Fitting in Our World Society

The bronze is of Toussaint L'Overture and is one of my favorite sculptures by Dr. John Moossy. Haiti is on my mind and I expect I'll say a bit about the situation there. But first I left a comment at Gay Uganda's blog and it's been troubling me ever since.

As an American I don't think it's strange in the least when people I meet online from other countries are interested to find out more about the USA. But there is something a little odd about my interest in Uganda. One of the odd things about is my presumption that people outside the USA are interested in it. And that presumption goes hand in hand with a presumption that by virtue of being an American I have something interesting to say to them. Maybe, but I'm sure the problem has something to do with presumptuousness.

I got online rather late in the game, but when I did I was fascinated by the social aspects of the Web. I also quickly got hooked on searches and the range of news and informative Web sites astounded me. And I fell enthrall to cyberutopian visions. That link is to a video of David Weinberg speaking at Reboot 11. I know most people don't have time to watch yet another video, so here's my quick summary: The Internet can enable people to create something good, but to do that it requires of us activism. Ethan Zuckerman, always excellent, has written several posts on cyberutopianism and this piece provides plenty to think about contra the notion. Anyhow I got charged up along with millions of others that together online people could come together in incredible ways not possible before. I had been chatting with people online from all over, but noticed I had not chatted with anyone from Africa and so sought them out.

I first began chatting with a young man who tended a computer lab at a high school in Uganda. We've been talking ever since. One thing led to another and so I've met more people in Uganda and other African countries. In 2002 my friend from the computer lab at the high school along with his brother and other friends began forming a community based organization. Early on there were some group dynamic issues I was keen to understand better and began searching through Yahoo Groups for other Ugandan groups. In the process of doing that I became acquainted with some Ugandan activists working on behalf of gay people.

I'm not saying that my interests in Uganda is noble. What I am saying is that I see the Internet as a tool that people can use to work together to get through what we're facing. And my interest in Uganda has been sustained over for nearly ten years now primarily through online friendships with Ugandans in various parts of the country and who have their own views.

Another way I've fed my interest in Uganda is to follow Ugandan bloggers. Gay Uganda provides a voice that's rarely heard and has been doing so since 2006. The 27th Comrade is in my view a brilliant writer, but in any case clearly is wickedly smart. He rarely tends his blog Communist Socks and Boots these days, but from the title you can tell he's a communist and as such is another unusual voice among Ugandan bloggers. Comrade 27th has also left frequent comments on the blogs by Ugandans and has done much to promote cross-blog communications.

Gay Uganda has written eloquently since October about a truly horrendous Anti Homosexuality Bill pending in Uganda. Comrade 27th has been critical of Gay Uganda's encouragement of people outside Uganda to work towards the defeat of this bill. I made the mistake of leaving one of my rambling comments on one of Gay Uganda's posts. I wish I'd learn to get to the point and I guess that comes down to thinking before I post.

Comrade 27th has made the point I'll loosely summarize as the USA's foreign policy is often heinous and the culture heedless and immoral; so why should Ugandans look that direction? I'm sure I differ with Comrade 27th on a multitude of details, but I've got to give it to him that in the larger sense of it he makes a good point.

The Box Turtle Bulletin has a great page where they've listed their coverage of the issue chronologically--just click on the link BTB's Uganda Coverage. Just scrolling through their stories an understanding why Americans, even if they could care less about Uganda, ought to care about this bill can be gleaned. Americans are involved in promoting this intolerance and this agenda often has more to do with politics in the USA than Uganda.

Few people care what I think, most people think me pretty goofy, which of course I am. When I talk to my American friends about what concerns me about American politics mostly the response is that eyes roll. If I use the word "plutocracy" I hear back: "Well what else is new." When I then use the word "oligarchy" they tell me: "The correct word is plutocracy." When in exasperation I use the word "fascism", well then I'm just beyond the pale and a nut. I am a bit nutty, but in general try to avoid such generalized talk in favor of more specific topics. But that doesn't mean I think people are not acting on some very bad ideas, or to put it succinctly that there are no bad guys.

