Guru Danger

It seems to me that there are real dangers in following a teacher who is dead. It seems to me that there are real dangers in following a teacher (guru) who is alive. The mitigating factor in either scenario must be a sound moral compass. That has to be the deal.

The case against dead teachers is self evident. A follower can go way off the track and there is no one to bring her back to center. The words handed down can be mistranslated or badly distorted or actually lied about or manipulated by self serving followers. I shouldn't insult your intelligence with familiar examples, but I will. I recently heard a preacher on a Jesus radio station extorting his flock to get revenge about something. He said, "In the holy words of Jesus Christ himself, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' Shit ya. People are following this follower and there is no Jesus Christ around to say, "Wait a minute, fellow".

And you see followers on incredibly strict religious diets drinking Coka Cola because Coke wasn't invented when the rules were written. These are dumb examples, but you can expand them to the big stuff like The Inquisition, the massacres of infidels that are still going on in the name of peace. This is going to happen to MLK and Mandela, just watch. Either their radical revolutionary ideas are going to be watered down to pap or their words are going to be twisted. That is one reason the death of someone like Mandela is so deep. Whether he was active or not in the past few years, his very presence on this earth kept some people on the strait and narrow.

The great masters who walked this earth had unbending moral compasses. They didn't say, Thou Shall Not Kill unless someone is trying to steal your toaster oven. They didn't say Love Your Neighbor As Yourself  unless she is wearing a head scarf. The teachers (masters, gurus) of non-violence didn't say Use non-violence, but it is OK to whack your wife around. Sometimes we need live teachers.

On the other hand... We read often enough of live teachers who have done dastardly things to their followers. James Jones comes to mind, of course. People have been led to criminal acts by leaders who seem very evolved, or very appealing or very enlightened. Too many examples to count. My conclusion is that honing our personal moral compass and following only when it passes every inner test you can come up with, can we put ourselves at the feet of a teacher.

There is so much we have to learn. Let's go out and learn, but let us not lose our balance in the process.

Some well meaning questions and some pissy answers.

I have given you fair warning. I am pretty much against American exceptionalism and our ridiculous notion that we are the center of the universe and therefore the center of enlightenment. I mean, think about what was going on in the USA when the Renaissance was happening in Europe. And that is just one of many examples. Think about our contributions to the world right now; wars, weapons, shitty GMO seeds and chemical foods, pollution and exploitation of natural resources at rates that were unsustainable years ago, guns, bombs, landmines, drones, war, terrible labor practices, global warming, plastics, floating islands of plastic, racism, unhappy religions and so on.

So, that being said, nice innocent questions come my way about whether the people in Thailand know how to take care of the elephants and whether people here know that brown rice and organic foods are good for them. And the implication is that we are the enlightened ones who could teach others to live better.

This is where I fall off the rails. Who are we to talk about things that we are worse at than any other country on the planet (maybe excepting China) I am sure that most of the world laughs when Hillary Clinton wags her finger at China and lectures about human rights. Everyone knows about Guatanamo and Abu Ghraib and all of our human rights stories.People know. What are we thinking? Other countries fight successfully against GMO seeds and crops contaminating them forever and they know enough that we are the proponents of such evil stuff.

Maybe instead of asking about the care of animals in other countries we should ask what we can learn about the care of animals. How can a country that allows the crimes that happen 24 hours a day in feed lots growing chickens and pigs and cattle in America claim to care for animals? Look at some pictures and think about how we are seen from afar. It is so disgusting as to be nearly unthinkable.

We set a fine example of animal husbandry during the eradication of the buffalo. From tens of millions to 2,000 in twenty years. 

The Near Annihilation of America's Buffalo in Pictures

Photo: Unknow  These are buffalo skulls waiting to be ground into fertilizer and shipped east. Tip of the iceberg.

In the journals of Lewis and Clark, not so very long ago, they wrote about having to stop the caravan in its westward movement after they crossed the Missouri River because there was such an abundance of wild life that they couldn't pass through it all. They, of course, had a ready solution. They shot and killed as much as they could to such a degree that they were held up further waiting for more ammunition to be brought from the East.

I think we need to stop thinking we have answers until we clean up our own act. Then people in other countries will look to us for guidance.

Same story for food. We are not a booming success in setting any standards around the world for dietary excellence. The world knows this.

I would like to see us look to others and see where they were successful and learn from them and learn fast. We have a long way to go and not much time to do it in.

I am a weird tourist.

My BLOG is not a travel blog but people have been asking questions about what I am doing, eating,and so forth. I feel like the little old ladies in English novels who went to a hotel in a nice place and stayed for the duration. There are several differences, however. The other people at my hotel mostly don't stay very long. This is a good thing and a bad thing for me. Several people who have come through I would have enjoyed spending more time with. With most a little bit was plenty. Most of the guests at the Come Chiang Mai Lanna Boutique Guest House are Asian. Couples mostly do couple things unless one person is an extrovert. Families spill over. I like that. Most often the mothers look tired and like to have someone admire their kids. I do that. Singles talk if the dining room is not crowded. These are my observations.

