Health Care and The Post Office

I worked for the post office yesterday. While I was sorting mail a few of us got into a dicussion about universal health care. One of the guys said "but you realize we're going to have to pay for that." This takes me back to an excerpt out of a blog post I read before going to work.

"It is utterly ridiculous that any adult cannot figure out the obvious inequity of this nation and American capitalism, where an elite one percent of the people grab 45% of the national pie. Such a conditioned stupidity and powerlessness makes you want to cry for your country." Joe Bageant

The top 1% of the income bracket can pay for it.

When are we going to start talking about the wealth gap in America?

Letter to the Editor 7/20/09

I wrote a letter to our local newspaper's editor this week.

Honesty

It was refreshing to read "Oil Prices Rising and as Supply Falls", by Dave Thomas from The Ashland Daily Press last week. It was especially refreshing to read this line at the end of his article: "As Oil prices climb higher, let's hope we find a third mode to address the challenges ahead. A good place to start would be to re-localize our food and energy production and scale down our community size to stay within local carrying capacity. It will happen anyway--through responsible planning, personal change, and careful transition, or through complaceny, panic, and crisis."

He's right, our civilization is collapsing. Of course, looking back at the history of civilizations in the past all of them eventually do. The question is: what are we going to do about it? Mr. Thomas's letter clearly and honestly states the issues that we have to address if we want this collapse to be less painful than others have been in the past. I'm glad he wrote it. I hope to see more like it printed in The Spooner Advocate.

If I could find the link to the article that I responded to I'd post it.

It was nice to see issues like: human overpopulation, carrying capacity, Peak Oil, local economies, and food production addressed in our local newspaper. Although I was hoping the author would've mentioned civilization. Those problems he talked about that need to be addressed are all symptoms of civilization, for the most part.

Grunting

I'm interested in writing and writers. It all started with Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. Before reading Ishmael I could have cared less about writing and writers. I read one book before the age of 25, and that was Night, by Elie Wiesel.

The past year or so I've been following Micheal Perry. He's a writer from Wisconsin. Lives about 2 hours to the south of me in a little town called New Auburn. He's been writing for about 20 years now and has a few books published.

Every writer has a process. Micheal says his process is a lot like grunting. He just puts it all down and then organizes and edits and organizes and edits until it looks good.

I like that idea and that's what I've been doing lately. Not nearly enough of it though. It's probably a combination of thinking I don't have anything important to say, lack of grammatical and technical writing skills, and putting myself out there.

I enjoy it when I do it though.

Weaving

Just some notes here. Lately I've been reading various works by Vine Deloria. He's wise. Take this quote for example:

Now, every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people must be to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others. Because of hierarchies, European thinkers have not performed their proper social function. Instead, science and philosophy have taken the path already taken by Western religion and mystified themselves. The people who occupy the top positions in science, religion, and politics have one thing in common: they are responsible for creating a technical language incomprehensible to the rest of us, so that we will cede to them our right and responsibility to think. They, in turn, formulate a set of beautiful lies that lull us to sleep and distract us from our troubles, eventually depriving us of all rights - including, increasingly, the right to a livable world.

This takes me back to this excerpt out the Story of B:

"Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness." Pg. 136

Daniel Quinn goes on to explain how animism finds truth in the universe in a language that most people can understand. He has brought "wisdom back into the community and made it available to others." I'm really glad that he took the time to do this. He is wise too.

How's that for simplicity?

MP3 Recording of Jensen Interview

Someone on a message board that I belong to listened to the interview and recorded it. You can contact them at panopticsort[at]gmail[dot]com to receive a link where you can download the mp3 to it. Don't worry I asked them for permission to do this so they won't be surprised to hear from you.

Good Interview

For those interested the interview on WOJB went well with Derrick. So well they are seriously considering having him on atleast once a month to continue the conversation.

I can't help but think about these words by Daniel Quinn when it comes to Derrick's work, "Derrick Jensen sees as clearly as I do the disastrous impact the Taker Thunderbolt is having on our planet."

In my community there is a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding the disastrous impact Takers are having on the planet. It's a relief to have Derrick on our local radio station helping us understand this. Now all that WOJB needs to do is set up a monthly conversation with Daniel Quinn and this community member will be a happy camper.

Derrick Jensen and WOJB

I'm excited. I recently found out that Derrick Jensen will be a guest on our local radio station. I've been waiting awhile. I first suggested they have him on about five years ago now. I'm glad there were others that did the same, usually it takes more than one person's suggestion (like the show host's good friend) to make something like this happen.

