Cell Phones and Science Fiction

News from home: This morning my teenage son openly wonders, "Isn't there a rare metal in cell phones?" I proceed to pick up my smartphone and google "rare earth metals in cell phones". We find an article put out by PBS (Public Broadcasting System) titled: "Where to Find Rare Earth Elements." I then take the liberty to read it aloud. I get about three-quarters of the way through and come across this paragraph about those in power's (I had written "our" here) insatiable appetite and search for rare earths:

"Many countries, including the U.S., Australia, India, Brazil, Vietnam, and Russia, are looking for new deposits of their own. Japanese scientists found large amounts of rare earth elements in mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and similar studies have shown they’re also in mud in Jamaica. In the far future, we could even turn to the Moon, which is unusually rich in rare earths."

He stops me, and with wide-eyed disgust says, "My god, it's like a horrible science fiction novel come true."

Thinking Critically, Community Rights, and Corporations

Daniel (15 yrs. old) and I are back at reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" to each other this morning. I can think of 3 powerful quotes that I could pull from today's reading. I'm going to go with this one.

"It is possible to perceive the world such that it makes sense to gas Jews and others at death camps. It is possible to perceive yourself and others such that it makes sense to destroy the planet in order to make money and amass power, to perpetuate and make grow an economic system. None of this is to say these are "wise" choices: It's to say they're choices. It's also to stress once again, how often unquestioned assumptions frame our choices. If we wish to make different choices we must smash the frames that constrain us. We must, if we care about our own lives, and if we care about the life on the planet, begin to remember how to think critically, how to think for ourselves." -- (Pg. 119-120)

I had a couple thoughts related to Community Rights and Corporations this morning.

The first: It occured to me that I'm not against corporations. What I support is once again making corporations subordinate to We The People. A free and sovereign people define and have power over the robots they create. In other words, under the the theory of The United States the corporation was never meant to govern We The People. In my mind, a big reason why the American Revolution was fought was to drive a stake through the heart of the corporation.

The second: What does an authentic win look like for a community fighting a corporate harm? I think an authentic win looks like citizens within the community voting "no", or making a law against the harm being done to them. If a corporation decides to leave because of economic reasons or because of the hassle-factor that is the corporation leaving. You, as a self-governing people have not defined what your values are and codified them into law. Once you have expressed your values into law it's all out there in the open for the next corporation that will be coming in to do the harm.

Do I think this will be easy? No. Do I think it's a magic bullet? No. But I think it's far more effective than fighting corporate harms one at a time. It reminds a lot of whack-a-mole. That is what it looks like for citizens and activists fighting the harms.

We Are The Relationships We Share

Daniel (15 yrs. old) and I are done reading a chapter out of Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" to each other this morning. I look forward to this ritual, especially with this book. I would consider Derrick Jensen one of the most important thinkers and writers of our time. Every teenager should be exposed to the words in "Walking on Water." The sad thing is that barely any will based on the simple fact that we can't stand too much reality. His analysis is so spot on that there is no place for the reader to hide. You're left with having to do something however small about our current collective suicidal path to extinction. Anyway, I was delighted to read this paragraph with him and discuss it.

"A human being is not simply an ego structure in a sack of skin. Human beings, and this is true for all beings, are the relationships they share. My health--emotional, physical, moral--is inextricably intertwined with the quality of these relationships, whether I acknowledge the relationships or not. If the relationships are impoverished, or if I systematically eradicate those beings with whom I pretend I do not have relationships, I am so much smaller, so much weaker. These statements are as true physically as they are emotionally and spiritually." ( Derrick Jensen, pg. 107, Walking on Water

Two things I'd like to mention from Community Right's front:

Another brilliant post by Paul Cienfuegos. This post is full of great ideas for local ordinances to combat climate change and assert a communities right to govern itself.

The Community Right's folks in Oregon are organizing to add a “The Right to Local, Community Self-Government” amendment to their state constitution. They asked that folks who support Community Rights like their Facebook page. The big picture plan is to drive a "The Right to Local, Community Self-Government" into our state and federal constitutions.


 

Hierarchy in School

Back to reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" with my teenage son this morning. I'm glad that I got to read the paragraph below to him. I wish all schools (I know, I know, children don't need schooling. But we're stuck in the myth of Bottom-Line Economics for now) had this in their vision statement. The world would be a different place. And it would've made getting out of bed a whole hell of a lot easier for the majority of my mornings from ages 4 to 18.