I found this place, CCMLBGH, on the interrnet on the AGODA website which has very good descriptions, deep discounts. I have left a bunch of times to take little trips and several times including tonite when I forgot to tell them I was staying and they booked full. When this has happened, they found me a good place, carried my bags over and came to be sure I was well settled in. Amazing , really.

I am happy with this place. It is small, clean, appealing to the eye, comfortable, great food, very nice people. Good walking neighborhood. So, I have done some real travel, but mostly I have plunked and made a good routine. I usually swim everyday. Here, not. I found pools that were nice, but the water tends to be a bit cold and the sun is very hot and the shade is quite cool. So, I end up moving and adjusting myself all the time, so I have given up on that. After all, I soon will be at the beach and then in Nicaragua so- nothing lost.

Food takes up a lot of my time. I like to eat small meals frequently. Actually don't have much choice after I was so sick last year. Thais also seem to be eating pretty much all the time and there is great GREAT food everywhere, all the time and very inexpensive (except for the small fortune I spend on cappuccinos). Sweet things are extremely sweet and hot is very hot and salty is very salty, so I am on a perpetual grazing party compelled by the experience that one extreme sets off a craving for the other. I have only once eaten an American thing and that was a grilled cheese sandwich which was quite remarkable but in no way resembled anything we might associate with said item.

I had shrimp with hot cooked basil in a chile sauce, rice and cold water for lunch. $1.30. Still starving, I went and had a carrot, apple and ginger juice thing. Now, I am plaotting where I will stop for my afternoon coffee and dessert. I have a pretty good idea.

I am taking yoga classes when I can get to them. This is pretty much an all day deal because after the class, I have to take a shower because the mats are really smelly and then I have to have lunch because I am starving and then I have to have an 1 1/2 hour massage because I ache and can't walk, then I go to my favorite temple and meditate and mostly give thanks for the beauty, the time, the health, the money, the spirit that guides me to be in a temple in Chiang Mai giving thanks. It is one big circle.

So, all in all I would say that my life is simple, easy, and pleasant. Once or twice I have felt lonesome, but that is why God gave us the gift of SKYPE. In my walking and boat rides and elephant rides, I have met (Invented) the character that will be in my novel if I write one. I just love her. We'll see where that goes.

And next week Gretchen and Eric come and we will do some hammering travel and meet up with dear friend Rhys. That is the story. You can perhaps see why I am not a travel writer. I assume that all of you have either been here or have a pretty good picture of the peaceable kingdom in Southeast Asia and, as I find everything lovely and meet kind generous people...not so much to report.

One thing does stand out and it is not in anyway unique to Asia. Everyone is always on their iphones. Everyone. Everywhere. Or taking pictures  (same thing). The human disconnect is staggering in its scope. Absolutely staggering.

We Have to Judge!

A comment on a recent blog of mine has me fretting. I said something about Jehovah Witness people proselytizing in a country that has a rich and rewarding belief system that has worked marvelously for a very long time. Why would anyone want to screw with someone else's good thing? The comment was "Don't judge."

That kind of got me stewing. I do judge. We all judge. In some cases judging can be a very good thing. In the instance about the Jo Ho people I wasn't so much judging as making a slightly ironic point. Kind of in the line of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

If millions of people hadn't judged that apartheid was evil in the USA and finally in the 1960s made enough noise and great leadership emerged, we still would have "Whites Only" signs all over the south. If Nelson Mandela and the ANC hadn't judged that apartheid in South Africa was evil, we wouldn't be celebrating Mandela's remarkable life today.

We have to judge. Leaving aside all the thousands of years of astute theological arguments (which we all know) about the existence of evil, I have to weigh in on the side of simple minded belief that sometimes there are bad things afoot. And if we can't make judgements about them, we can't do anything to stop them.

And, I am compelled to admit that I like irony and a bit of fun with ideas and seeing the humor in things. I know from experience that this is more of an east coast thing that west coast. I also like to be provocative. It gets the juices flowing. And not to single out the Witnesses in particular, if you think about it there has been a lot of weird shit forever everywhere in the name of religion. Don't get me going.

I am grateful for the comment. It got me thinking.

Deus Absconditus

Concealed God. Oh, all those years of the dreaded Latin lessons! And now it is fun when some phrase rears its head. Who knew?

Who knew? Was there some little corner in my being that knew, even then, that there was something for me that would someday delight in words, reading, talking, my God, talking! and telling stories? I don't remember talking all that much except there is some family myth that I used to follow my brother around as he terrorized our little planet. My mother says he climbed to the top of the fridge, up the front, when he was 8 months old. He also started walking then and hasn't slowed down since, except when he had that bad back thing and that was agony for him. Apparently I followed him everywhere, talking a blue streak and interspersing my monologue every few sentences with a "Huh Bill?" To which he would give some fleeting nod and go about his business. (Sounds like a lot of men.)

