘we’ today?

Hoping for the best for those kitties. Ernie ,from the SPCA, not yet a year old is worth over $500 for those infection visits.

Contrast the Kennedy family legacy of serving others with the Bush family legacy of greed as best exemplified by cruising in the cigarette boat off of the Kennybunkport compound while conducting a war to preserve the flow of oil for ostentatious display of wealth, like that.

The thing that always drives me bonkers is the growth of the religious vein where the righteous get rich, and the poor are not righteous and therefore deserve what they get.

My grandpa was a Methodist minister my whole life, and I never once heard him preach that from his pulpit nor have I found any foundation for it in the actual text of my King James bible. It’s appallingly selfish stuff, and yet it is everywhere these days. Ugh.

When the Wall came down I was about to go through a “sabbatical” as conditions in my life presented the opportunity. I was about to leave NYC and sail off to experience the warm parts of the world.

I contacted a relief agency and gave everything I owned to the Russian people, aside from the few bits I took aboard my boat. Little did I know at the time that the capitalists descended on the USSR and in no time it was a mafia led society with super rich oligarchs and a huge underclass whose work and safety net lousy it may have been removed. A flawed communism collapsed and the people were finished off by unfettered free market capitalism.

In many ways the Russian people were more equipped to handle the collapse of society because they were not accustomed to the materialism that the consumer societies of the industrialized nations know. We lost the skills to live off the land, to live local and sustainable because we were sucked into the myth of a global economy.

There are people out there who get it and have their hair on fire about many things, from global warming to the craziness of turning a cash economy into a credit and debt based one.

No one up there is listening, believing it can be fixed and we can just resent the calendar and have a redo from the mid 90s for example. WRONG. We have to dismantle most of our institutions and build new ones and use completely different paradigms.

These are very big momentum problems and it appears that those at the controls simply don’t get it or are in denial.

Thank dog I won’t life long enough to see all the suffering to come. I pity the parents (I’m not one) and the children who inherited a world of increasing pain and misery.

Air Conditioning, clothes dryers and sprinkler systems.

Vet bills. I know a thing or two about vet bills. *g* (((Toby)))

My vet has used a family owned mortuary for as long as I can remember. When Gigi died I assumed that I’d have her ashes back in a week or less. When they weren’t I asked the staff about it and discovered that the memorial folks had sold the business, the new owners were holding ashes hostage for higher rates and the vet was using a new service and that it took longer. So I waited, wondering what I was gonna get back and how much more expensive it was going to be. Wednesday morning the staff called and said her ashes were ready to be picked up. In the bag I discovered a beautiful mahogany urn, definitely not your basic cremains container, but no bill. The staff had paid for it all.

Needless to say I made a spectacle of myself standing there with tears streaming down my face. It also helped this jaded old dude regain some faith in mankind.

CNN did an interview with Dr. Johnson for Sanjay Gupta and only this brief piece came out of all the footage they took (she’s at the very end), though they’ve done follow-up and say they’re getting ready to use more of the footage. Christy, you met her when you were in NOLA.

I was watching a bit of the MSNBC coverage on Thursday or Friday morning and I just had to turn it off. Scarborough, Buchanon and Matthews were comparing Reagan and Ted Kennedy and it was giving me a rampant headache.

My “we” has always been a pretty broad swath, but I was brought up that way.

Apathy is easy living in isolation.

Ding.

It goes back to Calvin. My wife was an ordained American Baptist minister and believe me she never preached the gospel of greed from her pulpit either.

Oh, how wonderful, Lindy! So glad the program got a little boost from national media. :)

I also remember this as the beginning of the end for the bush era.

Cindy Sheehan had spent several weeks camped out being ignored by bush.
Then Katrina. The public became so aware of what ‘less government’ really meant as practiced by the bushies.
The incompetence of ‘Brownie’(instead of heck of a job) the total disregard by bush of a state in dire need.

As horrible as Katrina was, no other event showed the American people how delusional, corrupt, and in chaos our country was at that point.
And the person that everybody could/want to have a beer with(Bush) did not give a damn about them or their plight.

Yes!! Clotheslines. The connectors between and among neighbors. Until I moved from David’s and my house, I had outdoor clotheslines. There were two in our neighborhood. Two. And when I hung out clothes, I rarely ever saw anyone else out in their yard.

Good Morning….talk about tears..I’m with you. What a gift.