I talked to the show host for a few minutes this morning. He was excited about the interview. He mentioned that he's agreed with Derrick's premises privately for a couple of years now. He also mentioned the conversation that was going on over at Orion's website concerning Derrick's article titled World at Gunpoint in the magazine's May/June issue. He said it would be great to have that conversation continued on his show. He hopes to have many local and internet listeners calling in.


Here is the description of the show:

Monday, July 6
At 10:00AM CDST Derrick Jensen will talk about his book What We Leave Behind on WOJB-88.9FM Reserve, Wisconsin with the station's Public Affairs Director Eric Schubring. The live broadcast will be available to internet listeners at www.wojb.org. Listeners will be invited to join the conversation at 800-776-3689 or 715-634-2100.

WOJB-88.9FM broadcasts from the Lac Courte Orielles (pronounced La-Coo-Dah-Ray) Ojibwa Reservation in northwest Wisconsin. The 100-thousand watt radio station was established in 1982 and remains the only Native American owned and operated radio station east of the Mississippi. Beginning with its first broadcasts WOJB has been recognized as a source for information on peace, justice, environment and equity issues as well as an eclectic mix of music.

Poverty and The Post Office

So I'm at the post office the other day filling for the full-time mail carrier. While I was sorting mail the other carrier and I got to talking about how she and her group were raising money for a mission trip to Lake Atitlan in Guatamala. I mentioned that I've read a few books by a shaman from there. And he wrote that Lake Atitlan was one of the most beautiful places on earth. She wholeheartedly agreed and happily added the people were much happier than we in the United States are. Than all of a sudden the expression on her face changed and she got to telling me that how she couldn't believe how much poverty is there. Her reaction to the Guatamalan's poverty reminded me of what my grandmother use to look like when I would attempt to sit on her furniture with muddy pants.

I came to the conclusion to what their mission trip was about: fighting poverty in Guatamala. The next day I had half the notion to show her Marshall Sahlin's anthropological perspective on poverty:

"The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization."

I left the book at home and let it pass.

Labor Saving Devices

"Men have become the tools of their tools."--Henry David Thoreau


"We spend more time working for our labor-saving devices than they do working for us."--Ed Abbey

"By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed." --Lewis Mumford

Don't Look

This morning I'm thinking about passing through the door backwards, avoiding responsibility, telling lies to ourselves and each other, believing in fantasies, lifting ourselves up above the earth, denial, etc...

"Everyone is looking down, and it's obvious that the ground is rushing up toward you--and rushing up faster every year. Basic ecological and planetary systems are being impacted by the Taker Thunderbolt, and that impact increases in intensity every year. Basic, irreplaceable resources are being devoured every year--and they're being devoured more greedily every year. Whole species are disappearing as a result of your encroachment--and they're disappearing in greater numbers every year. Pessimists--or it may be that they're realists--look down and say, 'Well, the crash may be twenty years off or maybe as much as fifty years off. Actually it could happen anytime. There's no way to be sure.' But of course there are optimists as well, who say, 'We must have faith in our craft. After all, it has brought us this far in safety. What's ahead isn't doom, it's just a little hump that we can clear if we all just pedal a little harder. Then we'll soar into a glorious, endless future, and the Taker Thunderbolt will take us to the stars and we'll conquer the universe itself.' But your craft isn't going to save you. Quite the contrary, it's your craft that's carrying you toward catastrophe. Five billion of you pedaling away--or ten billion or twenty billion--can't make it fly. It's been in free fall from the beginning, and that fall is about to end." ISHMAEL (pages 105-110)

"The point is that in order to maintain these lies--that we are really flying, that we can exploit a landbase (or planet) and live on it, and so on--we must keep pushing away physical reality, and we must keep telling ourselves these lies again and again. The maintenance of these lies is incredibly expensive psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, physically, financially, morally, ecologically, and so on." Derrick Jensen in WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND, pg. 209

Of course this leads to understanding what the basic laws of ecology are and what the law of life is.

The Machine

I've been reading Derrick Jensen's What We Leave Behind and Welcome to the Machine.

"Machinery is the new Messiah,"--Henry Ford

We live in a machine age. To maintain prosperity we must keep the machines working, for when machines are functioning men can labor and earn wages. The good citizen does not repair the old; he buys anew. The shoes that crack are to be thrown away. Don't patch them. When the car gets crotchety, haul it to the town's dump. Give to the ashman's oblivion the leaky pot, the broken umbrella, the clock that doesn't tick. To maintain prosperity we must keep those machines going."--Richardson Wright

Want

"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith, scholar of religious studies

Looking for Answers

Ever since I read Ishmael I've been looking for answers as to why the world is so messed up. Actually I have been wondering about this since I've been a child. It's funny, because when I read Ishmael I pretty much had the attitude that this is just the way things are, so deal with it and try to find some happiness in this life. Ishmael brought those important childhood questions back up to the surface again, and I'm happy for it.