The issue of homosexuality in Uganda brings together powerful Ugandans with powerful Americans up to no good. And the story of this confluence of the powerful is long and winding. Gay Uganda has a good handle on the map of it and so it's easy for him to see common cause with people outside of Uganda. I'm with him against a vengeful oligarchy. But I'm not often very clear what to do about it. I certainly cannot presume to tell Ugandans what they ought to be doing. And 27th Comrade at least is making the case that those in the West who are totally confident they do know what to do in Uganda, are deluded. I think he's probably right about that. The real issue is not the argument but what it is that we all should be doing? Imagining how Comrade 27 would answer, he might point out that if a white guy is doing the planning, the plan probably won't help him or Uganda.

A Federal Court in San Francisco is reviewing the decision to uphold the infamous Proposition 8--a voter initiative in California retracting the right of gay people to marry. Firedoglake has extensive coverage of the trial. This trial is seen by many as a risky gamble and that if the case goes to the Supreme Court with it's very conservative majority it will be overturned regardless of the legal arguments. An expert witness for the plaintiffs testified about how the odds are stacked against legislations to ensure the rights of gay and lesbians. He pointed out that in the past 20 years legal protections agains bias-motivated on gays and lesbians have been:

Overturned by popular plebiscite. Initiatives have rollewd back gains. 150, not counting marriage, G&L antidiscrimination votes, in 20 years. 75% of these have lost.

The struggle for basic rights is far from complete in the USA. And the politics governing what a small minority can do in the face of an often militant majority is not easy to work out.

I am in favor of LBGT rights in the USA. I stand for the right of adult people everywhere to be in control of their own bodies, to love who they love, and to express that love together as they consent to. How to stand up for our rights is very particular to the context. In the case of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda I've encouraged other Americans to find out about it and to contact their political representatives. I have also tried to convince people that there is more at stake politically in this legislation than simply gay rights, that the bill inhibits rights of association and of the press. What that comes down to is basically I'm a blowhard, all talk and no action.

The safety of Gay Uganda worries me a lot. From the outside looking in, it seems to me that Comrade 27th should be an ally of Gay Uganda. Actually it seems to me that he is. As I understand Comrade 27th, he thinks that even well intentioned white people seem inevitably to diminish the personhood of Ugandans in hundreds of often trivial ways. He may be right about that, but I believe that people have the capacity to empower one another to be more fully human. And that the two points are not entirely mutually exclusive.

I don't feel like I've said anything useful in regards the thread at Gay Uganda. I've been thinking about it for days, so that probably means I'm just confused. But there's a loose connection with the situation in Haiti after the catastrophe and the Anti-Homosexual Bill in Uganda. As an America there should be no question that this country's relationships vis a vis Haiti is an ugly one. This 2006 piece in the LRB by Paul Farmer is the best short history lesson I've seen online.

Haiti is the result of a successful slave revolt. That revolution shared the ideals of the revolution that brought the USA into being and the over turning of the Ancien Regime. Europeans like to think that they invented enlightenment values. How then to incorporate Haiti? One alternative is to suggest that these are values of human invention and of shared patronage. The old order is never replaced without a struggle and the struggle for liberty and fraternity is a long one.

I'll quote Barak Obama, a politician I frequently struggle with, who is in turn quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice...."

I believe all of our hands matter. Growing up in where I have and how I have means that I must be responsible. We all must be. We can find ways to struggle together.

Interesting Times

河坑土楼群 Hekeng Tulou, Fujian
Originally uploaded by Fon ZHOU

"May you live in interesting times." Is a a well known curse, and such times are now. They were yesterday too. Sometime in early December I stumbled upon the Fujian Tulou. I think I was looking at links about Madame Chaing Kai-shek and discovered a reference to the Hakka people of China and had never heard of them. From thence saw the references to Fujian Tulou which were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008.

Architecturally these buildings are interesting, and the other pictures from Fon Zhou's Flicker stream are worth a look. They are built of massive rammed-earth walls with some of them dating back to the 12th Century. These compounds were defensive structures protecting congregations of about 300 families. Unlike modern apartment buildings almost everywhere, there were no "deluxe" units; everyone got the same. So the heritage is not just a building but a way of life which has persisted for hundreds of years.

