connections

Connections are what hold us all to each other, but they can be very difficult to maintain.

I’ve not been able to post to my blog in several days due to difficulties connecting to the internet and the the server that help maintain my connections.

This does not mean I’ve given up on the connections, the internet, or the servers. It simply means my attention is needed elsewhere right now.

Some connections are not so easily interfered with, those that are closest to our hearts and minds keep us going. Those are the connections we’ve worked over time to build, and we must continue to try to maintain those.

And the connections must be “rooted” somewhere. Roots need care too, just as do the plants and their leaves.

green is green

In poor imitation of Shakespeare, a tree by any other name would still have branches.

Seeking brief shelter this afternoon from the blaze of the afternoon sun, I thought about foliage and all the different “shades” of green upon which one might reflect. But green is green–unless one is color-blind, of course.

Planting a tree is a very good way to help clean the air, given all the trees we have felled to build and box.

Modern products seem to require a great deal of packaging, these days. Or do they?

So many carbon-based products–plastics–are used in modern packaging to make the product more “attractive” on the shelf, as if we could not choose between products without such packaging.

Of course, it’s what’s inside the package that is most important. “Branding” does not work if the content of the brand continues to change. I’ve noticed that happening with some of my formerly-favorite brands.

Do marketeers really think we cannot tell the difference between a package and what is inside?

Fortunately, most packaging can be recycled. However, plastics require more processing than those derived from paper and cardboard. Metals are more difficult to recycle as well.

A number of products currently packaged in “tin cans” can be packaged in wax-coated papers that require much less recycling as well.

Of course, companies must have access to the manufacturing equipment that can fashion such products.

Whatever we can do to reduce our dependence on “big oil” the better for all of us.

Now is as good a time as any to be green. It is our “free choice” to recycle, regardless of what the marketeers do with the “outside” packaging.

conservatives, liberals, and polity

In an earlier post, I touched on the continuum of ideological stances that shape political platforms. Here, keep in mind that “politeia”, the root term of politic, has to do with peoples of a bounded geographic area.

In U.S.A. history alone—not to mention world history— politics as a means for “intervention” in the processes that distribute resources amongst of a group of peoples has undergone a wide variety of transformations.

As mentioned previously, the necessity of intervention in these processes is a topic of heated debate. The debate centers on questions about who should control rights of access to the resources of groups of peoples. The very idea of “democracy” itself stems from these questions.

maintaining our household

When resources, represented in today’s world by the legal tender of bits of information, are misused to produce the illusion of security for specific individuals, or for specifically labeled groups of individuals, struggle and strife can only increase.

Freedom as “room for expansion” does not refer to expanding our populations, our national territories, or our economic monopolies. Nor does it refer to expanding our “scientific” knowledge as such expansion alone will not serve us if such knowledge is used in ways that increase struggle and strife.

We can only expand our hearts and our minds–our spirits–by expanding our understanding of the world and the universe in which we live.

We expand our hearts and minds by opening our awareness of experience. In some ways, our experiences are uniquely our “own”. However, when we share experience through communication we find that strife, struggle, and suffering are astonishingly similar worldwide.

In fact, human suffering evoked in response to fear of loss of money or prestige looks very much the same as bees swarming in response to loss of their nests and future children.

Freedom, we are often told, requires sacrifice. Our parents and grandparents of the W.W. II generation were told that freedom required sacrifice to the “war cause” and were willing to sacrifice much for that freedom. However, this war resulted in expansion of our population, our national territories, and our market monopolies.

If we open our hearts and our minds to the experience of struggle, suffering, and strife that continue long after whatever most recent “war” was over, we gain understanding and freedom to embrace the experience of others.

Our parents and grandparents were willing to sacrifice much to gain the illusionary “freedom” of our “national security.” Worldwide, struggle, strife, and suffering are again increasing to expand the illusionary freedom of strong “national security” and a strong “national economy”. Struggle begets struggle. Scars beget scars. Death begets death.

As we strive to maintain our market monopolies, there will be struggles and suffering. Individuals, partners, communities, corporations, and nations will scramble as resources are re-allocated. But, in an age of a global “economy” (from the Greek, oikonomia “household management”), resources will be re-allocated whether we wish it to happen or not.

In the “game” to “win” the illusion of security provided by market monopolies, there will be winners and loosers, although some may stay “even”.

If our parents and grandparents could sacrifice so much for the illusion of security provided by a “strong war”, how much should we be willing to sacrifice for the illusion of security provided by a “strong peace”?

The security of peace is just as illusionary as the security of war, for we will die in peace or in war.

But the strife to maintain “peace” is the struggle and suffering leading to freedom for expansion of our hearts and minds as we re-define who is “other” in our household.

struggles and scars

I am among those who see no value in violence or warfare. Violence and warfare are expressions of the most noxious of human emotions arising from strife and struggle. The emotions evoked, in turn, by events of violence and war are among the most difficult to control or guide. Actions based in such emotions are capricious and mostly unpredictable.

The outcomes of such actions are completely predictable: pain and wounds. Pain and wounds, in turn, result in either scars or death.

Death is inevitable for us all and a life event over which we have no personal power. We do, however, have personal power over the extent to which we inflict pain and wounds upon ourselves and others as we struggle to traverse the timescape between birth and death.

Scars, whether mental or physical, are reflections of struggle. It is often difficult to keep in mind that the most onerous and compelling struggles are inner struggles. Inner struggles have exponential potential to exact pain and wounds upon all—self and other, other and self–when turned outward.

Wounds beget wounds.  Scars beget scars.  Death begets death.

September 11, 2007

September 11

instant gratification

A review by Micheal A. Clemens of a new book by Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, (Oxford University Press, 2007), contains some of Clemens own experiences about working with projects in “underdeveloped economies”. The brief synopsis:

Paul Collier offers strong recommendations for helping “the bottom billion” — those living in poor countries caught in growth traps. But he cannot overcome a basic problem: how to create growth where no functioning economy exists (“Smart Samaritans”, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007).

Clemens’ observations about working in the poorest of nations are not overly pessimistic. All the problems he describes are realistic.

the shape of wisdom

Of course, not all youth have the openness of mind of the very young. I’ve looked into the eyes of dying children and have seen deep understanding of age pooled in their reflection. Some die in hunger, starvation, and endemic cultural violence.

Yet even those children born into prosperous families have not the automatic protection from risk we tend to expect as our due from prosperity. Their infant eyes, too, reflect great age in the breach before the great leveler.

consumption to offset risk

The “adolescent” mind, it has been said, is the state of mind in which the Boomer generation has been stuck. We have not “sucked it up” as did our parents and grandparents. We’ve overly indulged ourselves in adolescence. We’ve never grown up and faced the harsh realities of the market economy.

And yet, some do stop to reflect from time to time about the marvels our economy has produced, as did Joel Achenbach recently in that “liberal rag”, the Washington Post, in his article, “Bet on America“:

the enthusiast

Returning to the topic of Boomers as the “New Elders”, marketing consultants such as Marilynn Mobley are asking “do Boomers really want to be reminded of their age?”

“I’ve been surprised by some of the titles that have come out, such as ELDR, a magazine that debuted in July for 60-somethings. I don’t know that I’d want to be seen buying a magazine by that name…”

Let’s take a closer look at the “elder” idea.