Then there was the fact that I made, wrote, created puppet shows and plays. I was the boss of it all. I was the one with the stories to tell, except when my Irish uncles came and then I sat at the foot of masters. Not to put a too fine point on it, when I wrote one play in 4th grade, everyone had to bow to the ground in front of me and my line was "I am Jupiter, dare not defy me!" I was a princess who had been stolen by those people who called themselves my parents. I joined the circus many times in my telling of how things were. I forced my brother and sister to rehearse endlessly with me. Our act was called "The Flying Zeros."

All this stuff came from my imagination. All the stimulus was from books. We had no TV and I hadn't yet seen a movie. Pig Latin was my first foreign language. My grandparents had the first foreign accents I ever heard. Grandma Braucher-German, and the Caffreys could put on the Irish.

Was some part of what would become so important in my life already there?  Was my hidden deity bursting out through my childhood play? Did reading the wars of Julius Caesar expand my horizons? I connect with words. I shape my reality with words. I am not a court reporter. My interest is in the spirit of an event as it hit my perception. And, in a certain way, all our stories are exactly the same. The god within is trying to find expression through the life we live.

So What Happened to Falling in Love?

I know that I have probably hit on this subject before but it came up today when I saw a couple together who were obviously, hopelessly, madly in love with each other. So cool. His eyes followed her every move , enraptured by her every gesture. She looked at him adoringly, couldn't keep from smiling. It sounds like a two- bit romance. It was actually gorgeous.

It made me realize how long it has been since I have heard someone say that they were "in love'. In Love. I mostly hear people talking about relationships. "Working on their relationship" is even more common. "Evaluating their relationship." Shit, I have a 'relationship' with my phone company. I have a 'relationship' with the food I eat. I don't want to have a 'relationship' with a guy I go out with. I am a romantic. I have had that kind of love where your heart pounds, where you can't catch your breath, where your brain turns to mush. I like that feeling. I am sad for those who haven't had it. It is not only about mating kinds of experiences. It can happen when you meet your new baby, when a child looks into your eyes and gives you her soul, when you meet the Dalai Lama. Pure, crazy, knock your socks off love.

And it is crazy and it is scary and you can get hurt big time. And so what? If we spend our lives not getting hurt, are we missing the big gold ring at the merry-go-round? You understand, of course, that I am not talking about perversions of this: "I love you, you're mine." kind of stuff. I am talking about opening the heart and 'seeing' someone else. It is fun. Try it again if you have forgotten what it feels like. I was inspired by that couple this morning. yes, I was.

Overheard tonight in a restaurant, a man making bad karma.

If what goes around comes around, if every action has a cause and a result, if we reap what we sow, then this guy I overheard tonite is going to have some tough times ahead.

I think he was American. He was on the older side, kind of good looking, maybe a little of the less seedy former CIA types that one runs into all over the world, especially where women go for cheap. He was talking to a young guy who was nodding, but not paying too much attention. The guy was bragging a bit about how he had set himself up here in Thailand. He was actually bragging a lot. He had a place in town and a something in the rural area. He had gotten it all for cheap. He was making his dream. No problem there.

Then his voice got louder and louder and he got more and more excited. There had developed a fatal flaw in his perfection. He had a neighbor who had a shop in the next house. The neighbor made furniture in his house. His work and his tools make a lot of noise. Big loud imitations of power tool noises! And now the guy was practically screaming and so pissed off..He had no tranquility in his home and the fucking neighbor wouldn't stop and the fucking police don't give a shit and there are no fucking laws in this fucking country to make the neighbor stop making noise that is disturbing this guys tranquility.

Aside from the fact that this guys companion looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole, aside from the fact that no one else eating there could possibly have another thought than this guys disturbed tranquility, aside from all that, there is the Buddhist thing.That is that if you want something you have to be it. In this case, if the guy wants to not be irritated by noises that he doesn't like, he has to stop making unpleasant noises himself. I am willing to bed the farm on the fact that this guy has no concept that he is actively (very actively) creating exactly that which he is railing against.

I know I should have approached him humbly told him that I have all the answers, but, you know, I didn't want to create the karma for that happening to me next time I am being an ass hole.

Toyota or Honda?

Every car here is a Toyota. Nearly ever moto or motorcycle is a Honda. I am taking hoards of these things. Yesterday I stopped in a Honda sales place and found out that a new Honda bike can be bought for about $500. I am not in the market, but I was wondering how people with a little fruit stand could afford one. I assume that used ones can be gotten for as little as $50. So, that led me to the question of why I can't buy one of these things and take it home at enormous savings. When I was young, everyone was going to Europe and buying a VW on the cheap and bringing it home.