This is similar to the James Burke show “Connections” which traced seemingly unconnected things and ideas back in time to the supposed origins.

The bigger idea was missed that everything is part of a matrix or web and has many origins so to speak. By his logic global warming can be laid at the doorstep of the first cave dwellers who figured out how to start a fire.

My central ac gets turned on maybe for an hour just to dry up the indoor humidity. Clothes dryer is a cotton line strung around the carport. Yard is watered by rain clouds. I actually know and talk to most of my neighbors.

One measure of a deprived childhood is if there was no one to give he child a living demonstration of the great lifelong pleasures of giving.

I think one can fairly say of many conservatives, they just don’t know what they are missing.

our election lawn signs were enough to, shall we say, alienate many of our new neighbors here in PA.

Pity that, but it’s almost palpable for some of them.

Future historians and psychologists will one day be writting on how large swaths of the American public were in fact suffering from a mental illness.

I must have 10 pages of scratch paper filled trying to get a thank you note just right.

I don’t expect anything to change until we come to grips with who we, as humans really are. As members of sentient beings, humans seem to be the only group to find that life is a problem. Not simply problems in life, but that life itself is a problem. And so we go about trying to solve this “problem” which really doesn’t exist.

So where does it lie? It lies in the ego, which, on the grandest of scales, doesn’t exist! It’s the “me” to which Christy points, but beyond the me or the we, there is the I, which observes but doesn’t judge. Getting in touch with that changes the perspective and the me drops away. Illusions surrounding the consequences of the me drop away.

I remember that show. Excellent.

I don’t know if it got a boost or not. I was more interested in what she had to say, and most of it was missing.

Hopefully they will post the whole interview online at some point. That would be lovely. Let me know if they do, and I’ll link it up.

FWIW, there is a blogger who is in dire need of the single payer health care reform so many here are working for, who should be remembered as well. Theirs is not a comfortable voice to hear sometimes but one that has a quality of being cardinal that is now falling silent. Whenever a spare piece of change is available, Arthur Silber at Powerofnarativecould probably use to survive another bit. Just so folks here will know, thanks for the kindness and consideration.

I still have a “War Is Not The Answer” sign I got from the Quakers back in 05 in my yard. Only once has it been disturbed. They didn’t destroy the sign but did wreck the metal support thingy. I had more so it was back up in a blink. Hasn’t been touched since.

Will do, and thanks.

But, you know…I know you can write…Gigi got such good care. That is alot to be thankful for….

Good Morning all. I’m hardly here anymore due to computer problems and the new job. Using my son’s computer for the second PUAC in a row since mine isn’t working yet. Everytime I come to FDL I get redirected to Gateway after a few seconds. Very frustrating.
As to the topic on hand, community support is visible where I work. One of the young mothers at work has just had the devastating news that her ten month old baby has leukemia. The child will be hospitalized for 3 months (hospital is an hour from home) and the mom has no sick time left after her maternity leave. Co-workers have been donating their vacation days to her so that she can stay on the payroll and be with her baby.

They should have gotten the card yesterday or today but I still have this lingering doubt that I didn’t get it right. Feelings sometimes are so hard to translate into words.

Good morning everyone.

There are a lot of good people who go out and do what they can to change the world. It takes a lot of time to get the word out, and given the limited time and budget that relief folks work with a lot of these people and organization have made the choice to focus on their mission instead.

As a nation, most of our people do not have the intellectual ability or the time to contemplate what we need to be doing as a nation.

One might posit that the dumbing down and turning American to consumer obsessed bots with materialism as the measure of their self worth as a strategy of the upper classes. That sounds conspiratorial, but it also rings true.

See the Century of the Self which explains how we seemed to have headed in the wrong direction.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/d…..self.shtml

For the past quarter century or so I have held Orin Hatch in much less than high regard. But, using my best Orin lingo, “I hafta ta tell ya ” he was pretty good at the Kennedy tribute last night.

The NVC folks have a nice list of feeling words that are clean of judgements.

http://www.cnvc.org/en/learn-o…..-inventory

What can one say hearing that kind of stuff. Having to struggle for your life, not knowing you’re struggling and not being able to comprehend what the struggle is about or what the future might bring. Sad. Kudos to your co-workers.