One of the places I find myself looking for answers is Derrick Jensen's work. I can't tell you how many times I've found myself thumbing through his books looking for quotes. And this excerpt out of A Language Older Than Words has been on my mind lately. I said before I was going to write more on this blog, so I'm going to make myself do it, even if I am copying quotes.

Derrick asks: "Why is our behavior so predatory? What are the common factors among predatory cultures?"

"It's interesting," [Judith Hermann] responded. "The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sunday looked at data from over a hundred cultures as to the prevalence of rape, and divided them into high or low-rape cultures. She found that high-rape cultures are highly militarized and sex-segregated. There is a lot of difference in status between men and women. The care of children is devalued and delegated to subordinate females. She also found that the creation myths of high-rape cultures recognize only a male deity rather than a female deity or a couple. When you think about it, that is rather bizarre. It would be an understandable mistake to think women make babies all by themselves, but it's preposterous to think men do that alone. So you've got to have a fairly elaborate and counterintuitive mythmaking machine in order to fabricate a creation myth that recognizes only a male deity."

The rest of the quote is what really interests me.

"There was another interesting finding, which is that high-rape cultures had recent experiences--meaning in the last few hundred years--of famine or migration. That is to say, they had not reached a stable adaptation to their ecological niche. Sadly enough, when you tally the risk factors, you realize you've pretty much described our culture." Pg. 350

This tells me that we all need to start paying attention to our relationships with nonhumans. That's if we want to stop the cycle of abuse in this culture.

Letter to the Editor

My letter to the editor was printed in this weeks edition of The Spooner Advocate. Looking at it now I don't know if I like it. This seems to happen with almost everything I write.

Lately my letters have been focused on laying out reasons why people resist this culture and why they are working for a better world to live in. People doing this work are criticized just for simply doing the work. It's crazy. Anyway, I'll post the letter below.

New Ideas


I have a few questions about this statement in last week’s article titled “Not so cool” by James Lewis “Man-made global warming is again presented as settled science…” When have scientists ever sat down and agreed on anything? Am I hearing you say that citizens and their governments should do nothing about global warming until science settles the matter?

When wondering about those questions one only needs to turn the famous German physicist Max Planck. He had this to say about new and important ideas in science: “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over its opponents…what does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.”

Mr. Lewis stated in his letter that 30,000 scientists at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine have all agreed “man-made global warming is speculative at best and flatly wrong at worst.” Of course, on the other side of the spectrum, there are many scientists that say the planet will continue to warm no matter what we do. We have exceeded the global warming tipping point, and in the near future we’ll be facing a sudden biological die off. Which of course means that we will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs: extinction. The story of Homo sapien will be over. Time will tell which group of scientists hits closer to the mark.

I do know this though. If anyone would have written into this paper 60 years ago and said we might be facing extinction they most likely would have been laughed at. This isn’t the case nowadays. This alone is an indicator to me that not only scientists are starting to realize that we cannot continue to do what we are doing to this planet and not suffer the consequences, but so are common folk. So I don’t know if I would be so quick to label folks concerned about global warming as “alarmists”. I’d lean more towards viewing them sort of the way Planck viewed scientists with new ideas: a growing generation of people genuinely concerned about our future as a species on this planet. This new generation has been gaining steam since Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” back in 1962, and they’re using the tools that are available to them (legislation being one of them) to make sure future generations have a planet to live on.

Time will tell if we can legislate ourselves to sustainability. Personally, I think it’s going too take much more then that.

Writing

I would like to think and write with more clarity. I've had the burning desire to do this for quite some time now, it's just that I never actually sit down and take the time to do it. I've got a lot going on: bills to pay, mouths to feed, cars to maintain, and so on. But it still feels like I need to do it. So I'm going to gradually start putting more effort into writing.

Besides the obligations that I listed above that stand in my way of spending more time writing, there is always the peristant thoughts that readers will dislike my writing or that I'm wasting their time. Awhile back I ran across a line in Zinsser's On Writing Well that speaks to this:

"You are writing for yourself, don't try and visualize the mass audience."

I'm going to take Zinsser's advice. I'm going to treat this as a process of self discovery and see where it takes me.