I fret about all sorts of things, consequential and not so consequential. Of the former sort the twin predicament of peak oil and global climate change stand out. I'm very thankful to John Michael Greer for casting these as a predicament rather than problems to be solved.

The question that has to be asked is whether a modern industrial society can exist at all without vast and rising inputs of essentially free energy, of the sort only available on this planet from fossil fuels, and the answer is no. Once that’s grasped, other useful questions come to mind – for example, how much of the useful legacy of the last three centuries can be saved, and how – but until you get past the wrong question, you’re stuck chasing the mirage of a replacement for oil that didn’t take a hundred million years or so to come into being.

Back in the 1970's there were two periods of sharp rises in oil prices in the USA in 1973 and in 1979. In both cases the proximate cause was political, and in both the economic ramifications were pronounced. As a young person at the time the realization that oil was a finite resource was brought home and I was eager to imagine appropriate responses. I did a lot of failing around, but nothing terribly productive as my peers established themselves in careers. Over the years I never thought that what I'd found out about oil as a finite resource back then was wrong, but events sure didn't turn out like I thought they would.

I don't know how long Business Week keeps it's content online, but in this week's edition is a story, Endless Oil: Technology, politics, and lower demand will yield a bumper crop of crude. The piece ends:

A nasty oil shock is always possible. But the case for bountiful oil is strong.

My own reaction to the story was that if there is a strong argument to be made, the story hadn't accomplished it. Then again, I'm no expert. Something I noticed about the expert opinions quoted in the article is they came from Cambridge Energy Research Associates. My general impression of CERA is the research they provide industry is premised in economic methods.

Lately the whole field of economics is in crisis. Back in early September Paul Krugman wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? which has been much discussed online. In this weeks The New Yorker John Cassidy has a piece After The Blowup: Laissez-faire economists do some soul-searching--and finger-pointing which deals with the consequences to the Chicago School of economics. The article is online only for subscribers. Much of the negative reaction to Krugman's piece in particular is in the form of "No we didn't!" Cassidy's piece presents some economists squarely in this camp, but many more economists are coming around to admitting that the finacial crisis does indeed suggest a failure. Perhaps "crisis" is too strong a word to describe what's happening within the economics field, and the more gentle construction is that the economic crisis "raises questions." Even the willingness to ask questions seems an advance in the field of economics.

John Michael Greer's post linked to earlier makes the point that mostly we've failed to ask the right questions. Perhaps as a field economists are forced to question whether they've been asking the right ones. So far I've seen too little engagement with the predicament of peak oil and climate change in the economic field. What's troubling to me about the Business Week article is how speculation is translated into positive fact. I'm left unconvinced.

Ah, but that leaves me wondering, while thinking our predicament is dire: What am I gonna do?

I don't have a good plan. The New Year is always a time for thinking anew, whether I want to or not. It's the middle of the month of January already, so I figured I'd put up my question to remind myself to start asking questions, and to start to do something. If nothing else the Fujian Tulou remind me that people in other periods of predicament responded in ingenious ways. Perhaps I can respond creatively too.

Happy New Year everyone.

Wisdom

If it's mentors we're nominating, I think I'd be about the last picked. Not the last probably, because I certainly never want to hurt anyone. It's not as if I don't have anything to share. Mentors are supposed to be trusted counselors to the inexperienced, and for what it's worth I've been experienced. Oh wait, maybe that's a disqualification for being a mentor? Anyhow,the main reason I'd be so far down on the list is I lack a certain wisdom. Wisdom, it seems is not only knowing what is right and and true, but also being able to put an action to it. That's the part, the wisdom, I lack.

Among the blogs I read are several that pursue the subject of peak oil from one direction or another. Most observers concerned about the ramifications of being on the downside of Hubbert's peak also seem to be quite hep to the consequences of global climate change too. For my part I'm convinced of both, but sometimes reading what I do gives me a big headache, and other times heartache. What I really want to hear is that everything is going to be alright, but I think otherwise.