This, of course, led me to make an attempt at understanding the concept of Free Trade. Everything I read about this subject added to my confusion. It is a good idea, but bad in practice. It is a bad idea but has some good parts. It is a way of further enslaving have-nots and stacking the deck for the haves. It doesn't exist and can't exist. The WTO and GATT and NAFTA are living examples of how these so called free trade deals screw everyone except the powerful.

Who decides what? We subsidize farmers in the USA so they can dump corn in Central America at prices that put farmers there out of business and then what do we gain? More hungry people needing to work in the USA so they can send remittances home so that their families can buy expensive corn so that we can pay taxes to make this happen? Too many questions. I do not understand what is my net gain. Nothing, I suspect. What is WalMart, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs net gain? Huge amounts. I would wager.

If any of you can explain to me what is going on, I would appreciate it very much. I hate being ignorant. I trust my gut feelings that there is perverse manipulation afoot. And I feel quite certain that the USA doesn't need more cheap junk to fill up our storage units. But, the concept of a level playing field has some appeal to me.

This is so true. Some important words from Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky: America hates its poor

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Chris Steele

Excerpt from Occupy (Second edition), Zucotti Park Press

Salon, December 1, 2013

Q: An article that recently came out in Rolling Stone, titled "Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail," by Matt Taibbi, asserts that the government is afraid to prosecute powerful bankers, such as those running HSBC. Taibbi says that there's "an arrestable class and an unarrestable class." What is your view on the current state of class war in the U.S.?
A: Well, there's always a class war going on. The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The business classes are very class-conscious -- they're constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is recognized.
We don't use the term "working class" here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say "middle class," because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.
It's true that there was a one-sided class war, and that's because the other side hadn't chosen to participate, so the union leadership had for years pursued a policy of making a compact with the corporations, in which their workers, say the autoworkers -- would get certain benefits like fairly decent wages, health benefits and so on. But it wouldn't engage the general class structure. In fact, that's one of the reasons why Canada has a national health program and the United States doesn't. The same unions on the other side of the border were calling for health care for everybody. Here they were calling for health care for themselves and they got it. Of course, it's a compact with corporations that the corporations can break anytime they want, and by the 1970s they were planning to break it and we've seen what has happened since.
This is just one part of a long and continuing class war against working people and the poor. It's a war that is conducted by a highly class-conscious business leadership, and it's one of the reasons for the unusual history of the U.S. labor movement. In the U.S., organized labor has been repeatedly and extensively crushed, and has endured a very violent history as compared with other countries.
In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce. It became a huge movement that spread over major farming areas.
The Farmers' Alliance did try to link up with the Knights of Labor, which would have been a major class-based organization if it had succeeded. But the Knights of Labor were crushed by violence, and the Farmers' Alliance was dismantled in other ways. As a result, one of the major popular democratic forces in American history was essentially dismantled. There are a lot of reasons for it, one of which was that the Civil War has never really ended. One effect of the Civil War was that the political parties that came out of it were sectarian parties, so the slogan was, "You vote where you shoot," and that remains the case.
Take a look at the red states and the blue states in the last election: It's the Civil War. They've changed party labels, but other than that, it's the same: sectarian parties that are not class-based because divisions are along different lines. There are a lot of reasons for it.
The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look at CEO salaries. CEOs are no more productive or brilliant here than they are in Europe, but the pay, bonuses, and enormous power they get here are out of sight. They're probably a drain on the economy, and they become even more powerful when they are able to gain control of policy decisions.
That's why we have a sequester over the deficit and not over jobs, which is what really matters to the population. But it doesn't matter to the banks, so the heck with it. It also illustrates the consider- able shredding of the whole system of democracy. So, by now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom 70 percent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.
A good topic to research, if possible, would be "why people don't vote." Nonvoting is very high, roughly 50 percent, even in presidential elections -- much higher in others. The attitudes of people who don't vote are studied. First of all, they mostly identify themselves as Democrats. And if you look at their attitudes, they are mostly Social Democratic. They want jobs, they want benefits, they want the government to be involved in social services and so on, but they don't vote, partly, I suppose, because of the impediments to voting. It's not a big secret. Republicans try really hard to prevent people from voting, because the more that people vote, the more trouble they are in. There are other reasons why people don't vote. I suspect, but don't know how to prove, that part of the reason people don't vote is they just know their votes don't make any difference, so why make the effort? So you end up with a kind of plutocracy in which the public opinion doesn't matter much. It is not unlike other countries in this respect, but more extreme. All along, it's more extreme. So yes, there is a constant class war going on.