"We perceive the entire hierarchy in school exactly opposite to how it really is. You're not here for me, and I'm not here for my supervisor. My supervisor is here to help me, the administrators are here to help him, all the way down the line. 'You' are the reason we're all here. What do you want to do?" (Pg. 96)

Who are you?

The lines below are some of my favorite lines ever written. They are a big reason why I don't send my kids to public school. They are a big reason why I live the way I do. They are a big reason why I resist this culture. I read them to my son last week, and I'm eternally grateful for this. They should be read in high schools across the nation. Ever since first laying my eyes on them I have wanted to type them out so I have quick access to them. Well, this morning, I finally did it. After exactly 30 minutes of typing they are now copied to my computer. It's funny because my book is a signed copy from the author. This morning I noticed he signed his name on 2/19/04. That's almost 11 years to the day. I remember the day I got this book. I pulled up to the mailbox in my pic-up, opened the door, reached in and grabbed it out, then closed the door. I drove up to where I usually park my truck, shut it off, then proceeded to tear off the brown grocery bag paper covering it. I opened the book and didn't get out of my truck until my future wife asked if I was going to come in the house (Life was a little different for me back then). I had to be out there for well over an hour. From where I'm sitting right now I can look out the window that wasn't there at the time and see myself sitting there in the old pic-up that I'd recently bought of my dad reading these revolutionary lines. Gawd, what memories. What a place. It's good to be alive resisting.

Be careful when you read the lines below. You just might do something you never expect to do.

"There's really only one question in life, and only one lesson. This question is whispered endlessly to us from all directions. The moon asks it each night, as do the stars. It's asked by drops of rain that cling to the soft ends of cedar branches, and by teardrops that cluster at the fold of your nose or edge of your mouth. Frogs, flowers, stones, pieces of broken plastic, all ask this of each other, of themselves, and of you. The question: Who are you? The lesson: We're born or sprouted or hatched or congealed or we fall from the sky, we live, and then we die or are worn away or broken or disperse in a river, lake, or sea, ripples flowing outward to bounce back from the far shore. And in the meantime, in that middle, what are you going to do? How are you going to find, and be, who you are? Who are you, and what your going to do about it?

"If modern industrial education--and more broadly industrial civilization--requires 'the subsumption of the individual,' that is, into a pliant workforce, then the most revolutionary thing we can do is follow our hearts, to manifest who we really are. And we are in desperate need of revolution, on all scales and in all ways, from the most personal to the most global, from the most serene to the most wrenching. We're killing the planet, we're killing each other, and we're killing ourselves.

"Our current system divorces us from our hearts and bodies and neighbors, from humanity and animality and embeddedness in the world we inhabit, from decency and even the most rudimentary intelligence. (How smart is it to destroy your own habitat? Who was the genius who came up with the idea of poisoning our own food, water, and air?) I've heard defenders of this system say that following one's heart is not a good enough moral compass, that Hitler was following his heart when he tried to conquer the world, tried to rid the world of those he deemed unworthy. But Hitler was no more following his heart than any of the rest of us who blindly contribute to a culture that is accomplishing what Hitler desired but could not himself bring to completion. The truth is--as I have shown elsewhere, exhaustively and exhaustingly--that is only through the most outrageous violations of our hearts and minds and bodies that we are inculcated into a system where it can be made to make sense to some part of our twisted and torn psyches to perpetuate a way of being based on the exploitation, immiseration, and elimination of everyone and everything we can get our hands on.

"Within this context, the question the whole world asks at every moment cannot help but also be the most dangerous: Who are you? Who are you, really? Beneath the trappings and traumas that clutter and characterize our lives, who are you, and what do you want to do with the so-short live you've been given? We could not live the way we do unless we avoided that question, forced others to avoid placing that question in front of us, and in fact attempted to destroy those who do.

"As we see." (Derrick Jensen, Pg. 41-42, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution)

Apologies

Well over a decade ago I had a friend out of the blue come up to me and apologize.

"We blew it." He started out. "It was the moment we could have changed things for the better. People were organized and energized, and we blew it. I apologize to you for that. I apologize that you have inherited this horrible economic and political system, and world that is systematically being destroyed."

"No problem." I said uncomfortably and sort of surprised.