Dave Pollard has a post up What Happens Nest: A Timeline for Civilizational Collapse. Here's a snippet:

A number of readers have asked me for an "elevator speech" that describes how I think our civilization will collapse by the end of this century. Being more of a "picture" person I decided to try to answer that question graphically. The result is shown above.

Go there if you think you can stomach it. It's a compact post which lays out the predicament we find ourselves. My usual response to articles like Pollard's, although I substantially agree with them, is paralysis. What am I to do?

When I start writing blog posts, I have a general idea for the direction they'll take, but the post almost never seem to go that way, or at least travel a straight path in that direction. The inspiration for this post was the delight I felt reading an email from a young Ugandan lad with whom I'm supposed to be in a mentoring relationship. So far, mostly it seems we talk past each other. But in this email he told me not to forget to include a poem for him. I don't write poems, but I had been including poems written by real poets in previous emails. To get feedback that he thought this a tradition worth keeping up pleased me. I enjoy searching for poems online and selecting something I like and think he might too. In short I felt sense of gratitude for how, even though it's hard to point to any real practical gain in the relationship, his presence enriches my life.

I started out saying I'd be among the last chosen to be a mentor, but in reality I was invited to take part. I participate in a social network called Ned and I think that the page about the Butterfly Project can be read by anyone. The point is that it's not only the relationship with the student I'm paired with that's gratifying, but also the online relationship with other students and people interested in the project.

So, this post began with the idea of convincing others to consider mentoring a young person. And I certainly wanted to link to a very dynamic set of Web pages at Tutor/Mentor Connection.

Well, then my mind started to wander. Oh and the tendency for my mind to wander is yet another reason I'd rank myself low on the list of possible mentors. A certain degree of concentration is necessary and negative examples really are never as effective as positive ones. I hit upon the notion of experience in defining what a mentor is supposed to be. From there I went to Youtube and watched multiple renditions of Are You Experienced. In the background for trying to write a convincing post is this gnawing feeling of paralysis in the face of apocalyptic dread. The sense of purpose the young students in the project have is quite the antithesis of this feeling. They want advice about how to proceed with tangible projects, and the gratitude I feel for their optimism and determination makes me want to be sure the advice is good.

One thing even a little exposure to teens quickly assures is they can smell a phony in a heartbeat. That's why "Do as I say not as I do" never succeeds as a strategy. Of course there is something quite real about apprentice relationships. The Cynefin Framework is a simple model to describe situations. It's really quite simple, there are: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic situations. Apprentice relationships are especially good for complicated situations where there are best practices to apply. Most trade involve very evolved sets of skills, the trades are complicated and it takes time and concentration to master them. I think when people think about mentoring relationships we most often think of the transmission of best practices. But so many of the pressing problems of today seem complex or even chaotic. While students might not really be thinking outright about complexity, really it's simpler when someone tells them what to do, in the face of complexity thinking for themselves is going to be more useful in the long run.

I neglect this blog. Part of it is that I can't imagine why anyone would read posts that start out going in one direction but end up meandering all over the place. The simple solution to that problem would be for me to stop doing that. Alas, I wish I would, but I'm not sure I can. It's also a relief not to imagine that I actually can convince anyone of anything, even if I seem to start from that premise. The blog started with the premise of convincing people to consider ways they could be of service to people in Africa, especially online. Over the years of this blog, I've certainly questioned the wisdom of this premise, but never questioned the value of the friendships I've made. I don't write much about my contacts in Uganda because often the conversations are private. It's one thing for me to tell about myself, but quite another to tell about someone else.

I think online collaboration is useful and rewarding. I also believe I've got to be more serious about making more in person collaborations. What my readers think, and hope to do, is for them to discover; although I have a keen interest in hearing about it. My sense about the complex and chaotic situations we all face today is there are no silver bullets, certainly not one big and simple fix. Doing everything we're suppose to is what got us in the fix we're in, so doing more of it even more earnestly isn't going to get us out of it. The best approaches, if they come along at all, won't come from the center.

Apart from the students in the Butterfly project my interlocutors in Uganda aren't so young, but they are younger than I am. Everything we've done together has been to try to create something good with all sorts of attendant concern that maybe it's not so good at all. There's little money, there's ordinary problems on the ground, sickness and health, progress and setback, and constant reminders of how vast the territory of my ignorance really is. I suspect my relationship with the Butterfly project will be more of the same.