The case of labor is crucial, because it is the base of organization of any popular opposition to the rule of capital, and so it has to be dismantled. There's a tax on labor all the time. During the 1920s, the labor movement was virtually smashed by Wilson's Red Scare and other things. In the 1930s, it reconstituted and was the driving force of the New Deal, with the CIO organizing and so on. By the late 1930s, the business classes were organizing to try to react to this. They began, but couldn't do much during the war, because things were on hold, but immediately after the war it picked up with the Taft-Hartley Act and huge propaganda campaigns, which had massive effect. Over the years, the effort to undermine the unions and labor generally succeeded. By now, private-sector unionization is very low, partly because, since Reagan, government has pretty much told employers, "You know you can violate the laws, and we're not going to do anything about it." Under Clinton, NAFTA offered a method for employers to illegally undermine labor organizing by threatening to move enterprises to Mexico. A number of illegal operations by employers shot up at that time. What's left are private-sector unions, and they're under bipartisan attack.
They've been protected somewhat because the federal laws did function for the public-sector unions, but now they're under bipartisan attack. When Obama declares a pay freeze for federal workers, that's actually a tax on federal workers. It comes to the same thing, and, of course, this is right at the time we say that we can't raise taxes on the very rich. Take the last tax agreement where the Republicans claimed, "We already gave up tax increases." Take a look at what happened. Raising the payroll tax, which is a tax on working people, is much more of a tax increase than raising taxes on the super-rich, but that passed quietly because we don't look at those things.
The same is happening across the board. There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office -- anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal. I'm old enough to remember the Great Depression, a time when the country was quite poor but there were still postal deliveries. Today, post offices, Social Security, and public schools all have to be dismantled because they are seen as being based on a principle that is regarded as extremely dangerous.
If you care about other people, that's now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you don't care whether other people's kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that's called "libertarian" for some wild reason. I mean, it's actually highly authoritarian, but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.
That's why unions had the slogan, "solidarity," even though they may not have lived up to it. And that's what really counts: solidarity, mutual aid, care for one another and so on. And it's really important for power systems to undermine that ideologically, so huge efforts go into it. Even trying to stimulate consumerism is an effort to undermine it. Having a market society automatically carries with it an undermining of solidarity. For example, in the market system you have a choice: You can buy a Toyota or you can buy a Ford, but you can't buy a subway because that's not offered. Market systems don't offer common goods; they offer private consumption. If you want a subway, you're going to have to get together with other people and make a collective decision. Otherwise, it's simply not an option within the market system, and as democracy is increasingly undermined, it's less and less of an option within the public system. All of these things converge, and they're all part of general class war.
Q: Can you give some insight on how the labor movement could rebuild in the United States?
A: Well, it's been done before. Each time labor has been attacked -- and as I said, in the 1920s the labor movement was practically destroyed -- popular efforts were able to reconstitute it. That can happen again. It's not going to be easy. There are institutional barriers, ideological barriers, cultural barriers. One big problem is that the white working class has been pretty much abandoned by the political system. The Democrats don't even try to organize them anymore. The Republicans claim to do it; they get most of the vote, but they do it on non-economic issues, on non-labor issues. They often try to mobilize them on the grounds of issues steeped in racism and sexism and so on, and here the liberal policies of the 1960s had a harmful effect because of some of the ways in which they were carried out. There are some pretty good studies of this. Take busing to integrate schools. In principle, it made some sense, if you wanted to try to overcome segregated schools. Obviously, it didn't work. Schools are probably more segregated now for all kinds of reasons, but the way it was originally done undermined class solidarity.
For example, in Boston there was a program for integrating the schools through busing, but the way it worked was restricted to urban Boston, downtown Boston. So black kids were sent to the Irish neighborhoods and conversely, but the suburbs were left out. The suburbs are more affluent, professional and so on, so they were kind of out of it. Well, what happens when you send black kids into an Irish neighborhood? What happens when some Irish telephone linemen who have worked all their lives finally got enough money to buy small houses in a neighborhood where they want to send their kids to the local school and cheer for the local football team and have a community, and so on? All of a sudden, some of their kids are being sent out, and black kids are coming in. How do you think at least some of these guys will feel? At least some end up being racists. The suburbs are out of it, so they can cluck their tongues about how racist everyone is elsewhere, and that kind of pattern was carried out all over the country.