Of course everyone has to pitch in and no effort is too small. Unfortunately , we need some paradigm shifts in thinking by the society as a whole or these noble efforts, large and small are like putting one’s finger in a dyke to hold back an ocean.

Having spouted off about neighborly apathy, I do need to go on record re some of our neighbors when David died.

Hot dishes? Not so much. They did incredible things for us, for me. Most notably, they completely re-did and made safe and lovely our long, long, curving stairway from the driveway up to the house. Days of work, and some of the workers I barely knew. Meanwhile, their spouses were off to “Let’s Dish!”, one of those places where you prepare multiple yummy entrees and package them up for freezing. I think there were three dozen fabulous dinners, all in one-serving packages. They showed up in a major herd to help me put David’s gardens and the very large yard and pond to sleep for the winter. They shoveled and snow plowed. And given that I was a fair wreck at the time, I needed (and got) all the help I could ever have hoped for.

It’s probably noteworthy that nearly all of my neighbors were Dems. But the most conservative guy in the ‘hood (nicknamed Bubba — no kidding!) was right there, digging in and doing, and given our lawn election signs, my politics were no secret to anyone.

So individually, an amazing neighborhood. But I have seen very little evidence that that caring extends more broadly into the community and the nation. The capacity is definitely there. How to light a fire under essentially decent folks. Aye, there’s the rub.

OT…Why isn’t Barney Frank being considered as Kennedy’s replacement?

My problem is that, at times, they don’t adequately express what I feel in my heart.

I don’t think that he wants to be. He’s in a fairly high position within the House and isn’t predisposed to lose that seniority and start anew in the Senate, is what I’ve heard. But that’s not a 100% positive sourcing..

Barney Frank has a very powerful position in the house. If he were to make it to the senate he would be starting out as a freshman.

I have a little coffee left.

Amy Goodman was scheduled to be in Tampa tonight for the WMNF Peace Awards but the station has just learned that Amy has a family emergency and won’t be here.

(((Amy Goodman)))

Doesn’t it strike anyone how strange it is that humans are the only species on the earth to invent and use instruments of mass destruction?

Einstein once said: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Delurking to share: Speaking of Katrina, this is an interesting article from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (reprinted by ProPublica). Really worth the read but be warned it is very unsettling.

The Deadly Choices at Memorial

http://www.propublica.org/feat…..morial-826

Humans are the only species that fouls the air, fouls the water and destroys fertile ground. Two billion years in the making and we may very well destroy the planet in less than 200 years.

That’s all you can say?

Nah, but I don’t want to hijack the thread.

But I still am not happy to see W on my tv….

Nor I.

Bush looks pissed.

There is no thread appropriate for the comments I am making. So hijack it is.

Krakatoa fouled the atmosphere, earthquakes. ice ages and other natural disturbances destroy, but humans in their ego, can destroy all life as we know it. Against this fact, whether Barny Frank replaces Kennedy (absurd. Barny is no Kennedy and we do not replace each other).

I bring this up now because this is a moment of passage. Do we continue down the path trying to solve the problems we create with the same mindset that created them? Times call for a radical re-assessment of who we are and what we do. I suggest we start with the ego and it’s ramifications for life.

Lisa’s liveblogging the Kennedy Funeral for those interested.

Thanks!

Precisely

Each person is human only to the extent that he or she protects the abused, shuts down the corrupt, sees and honors every soul and spirit, both in living beings and in the seemingly inanimate, but it has not helped at all that the powerful of almost every place and age — the exceptions have been rare — have kept this dictum cloaked, covered, buried, have isolated it from daily life to be preserved as cant rehearsed in church.

Ran across that passage recently in an online novel. Almost bitter, but not quite. Possibly almost true, as well.

How do we change the mindset of those who control much of what is destroying life? I’ll use one example. The owners of the industries that foul the air and the oceans do so in their quest for profit, the accumulation of wealth. Technology to control toxic emissions exists, to a degree. Why aren’t they used? Because the cost will diminish the “return on investment” for shareholders and the outrageous compensation of management. That is indeed their public argument. If their grandchildren are born into a world where few newborns survive, food is an expensive commodity, etc, they couldn’t care less. Their life of luxury is the here and now for them, the future and the consequences of their actions be damned. How then to we change the mindset of the general population to force the changes we need to continue to survive? Carl Sagan once said that one planet was not enough for what he saw as the future. One planet is all we have.

You get it!