John Taylor Gatto and Wisconsin Public Radio

Yesterday, over the airwaves of Wisconsin Public Radio, I had the opportunity to ask John Taylor Gatto two questions: 1.What is the role of public schooling in keeping children and young adults off the job market? 2.What do you think about President Obama wanting to spend more money on education? You can hear his answers HERE.

After listening to John it's clear why compulsory schooling doesn't work for the majority of students.

Letters to Local Newspaper

This past month I have sent in two letters to our local newspaper. I'm beginning to think a lot of people in my community have forgotten that we exist in a class based power structure.

The Pyramid

In this system money is a stand-in for power. Corporations and individuals with a lot of money get to plan and dictate the political and economic policies of this country. I don't know of many people who would argue with this. And it's because of this simple fact that I'm always surprised to see people spending more time and energy on criticizing citizen groups like Washburn County First instead of corporations or individuals with a lot of wealth and power.

Corporations and individuals with power will not give up their power without a fight. Wal-Mart is one of the most powerful corporations in the world. So why are most of us are complaining about losing the opportunity to buy cheap products and work at a low wage job?

Perhaps the question we should be asking is what kind of system would allow a corporation like Wal-Mart to accumulate so much wealth and power. And isn't this what groups like Washburn County First are doing in their own way? What happened to the revolutionary spirit this country was founded on?

This takes me back to the spotted owl problem of the early nineties when I was a logger. People were complaining that since they were closing down spotted owl habitat to logging operations, loggers were losing jobs. Not once did I hear anyone complain how advances in logging technology cost loggers their jobs. Well, close to 20 years later I understand why.

High technology enables the centralization of power. In other words, a select few individuals and corporations accumulate a lot of money and power because it's cheaper for them to hire machines to do the work humans could do. Our system fulfills the needs of our machines, and therefore those in power, more effectively and efficiently than it fulfills the needs of human beings (unless of course your needs are the same as a machine). Systems that are designed this way are volatile and don't last long. Period. Why we let allow it to continue is beyond me.

We live in a pyramid shaped power structure. As the economy continues to collapse and the number of people at the bottom of the pyramid continues to grow daily it's time we start asking why there are so few with so much at the top of the pyramid and so many with so little at the bottom. After all, there are more of us than there are of them.

---

Understanding

Last week, in his article titled "Philosophy: Forgotten in our schools?" Spooner High School student Nick Prete asked this question: So should our teachers focus more on introducing the hunger for learning into or students?
Teachers need to tell their students the truth about what students need to become successful outside the world of schooling. The answer is: power. And in our society money is a stand in for power. As Derrick Jensen (A philosopher and teacher himself) has stated in his amazing book "Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution":

"We hear, more or less constantly, that schools are failing in their mandate. Nothing could be more wrong. Schools are succeeding all too well, accomplishing precisely their purpose. And what is their primary purpose. To answer this, ask yourself first what society values most. We don't talk about it much, but the truth is that our society values money above all else, in part because, as is also true of power, it gives us the illusion that we can get what we want."

Of course we all pay dearly for this physically, spiritually, mentally and emotionally (How many people do you know on anti-depressants?). As Jensen goes on to say "But one of the costs of following money is that in order to acquire it, we so often have to give ourselves away to whomever has money to give in return. Bosses, corporations, men with nice cars, women with power suits. Teachers. Not that teachers have money, but in the classroom they have what money elsewhere represents: power. We live in a culture that is based on the illusion—and schooling is central to the creation and perpetuation of this illusion--that happiness lies outside of us, and specifically in the hands of those who have power.

"Throughout our adult lives, most of us are expected to get to work on time, to do our boss's bidding (as she does hers, and he is, all the way up the line), and not to leave till the final bell has rung. It is expected that we will watch the clock, counting seconds till five o'clock, till Friday, till payday, till retirement, when at last our time will again be our own, as it was before we began kindergarten, or preschool, or daycare. Where do we learn to do all of this waiting?" pg.5-6

It has been my experience that understanding this is all one needs to kindle the flames of learning.

---

No one responded to either of those.

Dialogue From Facebook.

I've been involved in an interesting dialogue over on Facebook about issues surrounding our way of life that I'm moving over here. Below is the latest response:

Rob wrote: "This is a toughy. I appreciate the point regarding primitive tribes. I believe that one of "civilized man's" biggest mistakes has to be in the attempt to indoctrinate those they believe to be less than "civilized" into a culture they believe to be in fact "civilized." You have pointed out one of the tremendous flaws in the endeavor, that being that primitive tribes are essentially happy with the way they are and never did require "intervention," regardless of the intent. Evolution is not always pretty though. (As a side note, this is my primary issue with missionaries - and I generally wince at the term "primitive," though I understand the context here - English is extremely limited in it's allowance for variety in cultures)

"You've raised a number of issues, and I've just touched on one, and I want to get to the work issue, but I keep running out of room. Annie says you have a blog? Where is it?"