The same has been true of women's rights. But when you have a working class that's under real pressure, you know, people are going to say that rights are being undermined, that jobs are being under- mined. Maybe the one thing that the white working man can hang onto is that he runs his home? Now that that's being taken away and nothing is being offered, he's not part of the program of advancing women's rights. That's fine for college professors, but it has a different effect in working-class areas. It doesn't have to be that way. It depends on how it's done, and it was done in a way that simply undermined natural solidarity. There are a lot of factors that play into it, but by this point it's going to be pretty hard to organize the working class on the grounds that should really concern them: common solidarity, common welfare.
In some ways, it shouldn't be too hard, because these attitudes are really prized by most of the population. If you look at Tea Party members, the kind that say, "Get the government off my back, I want a small government" and so on, when their attitudes are studied, it turns out that they're mostly social democratic. You know, people are human after all. So yes, you want more money for health, for help, for people who need it and so on and so forth, but "I don't want the government, get that off my back" and related attitudes are tricky to overcome.
Some polls are pretty amazing. There was one conducted in the South right before the presidential elections. Just Southern whites, I think, were asked about the economic plans of the two candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Southern whites said they preferred Romney's plan, but when asked about its particular components, they opposed every one. Well, that's the effect of good propaganda: getting people not to think in terms of their own interests, let alone the interest of communities and the class they're part of. Overcoming that takes a lot of work. I don't think it's impossible, but it's not going to happen easily.
Q: In a recent article about the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, you discuss Henry Vane, who was beheaded for drafting a petition that called the people's power "the original from whence all just power arises." Would you agree the coordinated repression of Occupy was like the beheading of Vane?
A: Occupy hasn't been treated nicely, but we shouldn't exaggerate. Compared with the kind of repression that usually goes on, it wasn't that severe. Just ask people who were part of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, in the South, let's say. It was incomparably worse, as was just showing up at anti-war demonstrations where people were getting maced and beaten and so on. Activist groups get repressed. Power systems don't pat them on the head. Occupy was treated badly, but not off the spectrum -- in fact, in some ways not as bad as others. I wouldn't draw exaggerated comparisons. It's not like beheading somebody who says, "Let's have popular power."
Q: How does the Charter of the Forest relate to environmental and indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline?
A: A lot. The Charter of the Forest, which was half the Magna Carta, has more or less been forgotten. The forest didn't just mean the woods. It meant common property, the source of food, fuel. It was a common possession, so it was cared for. The forests were cultivated in common and kept functioning, because they were part of people's common possessions, their source of livelihood, and even a source of dignity. That slowly collapsed in England under the enclosure movements, the state efforts to shift to private ownership and control. In the United States it happened differently, but the privatization is similar. What you end up with is the widely held belief, now standard doctrine, that's called "the tragedy of the commons" in Garrett Hardin's phrase. According to this view, if things are held in common and aren't privately owned, they're going to be destroyed. History shows the exact opposite: When things were held in common, they were preserved and maintained. But, according to the capitalist ethic, if things aren't privately owned, they're going to be ruined, and that's "the tragedy of the commons." So, therefore, you have to put everything under private control and take it away from the public, because the public is just going to destroy it.
Now, how does that relate to the environmental problem? Very significantly: the commons are the environment. When they're a common possession -- not owned, but everybody holds them together in a community -- they're preserved, sustained and cultivated for the next generation. If they're privately owned, they're going to be destroyed for profit; that's what private owner- ship is, and that's exactly what's happening today.
What you say about the indigenous population is very striking. There's a major problem that the whole species is facing. A likelihood of serious disaster may be not far off. We are approaching a kind of tipping point, where climate change becomes irreversible. It could be a couple of decades, maybe less, but the predictions are constantly being shown to be too conservative. It is a very serious danger; no sane person can doubt it. The whole species is facing a real threat for the first time in its history of serious disaster, and there are some people trying to do some- thing about it and there are others trying to make it worse. Who are they? Well, the ones who are trying to make it better are the pre-industrial societies, the pre-technological societies, the indigenous societies, the First Nations. All around the world, these are the communities that are trying to preserve the rights of nature.
The rich societies, like the United States and Canada, are acting in ways to bring about disaster as quickly as possible. That's what it means, for example, when both political parties and the press talk enthusiastically about "a century of energy independence." "Energy independence" doesn't mean a damn thing, but put that aside. A century of "energy independence" means that we make sure that every bit of Earth's fossil fuels comes out of the ground and we burn it. In societies that have large indigenous populations, like, for example, Ecuador, an oil producer, people are trying to get support for keeping the oil in the ground. They want funding so as to keep the oil where it ought to be. We, however, have to get everything out of the ground, including tar sands, then burn it, which makes things as bad as possible as quickly as possible. So you have this odd situation where the educated, "advanced" civilized people are trying to cut everyone's throats as quickly as possible and the indigenous, less educated, poorer populations are trying to prevent the disaster. If somebody was watching this from Mars, they'd think this species was insane.