Capitalism with its worship of greed and money is the root of all evil so to speak.

We need to free the planet of this destructive force.

Power to the people.

I got it the first time I read Capital and was able to see with my own eyes what Marx was talking about.

Capitalism as a political economy isn’t going anywhere. What would you put in it’s place? A state controlled economy? Sorry, I don’t want to see another USSR.

” I agree that corporations have captured market share in the market and in the political arena. They control, in a weak sense, the politics of nations and the international organizations like the WTO. In a weak sense because they only influence decisions that effect their interests and not broader issues that they are unconcerned with.

That is because corporations are not a ‘team’ like the Soviets or the Catholics are team with a leader and an all encompassing agenda. Corporations are a ‘way’ like Buddhism or the scientific method. The difference is that ‘teams’ have a complete worldview as a primary agenda with specific targets or actions items to accomplish on the path to realizing their worldview. Where ‘ways’ have specific targets or action items as primary agendas that when realized result in a worldview that they never anticipated.

The distinction is somewhat circular as the total control ‘team’ leads to double think while the double think ‘way’ leads to 1984.

-Tim”

I would put in place a system based on democracy and accountability and most importantly fact based and driven by critical decisions for humanity, and the environment.

We have ceded our lives to unfettered free market capitalism which is greed driven.

Communism in the purist sense only provides for the people to all share in the deal – they share – the wealth and the poverty.

Communism is not incompatible with democracy.

Communism is not incompatible with democracy.

I disagree. If we lived in a world society where only items needed for existence, ie, food, clothing, shelter were produced we could conceivably live a purely communistic lifestyle. That is not the reality, however. How do we ensure that the person who cleans the school at night has the wherewithal to acquire the products enjoyed by the school principal? Under a communistic system where would the incentive to become a school principal come from?

For the second time this week I’ve heard FireDogLake mentioned on WMNF. And now Jane is being interviewed by the host of the Women’s Show!! Damn, it’s live!! Hot shit!!! Oops, just lost her. Jane, call the station back. *g*

WMNF. Just click the listen live link at top right. The show will be archived later today and you can catch it again at about the 20 minute mark of the 2nd hours.

20 minute interview with Jane. More time than she gets on teebee.

Hi Christy,

If only the people of Algiers Point heard your message:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K3veQLmhAE

- Tom

“But each time? Whatever feeling of community and connection we briefly held began to ebb as we all went back to our own daily grinds and personal frets. “

Ah, yes…I remember when human compassion was very wide spread and didn’t just pop up whenever there was some kind of tragedy. That was back in the 1950’s. After that compassion seemed to slowly fad away.
The 1950’s has always impressed me because it was a time when many of us felt connected to one another. Income ranges were not so out of wack and greed had not yet been invented.
You also mentioned how we moved away from helping one another and let our governmental agencies do more of that. Again, I see a correlation between big government getting bigger and compassion becoming more rare.

That compassion of which you speak was a leftover of the comming together during WWII. I grew up in that period and experienced it as a common quality. Yet underneath was the current of hostility directed at those not like us, blacks attempting to move into Cicero and such.

To Southern Dragon at 89, let me say: Who bought all the stuff enabling capitalism to thrive? Whose ego is going to be dominant in attempting to defeat it?

That’s my point, and beyond that, I won’t be dragged into a dialog over ego dominance.

We did, each in our own way. I see this as an issue of social consciousness rather than ego dominance.

Thank you.

Social consciousness takes it’s own path depending on what social structure about which we are concerned. Margaret Mead made that quite plain. Our social consciousness is woven with the thread of Puritanism, and sides get taken. There lies the ego connection.

The dissolution of the ego can only be undertaken by the understanding of the unity of opposites. There is no absolute evil or good. We cannot know God’s intention in allowing Nazism, or the Inquisition, to take two examples, until the Plan is completely exposed, and that can only happen when God’s plan has been run completely, if I may use a Judeo/Christian POV.

I wish we could have a conversation about this much more extensively. In my own life, when my ego takes over, I suffer. And my ego will do all it can to try to subvert it’s subsuming by the “I”, that which observes but does not judge.

I don’t know whether this can work, but maybe we need to give it a try. Jesus pointed to it, as did the Buddha, The Tao and other spiritual paths as well.

The Mayans have an expression: “In Lak’ech”, which traslates to “I am another yourself”.

Maybe start there?