I linked to the Tutor/Mentor site because there are so many really thoughtful articles there. Most people when they're thinking about collaborating will think closer to home than Africa. I know of no better site than the Tutor/Mentor Connection to find out more about collaborating with young people regardless of where you are. At the site are hundreds of pages which plainly explain many types of relationships. And you won't go far before discovering that the Tutor/Mentor Connection has a distinctively wise approach. It's much too simple, yet I'm tempted to say that the key ingredient is the importance of relationships. All relationships don't resolve into us and them, indeed the best relationships begin and end as we. Along the way there is good we can create with others, even if at the end there's no real escaping our predicament.

The photo is of a fungus growing under a butternut tree a few weeks ago. It looks like a brain don't you think?

G20 Pittsburgh Summit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/knobil/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I followed the news of G20 on Thursday and Friday evenings by obsessively updating Twitter search. I'm not very swift when it comes to learning computer stuff. For example I use Open Office Writer frequently and have for years. I'm appalled that I still don't know how to do rudimentary things with it: What are styles? I also seem incapable of being succinct about any subject; probably revealing my ignorance of most subjects more than anything. So while I'm happy to look at my Twitter stream, I don't put up tweets.

Earlier this month I learned about riots in Kampala early through updates at Facebook. I know some folks in Kampala so I was keen to find news, but little was available. So I turned to Twitter searching #Kampala. Because I read some Ugandan blogs, some of the persons putting up tweets were known by me. Following retweets, people copying tweets they find relevant so their Twitter followers will see them, I was able to identify trusted sources; following friends of friends. The riots were very worisome and as it turned out some of my friends were affected by the violence. It probably is a little strange, but the flow of tweets during that crisis was engaging. I tend to stay up far too late, so I was getting real time updates.

Appfrica "is a web portal for the latest news related to African innovation, education and entrepreneurship in technology." Incredibly quickly after the riots Jonathan Gosier, CEO of Appfrica Labs,wrote an incisive piece about citizen reporting of the event with thoughts about how to make such reporting more useful, entitled Asynchronous Info, Disjointed Data and Crisis Reporting.

I was eager to use Twitter as a source for information about the G20 Pittsburgh Summit. In advance of the event I followed people and planned aggregators at Twitter. But when the pedal hit the medal, the generic search #G20 seemed the best way to follow events. Posts at times were coming fast and furious, and as a "Trending Topic" the thread included Spambots. Still it was easy to identify credible sources, even when I hadn't known about most of them in advance. I was quite impressed that reporters from various mainstream news outlets were participating in the stream.

People were listening to the police radio and tweeting what they heard. For example a tweet was broadcast that four hooded actors were at a certain location with the added directive: Leave Now! The other side of the coin was that at one point the police dispatcher remarked that their Twitter intelligence was pretty good! Network research scientist Valdis Krebs wrote for One Web Day:

Remember...

The technology that gives You the power to organize,
also gives Them the power to watch.

I'm not sure where that leads us, but it was hard to miss during the action.

Because I know Pittsburgh well, I was able to place addresses and to recognize places in photos and videos, even the grainy ones taken with cell phones. On Thursday there were some windows of businesses broken. A friend of a friend put up photos on Facebook taken from inside her place of work across the street from the action. The photos were good enough to use for identification of the perpetrators. Probably the most serious of all the property damage done was done by one guy from California. My father was incredulous about the report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I reminded him of the location of the banks damaged and pointed out that the corner had to be one of the most photographed in all of Pittsburgh. If there were more involved they're certainly on tape and can imagine no reason the authorities would be holding back.

The photograph is from Mark Knobil's G20 photoset at Flickr. Mark is an accomplished cinematographer. I love his still photographs and often enjoy them best large. Prior to the event we were talking in a group of friends speculating what might happen at the G20. I suggested that the police probably wouldn't let marchers go beyond a particular street. I pegged it about right, what hadn't occurred to me at the time is what it would mean for the neighborhood where Mark lives. I suspect he was more prescient than me. His photos from his neighborhood move me because I love the part of the world where I live. His photos are brilliant in general, and if you want a sense for what Pittsburgh looks like you can really get a feel for it exploring his posted photos of the region.