It was a few years after George W. Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court to be President of The United States. My friend came of age in the sixties, at the height of one of this countries most revolutionary moments. He watched Martin Luther King march on our nation's capital with 50,000 people, Malcolm X shot dead on a stage, Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, elected as our State's Governor then move on to the United States Senate, Federal clean air and water standards enacted, etc.

At the time I thought he was being tough on himself. Why should he shoulder his generation's shortcomings? I thought. Then, over a decade later while reading to my teenage son this morning, I unexpectedly read this paragraph to him:

"I want to apologize, just as people in the generation before mine should have apologized to me, for the wreckage of a world we're leaving you. The people of my generation are passing on to you the social patterns and structures, the ways of being and thinking, the physical artifacts themselves that are killing the planet. We're blowing it, badly, and you'll suffer for it. I'm so very sorry." (Derrick Jensen apologizing to an auditorium full of students at an all boys boarding school, Pg. 50, Walking on Water)

Shortly afterwards it all came together for me, and I apologized to my son. In a couple years he will be entering an economic and poltical system that is far worse than it was when I entered it in 1992. And a world with far less diversity.



　

　

　

The Warrior and American Sniper

I decided to take my 15 year old son to see American Sniper. I don't go to the theatre or watch movies at home very often, so I surprised myself. Movies in general just don't interest me, or maybe it's just I don't feel like I have the time for them. But after listening to a hour long discussion on NPR about the movie, some lines by James Hillman came to me: There is a love and beauty in war that many of us don't want to see. And if we want to oppose war we have to go to war ourselves in our hearts and minds. We must imagine into the hearts of our enemy (All paraphrased).

Then I started second guessing myself, so I thought I'd better consult one of my elders and mentors. I pulled Robert Bly's "Iron John" off the the shelf and opened up to the chapter on Warriorship. This quote sealed it:

"We can all add further details to the account I've given of the decline from warrior to soldier to murderer, but it is important to notice the result. The disciplined warrior, made irrelevant by mechanized war, disdained and abandoned by the high-tech culture, is fading in American men. The fading of the warrior contributes to the collapse of civilized society. A man who cannot defend his own space cannot defend women and children. The poisoned warriors called drug lords prey primarily on kingless, warriorless boys.

"And it all moves so swiftly. The massive butcheries of 1915 [World War I] finish off the disciplined or outward warrior, and then within thirty years, the warriors inside Western men begin to weaken. The double weakening makes us realize how connected the outer world and the inner world are, how serious the events of history are." (Pg. 156, Iron John)

It's an interesting thought that part of the reason civilization is collapsing is because there aren't many warriors around to protect women and children. It brings up the question, at least in our house, what does it mean to be a warrior? I look forward to going to the movie and the discussion afterwards.

 

Music and Schoolwork

Daniel (15yrs. old) says to me, as we're sitting at the kitchen table with books and computers listening to the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, "I bet there aren't many kids that get to do their school work and listen to drug induced music." I laughed, then said, "One time I had a history teacher named Mr. Posselt. He was heavily influenced by the sixties, never married, led guided hunts in Minnesota, lived as a beggar, coached wrestling and football, taught your aunties, uncles, and grandparents, grew up in Antigo, and so on. Every Friday he'd let us move our desks wherever we wanted, shut all the lights off, and we'd listen to drug induced music for the hour. He called it Moments of Enrichment. His number one rule was: No Dope!

"Dad?" he interrupts and asks, "Do you think he'd stand with Scott Walker?" I laughed my ass off.

Reading, Writing, And Revolution With My Son

I'm once again grateful this morning for the opportunity to sit down at the kitchen table with my teenage son and read to each other Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution." Given that he's working on writing a novel and generally likes to write I couldn't think of a better book to read at the moment. I would recommend this book be required reading for all 16 year olds. It would also be a part of my adult bookstore and my class on revolution that ...I fantasize about nearly everyday. Hey, a guy could be having much worse fantasies. Anyway, it was a pleasure to read these lines to him:

"Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, 'Power. If I've got power or authority over someone, it's my responsibility to use that only to help them. It's my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are. But if I see someone misusing power to harm someone else, it's just as much my responsibility to stop them, using whatever means necessary.'"--Derrick Jensen, Pg. 17

A lot of people over the years have criticized Derrick Jensen for advocating violence in his writing. After all he has made the claim that we have to take down civilization if we want a planet for our children to live on. But I consider him to be an "everything on the table" type of guy. He advocates talking openly and honestly about the dire situation we are in (political, economic, ecological, spiritual, psychological) and all of the strategies we can use to improve the situation. I have no problem with that. And if the difficult subjects of sabotage and violence and such come up I have no problem with that either. You don't get anywhere, I think, burying your head in the sand. The things that you're burying your head about come back and bite you, like violence and war. We are born with violence and war in our souls. That's part of our inheritance as human beings when we come into this world. It's archetypal and given to us in the womb. It's part of the cosmos.