Sense of Urgency

I have felt a sense of urgency for quite some time now. Actually ever since I read "Ishmael", which has been close to ten years now. I ran across these words in "Pornography and Silence", by Susan Griffin that I think explains the mechanics behind this sense of urgency I feel every morning.

To make the heart retreat long enough so that the body, which perhaps has reached a fever pitch, can “release” sensation. And yet we must not be too quick to believe that this “urgency,” and this “release,” this fever pitch, this demandingness, belong to the body alone. For the separation between the body and mind is unnatural. The body speaks the language of the soul. In the body’s fevered longing is perhaps a deep desire for that part of the self which has been sacrificed, a desire for that self to come to consciousness, to be remembered. For an experience of the heart is also an experience of the mind. The body and heart cry out like a long neglected child, pleading, “Pay attention to me.” pg. 86

Upheaval

Ever since I ran across this comment by John Trudell it has stuck with me.

Question: Is the writing a complete spiritual source for you?

Trudell's Answer: "I hadn't thought of it in those terms. But I just know it makes me feel better. What surprises me is people will say to me what they get out of these songs, they get this or they get that or it helped them in some kind of a way. It's always kind of a surprise to me because everything came out of desperation and confusion, ya know, it came out of all the turmoil. So if there's a positive effect for people, I'm really glad because it validates what I'm doing in many ways. But again it's not something I can sit down and say "Well, I set out to do this." In a way I set out to purge it out of me. Jackson called it "upheaval" one time. And in a way that's really true. It's like an upheaval and I'm just purging this stuff. When I first started writing, that's what it was. Realistically, when I first started it was a therapy. Not that it was a conscious therapy. I knew I had to write, you know, I had to do something. It was either write or kill or do something, and I thought, well writing is better."

This morning I'm full of upheaval. And there are times when I'm so full of upheaval that I have to purge it out of myself onto the pages of my notebook or the internet.

When I find myself in this place of upheaval I am glad about one thing: I don't blame this upheaval on myself anymore (Thank you Ishmael)It's not me, it's the god damn culture that I'm a part of. It's not changing fast enough for me. What I mean by that is friends, family, neighbors, and local writers very rarely talk about the problems we face as a culture. And that takes me back to R.D Laing's three rules of a dysfunctional family.

"I don't think there really is anything even remotely resembling academic freedom or freedom of discourse within the culture. I keep thinking about RD Laing's 3 rules of a dysfunctional family, which are also the 3 rules of a dysfunctional culture. Rule A is Don't. Rule A.1 is Rule A does not exist. Rule A.2 is Never discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, or A.2. The way this plays out within an abusive family structure is that the members can talk about anything they want except for the violence they must pretend isn't happening. The way this plays out on the larger social scale is that we can talk about whatever we want--we can have whatever 'academic' or 'journalistic' 'freedom' we want--so long as we don't talk about the fact that this culture is based on systematic violence, and has been from the beginning. Anyone who's been paying any attention at all for the last 200 years knows that the United States is based on systematic violence. We live on land stolen from Indians. The economy runs on oil stolen from people the world over. The entire economy is based on conquest and theft. It's no wonder most of the people in the world hate the U.S. But of course we can't talk about that. Anyone who does talk about that and is noticed must be silenced as quickly as possible."

Source


I told Annie this morning that we can unschool Daniel, work on becoming mortgage free, learn our local plants, eat local foods, and write letters to the editor. But, you know what? Our efforts may be fun, fullfilling and nourishing, but none if it does a damn bit of good if the people around us don't really give a shit. The culture will continue on it's path of ecological destruction. And this takes me back to this excerpt out of the same interview with John Trudell.

"For an individual to take responsibility, because the individual leads to the collective, for an individual to take responsibility, I think we should always tell ourselves the truth. We should never lie to ourselves. Some of the most dangerous lies are the lies of rationalization and justification. We should always tell ourselves the truth. We should always be real with ourselves, even if our truths are glorious or shameful. Even if it's things we do that we don't like doing, we should always be truthful to ourselves about what we're doing. Because if we cannot be real to ourselves, then we will not be real in the world. And that's just the way it is."

When do we plan on starting to tell the truth about what were doing here as a culture?