Q: As far as a free, democracy-centered society, self-organization seems possible on small scales. Do you think it is possible on a larger scale and with human rights and quality of life as a standard, and if so, what community have you visited that seems closest to an example to what is possible?
A: Well, there are a lot of things that are possible. I have visited some examples that are pretty large scale, in fact, very large scale. Take Spain, which is in a huge economic crisis. But one part of Spain is doing okay -- that's the Mondragón collective. It's a big conglomerate involving banks, industry, housing, all sorts of things. It's worker owned, not worker managed, so partial industrial democracy, but it exists in a capitalist economy, so it's doing all kinds of ugly things like exploiting foreign labor and so on. But economically and socially, it's flourishing as compared with the rest of the society and other societies. It is very large, and that can be done anywhere. It certainly can be done here. In fact, there are tentative explorations of contacts between the Mondragón and the United Steelworkers, one of the more progressive unions, to think about developing comparable structures here, and it's being done to an extent.
The one person who has written very well about this is Gar Alperovitz, who is involved in organizing work around enterprises in parts of the old Rust Belt, which are pretty successful and could be spread just as a cooperative could be spread. There are really no limits to it other than willingness to participate, and that is, as always, the problem. If you're willing to adhere to the task and gauge yourself, there's no limit.
Actually, there's a famous sort of paradox posed by David Hume centuries ago. Hume is one of the founders of classical liberalism. He's an important philosopher and a political philosopher. He said that if you take a look at societies around the world -- any of them -- power is in the hands of the governed, those who are being ruled. Hume asked, why don't they use that power and overthrow the masters and take control? He says, the answer has to be that, in all societies, the most brutal, the most free, the governed can be controlled by control of opinion. If you can control their attitudes and beliefs and separate them from one another and so on, then they won't rise up and overthrow you.
That does require a qualification. In the more brutal and repressive societies, controlling opinion is less important, because you can beat people with a stick. But as societies become more free, it becomes more of a problem, and we see that historically. The societies that develop the most expansive propaganda systems are also the most free societies.
The most extensive propaganda system in the world is the public relations industry, which developed in Britain and the United States. A century ago, dominant sectors recognized that enough freedom had been won by the population. They reasoned that it's hard to control people by force, so they had to do it by turning the attitudes and opinions of the population with propaganda and other devices of separation and marginalization, and so on. Western powers have become highly skilled in this.
In the United States, the advertising and public relations industry is huge. Back in the more honest days, they called it propaganda. Now the term doesn't sound nice, so it's not used anymore, but it's basically a huge propaganda system which is designed very extensively for quite specific purposes.
First of all, it has to undermine markets by trying to create irrational, uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. That's what advertising is about, the opposite of what a market is supposed to be, and anybody who turns on a television set can see that for themselves. It has to do with monopolization and product differentiation, all sorts of things, but the point is that you have to drive the population to irrational consumption, which does separate them from one another.
As I said, consumption is individual, so it's not done as an act of solidarity -- so you don't have ads on television saying, "Let's get together and build a mass transportation system." Who's going to fund that? The other thing they need to do is undermine democracy the same way, so they run campaigns, political campaigns mostly run by PR agents. It's very clear what they have to do. They have to create uninformed voters who will make irrational decisions, and that's what the campaigns are about. Billions of dollars go into it, and the idea is to shred democracy, restrict markets to service the rich, and make sure the power gets concentrated, that capital gets concentrated and the people are driven to irrational and self-destructive behavior. And it is self-destructive, often dramatically so. For example, one of the first achievements of the U.S. public relations system back in the 1920s was led, incidentally, by a figure honored by Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy -- liberal progressive Edward Bernays.
His first great success was to induce women to smoke. In the 1920s, women didn't smoke. So here's this big population which was not buying cigarettes, so he paid young models to march down New York City's Fifth Avenue holding cigarettes. His message to women was, "You want to be cool like a model? You should smoke a cigarette." How many millions of corpses did that create? I'd hate to calculate it. But it was considered an enormous success. The same is true of the murderous character of corporate propaganda with tobacco, asbestos, lead, chemicals, vinyl chloride, across the board. It is just shocking, but PR is a very honored profession, and it does control people and undermine their options of working together. And so that's Hume's paradox, but people don't have to submit to it. You can see through it and struggle against it.