That's the truth as I see it right now. I'm glad my son and I can talk openly and honestly about it.

Why Is Food A Commodity?

Back to reading "My Ishmael" with my teenage son this morning. Right now this is probably one of the highlights of my day. I take great pleasure in doing this. Out of all the things I can pass on to him Ishmael's teachings are probably one of the most important.

After reading two chapters with him today I have to ask: What guy came up with the bright idea to make a food a commodity? I remember first watching Daniel Quinn's "Food Production and Population Growth" video and him making the comment about doctors being paid to deliver babies. His point went was doctors don't get paid by the pound to deliver a baby. Likewise, why do farmers have to get paid by the pound to produce food. Can't their services fall under the category of service? I had the hardest time with that point when I first heard it, and I still do to this day. Having been conditioned for close to 25 years to imagine there is no other way to be paid for food production, is a hard habit to break out even if it is only an act of imagination.

Unschooling The World With My Teenage Son

Started off my morning reading "My Ishmael" with my 15 year old son. We managed to get a chapter read before the house became to chaotic. That chapter's title was: "Unschooling the World." It's still as fresh and vital as it was when I read it back in my mid-twenties (I'm going to be 40 in a couple of months!) This time there isn't as much hope, though. There is a lot more grief this time around. Why? I imagine it's because things just haven't changed fast enough. 15 years after I first read it we value buisness over people to an even greater degree than we did at the turn of the century. If this wasn't the case corporations would not have free speech rights and be allowed to flood political campaigns with money. Scott Walker wouldn't be touring the central part of Wisconsin thanking God and glaciers for all of the jobs created by the frac-sand they left us.

Beyond The Playground Fence

"Schooling of any kind is unnecessary and counterproductive in human children." Daniel Quinn, Pg. 166

My sister recently inspired me to go back and reread the chapter titled, Unschooling The World out of "My Ishmael." That chapter helped me understand why as a boy I always wondered what was beyond the fence that surrounded South Beaver Dam school's playground. And why I entertained the fantasy of me and a few friends packing up a some clothes, matches, and primitive weapons and spending a couple of nights next to a campfire under the stars. Perhaps James Hillman is right, the heart imagines its way out of things

All Learning is Remembering

I learned yesterday in a talk by Michael Meade that "all learning is remembering." What I'm hearing him say is that if you want to learn there has to be some remembering involved. In other words, the knowledge is already there it is just needs to be awakened. It's also interesting to note that in The Story of B Daniel Quinn titled one section The Great Forgetting and followed up later with a section titled The Great Remembering. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that if any schooling program isn't aimed at remembering then all it is doing is putting kids and adults to sleep and it isn't worth the taxpayers money. The Quote below out of The Story of B better illustrates some aspects of this remembering.

"B means to gather the voices of humans all over planet into one voice singing, 'The world must live, the world must live! We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies. The age of The Great Forgetting has ended, and all its lies and delusions have been dispelled. Now we remember who we are. Our kin are not cherubim, seraphim, thrones, principalities, and powers. Our kin are mayflies, lemurs, snakes, eagles, and badgers. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has abated, so we no longer imagine that Man was ill-made. We no longer imagine that the gods botched their work when it came to us. We no longer think they know how to make every single thing in the whole vast universe except a human being. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has passed, so we can no longer live as though nothing matters but us. We can no longer believe that suffering is the lot the gods hand in mind for us. We can no longer believe that death is sweet release to our true destiny. We no longer yearn for the nothingness of nirvana. We no longer dream of wearing crowns of gold in the royal court of heaven.'"--Pg. 324, The Story of B

No Need To School

For a couple of days now I have been trying to come up with a post to express my frustration with other homeschooling parents that I've come into contact with in my community. Why? Over the years every parent I've talked to assumes that we keep our kids out of public school based on Christian values. In other words, they think that we think there needs to be more Christianity taught in our schools. That's not the case. And here is where I think my frustration is coming from: I don't think children need to be schooled (Daniel Quinn convinced me of this back in the late nineties), but I never say it. That would be blasphemy. And I think it would open up can of worms that I don't want opened.

"I'm not in the least favor of home schooling, Julie. It's not merely linguistic whimsy that connects the schooling of children with the schooling of fish. Schooling of any kind is unnecessary and counterproductive in human children. Children no more need schooling at age five or six or seven or eight than they need it age two or three, when they effortlessly perform prodigies of learning. In recent years parents have seen the futility of sending their children to regular schools, and the schools have replied by saying, 'Well, all right, we'll permit you to keep your children at home, but of course you understand that your children still must be schooled, you can't just trust them to learn what they need to learn. We'll check up on you to make sure you're not just letting them learn what they need to learn but are learning what our state legislators and curriculum writers think they should learn.' At age five or six home schooling might be a lesser evil than regular schooling, but after that it's hardly even a lesser evil. Children don't need schooling. They need access to what they want to learn--and that means they need access to the world outside the home."-- Daniel Quinn, Pg.166, My Ishmael

Children and History

"I do endorse the teaching of everything, because everything is what children want to know. What children very deeply want to know of history is HOW THINGS GOT TO BE THIS WAY--but no one in your culture would think of teaching them that. Instead they're overwhelmed with ten million names, dates, and facts they 'should' know, but that vanish from their heads the moment they're no longer needed to pass a test. It's like handing a thousand-page medical text to a four-year old who wants to know where babies come from." -- Daniel Quinn, pg.148, My Ishmael

The Schooling Question

Our kids don't go to school. When asked about it I usually say we homeschool our kids. From now on I'm going to differentiate and tell them we unschool.

I have to admit unschooling is tough to deal with at times. The very idea of allowing our children to follow their nose in their pursuit of learning can be frightening. Being a parent who has spent close to 14 years in the public compulsory schooling system probably has something to do with it. Given that most adults around me keep telling me that kids need structure and schooling probably has something else to do with it. Of course, there's the fact that my grandma was a grade school teacher who grew up during The Great Depression and came of age during The New Deal may be a factor too...

Daydreaming, Kids, and Homeschooling

A good article HERE on daydreaming. If I can give my kids one thing hopefully it is enough time to daydream. Now that I think of it that is one of the main reasons why we homeschool or unschool.

Thank you to Naturalawareness.net for sharing this.

Do Schools Work?

"Our entire program [ Compulsory Schooling] is based on this argument: 'We know kids learn effortlessly if they have their own reasons for learning, but we can't wait for them to find their own reasons. We have to provide them with reasons that are not their own. This doesn't work, but it's the only practical way to organize our schools.

"What? How would I organize the schools? To ask this question presupposes that we must have schools, doesn't it? I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn't work, they don't say, 'Well, we must have valves, so let's try two valves.' If a valve doesn't work, they say, 'Well, what would work? Their rule is, if it doesn't work, don't do it more, do something else.

"We know what works for children up to the age where we ship them off to school: Let them be around you, pay attention to them, give them access to as much as you can, let them try things, and that's it. They'll take care of the rest. You don't have to strap small children down and teach them to speak, all you have to do is talk to them. You don't have to give them crawling lessons or walking lessons or running lessons. You don't have to spend an hour a day showing them how to bang two pots together, they'll figure that out all by themselves--if you give them access to the pots."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 121, Providence

Einstein and Fairy Tales

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."--Albert Einstein

I think Einstein is onto something here. Living the life of an homeschooling/unschooling parent has taken me into to the world of fairy tales. Growing up I heard very little of fairy tales after 6 or 7 years old.

Rumi, Robert Bly, and Manners

We had a homeschooling moment this morning. My 13 year old son and I were talking about manners so I pulled out this poem by Rumi. I read it and played the Robert Bly reading. It's worth taking the 3 minutes to watch him read it. He's an amazing man.

It's also interesting to note that Rumi is President Obama's favorite poet. To me, that says a lot about the man and his faith. And I'm not implying that President Obama is a closet Muslim. My thinking is that he is a devoted Christian that enjoys reading ecstatic poetry because it's not available to him through his faith. Robert Bly claims that Christianity threw out its ecstatic tradition close 1500 years ago. That's also why Rumi is the most popular poet in America. It's just not available to us anywhere else.