Small up!

This is a Jamaican expression for make room for more people, as in a crowded taxi. I like the term. But I am liking it more and more as the idea catches on the less is more. In the 60s when the book "Small is Beautiful" cam out, we were already hearing warnings about ecological disaster, about the population exploding, mutterings about global warming. In the 70s we had the gas crisis for a bit. We knew about the rainforests being decimated. This was a long time ago. Nothing that is going on can be surprising. We had warning after warning.

This is one place where my generation more than fucked up, failed, bombed. We played the fiddle while Rome was burning. We carried excess and greed to astonishing heights. OK, we helped get back to more natural childbirth, we made some decent attempts at recycling, we got a nature foods trend going, we stopped nuclear power plant growth in the USA. Good things. But we became the champions of exploiting resources and people and the environment. We owned stocks in hateful companies with murderous practices, we had to have more of everything, more cars, more bigger houses.

A lot of the people running companies and the government now are my generation. We don't take care of the environment. We don't care if everybody shoots everybody. We support hideous wars and call them peace makers. We changed the rules so that companies have more rights than people.

We talk a good story but we go one wasting everything we have been given. We have no apparent intention of curbing our wasteful ways. There is no idea of sacrifice or pulling in or smalling up. Who are we? Now  see more and more about tiny homes and ways to make it simpler. But for most people I know this idea appeals to them as another dwelling. And extra space where they can go to gt away from their shit. Maybe we should leave our stuff in the house and live in the storage continer.

Whole countries have had entire populations switch to low flush toilets, motion sensitive lighting, wind power, on demand water heaters, no plastic bags...simple changes if there is a will. Not in the USA. We still leave whole huge areas lit up at night like a stadium (car lots) when other countries have never dreamed of doing such a dumb thing. Who are we?

We are the people who have storage places for crap we never want to deal with. We are the country who had to add Hoarding as a mental diagnosis. We are the people who kill each other to buy crap at WalMart to celebrate Thanksgiving and get a jump on Christmas. 

Now, one thing that occurs to me is that if this state of affairs was making us wildly happy and sublimely contented and generous to a fault with those who have less, then it might be worth trying to sustain it. That isn't exactly the picture I see. We need antidepressants by the truck load. We seem to need a lot of guns. Who are we?

I am fully a part of the generation that ruined the environment and broke up the family and had to do what I wanted to do because I deserved it and  I earned it and I knew best. How can we turn this around? We canstart by smalling up where we can.

The Birth of the Christ Child

What is it about this story that can be so utterly compelling for thousands of years to all sorts of people? I think everyone likes a good story. I do. I think we like stories that are particular and universal at the same time. It seems to me that every birth is a birth of Christ. A new being incarnates. A new star appears in the heavens. The earth is forever changed. I think every child born has this effect.  Right there there is something to remember and celebrate.

There is also the amazing timing. The winter solstice, celebrated as long ago as the Druids. The names might be different, but many traditions have some big do over the triumph of light over darkness. It is getting darker and darker and what is happening? Then like the magic it is, the sun wins out and the light returns. Who can't like this story? This is THE story. We feel hope. We feel that all things old have become new again. This is good.

And as far as I am concerned, the language in the New Testament is simple, elegant and vivid. The Prince of Peace being born in a humble manger in a dusty little town while the parents are obeying a harsh Caesar Augustus and going to pay taxes. Great story.

Have yourself a real treat this season and forget the nonsense and read this fine story to yourself or to whomever you can capture. Light a zillion candles, prepare for the triumph of the sun and get into the vibe. It will bring good feelings to you.

Everyone should have me for a doctor.

A German, a Frenchman, and Jew got lost walking in the desert.

The German said I'm thirsty. I'm tired. I must, I must… have a cold German beer.

The Frenchman said: I'm thirsty. I'm tired. I must, I must… have a good bottle of French wine.

The Jew says I'm thirsty. I'm tired. I must, I must… have diabetes.


Thanks to my friend Ron for the joke. The reason he sends me this is that he recognizes the Jew in me. It had to have been in a past life, because it is not in my current gene pool. Catholic and Lutheran. Irish and German. Be that as it may, I  jump to the worst diagnosis for every possible ailment. In this case a little knowledge is certainly a dangerous thing. I have no memory of ever not doing this. I do it regarding others, but have learned for the most part to keep my mouth shut.

It is my sketchy knowledge of anatomy that gives me such authority. I know muscles, major organs, systems (sort of). Therefore, when I forget that I ate organic beets and pee red, I am immediately sorting through my mental catalogue of those friends with bladder cancer. All survived. Steady breath. A headache has to be a brain tumor. indigestion or a back ache is my first symptoms of pancreatic cancer. I am reporting this to you flippantly, but the real deal is that I get pretty worked up until I check myself and decide to wait and see. I have Lupus just about every other day.

The reason I am thinking about this today is that I read a nice article about conscious dying and families taking back the care of the dead, much as midwives reclaimed birth. There is a big movement about this now. When my friend, Sarah Lee Sexton died, her body was put in a cold room on dry ice and friends and family sat with her round the clock for three days and nights and we prayed and cried and laughed and read to her. She died in a Camphill Village, and this was the tradition there. Now, without or because of the influence of Rudolf Steiner, these kinds of personalized traditions are springing up all voer the place.

So, this will be the problem of whomever is around after me. As will my funeral. I have changed my mind about what I would do for my funeral so many times that I am glad I won't have to sort it out. I've left notes around when I've had inspirations, but I can't remember where they are. But it is this thing about my dying so often that has me concerned. The "What ifs?" are killer. So unBuddhist. Right now I may have a million life threatening diseases incubating in my body. But, right now I feel great and my sore feet are sore from walking for hours at the night market and not from bone cancer. I 'get' it. Be Here Now. The past is over and the future doesn't exist. I am tired and thirsty. I must need a glass of water and a good night's sleep.