There was lots of press touting the transformation of Pittsburgh from a sooty industrial town to a greener high-tech industrial base. This article in The Christian Science Monitor is a good example. But what the articles fail to convey is how painful the collapse of the steel industry here has been. Coping with that transition has been a defining effort for people of my age locally. It seems as though I'm reaching for something other than "misery loves company," but perhaps there is a bit of that in our local character. At least there is a shared experience of loss and attempting to make tranformative change.

Seeing the city reflected through the lens of international attention has been interesting to me. I'm eager to get together with others to talk about the experience. I wonder if anyone else was paying attention to Twitter? My hope is the G20 has stimulated our thinking about what we might do together. We've come along way as a region, but surely there's a long way still to go.

Windmills and We20

The picture is the book cover of a book by William Kamkwamba and Brian Mealer. The book has gotten rave reviews--I particularly enjoyed Ethan Zuckerman's review and like to link to Zuckerman's blog just because it's always so smart. If you're thinking of buying the book, buy it at Amazon from this link so your purchase will help to fund the Moving Windmills Project for community initiatives in Malawi.

I'll get back to William Kamkwamba in a moment, but first a detour. The G20 Pittsburgh Summit begins tomorrow morning. In the lead up to it I remembered a Web site set up in advance of the G20 Meeting in London called we20. We20 is a great idea, it's a platform for small groups of people in communities all over the world to share locals plans relevant to their economies. I began talking up having meetings with my friends. As it turns organizing isn't my forte. Still over the last month or so when I've gotten together with friends the subject has come up.

The idea of making plans and sharing them online is really the important part of we20. But looking back over the "meetings" over the last month or so, I realize now that planning is a stage that comes after quite a lot of discussion. Something else I've come to understand is when you get together in small groups to talk about the economy, the talk gets quite personal. The conversations turn to our relationships, and most of that seems the last thing in the world to put on a public Web page. Nevertheless, plans are specific must relate to our real personal lives.

Last night I attended a meeting. Some of the conversation revolved around protests and the city's response. Some of the meeting was around global monetary issues like proposals for instituting a Tobin Tax in the context of Oxfam's proposal How to find $280bn for poor countries this weekend. We were able to sustain conversation about global monetary issues and global issues in general like climate change and commodity prices for a while. But in a small group of friends it's hard to sustain such talk for very long without the dire reality of our own situation coming to fore. The relevant question, and what we20 is all about is: "What are we going to do?" And there are no ready answers to that question.

Last night and in a previous meeting we touched on the issue of whether we face problems to be solved or a predicament. That way of framing comes from John Michael Greer by way of Sharon Astyk's The Pedagogy of Collapse. Astyk has a brilliant post today that sums up the hard dilemma we were facing last night that there's no easy change possible. In her post Dreaming a Life she notes that baby steps are all well and good, but babies quickly learn to walk, and faster than we'd like, to run! Our lament is being stuck in baby steps.

I bet that most we20 groups coming together have to start with these sorts of discussions. How to move them forward towards making actual plans, is something we've yet to discover. But I hope that even as the G20 Meeting is over and gone, discussion will continue and we find some way of making plans.

At William Kamkwamba's blog today there's a post annoucing that his TED Talk in Oxford earlier this year is up. The talk is about six minutes long, but had me cheering loudly. A couple of years ago William spoke briefly at TED Global in Tanzania. At the time Mike McKay a blogger who was working with Baobab Health in Malawi and had helped to get the story of William's remarkable windmill out expressed concern that people take care with all the attention to William. Things seem to have worked out well, perhaps because William has been too busy at school to pay too much attention to the hype.

William was only 14 when he built his first windmill. He was 19 when he spoke in Tanzania and he's 22 now. At his blog William says he's proud of his recent talk. And I felt so proud of him too listening to it. The old saw about genius is that it's "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration." In the last couple of years William has put in hours of hard work. I was so moved by his presentation and exhortation to other to try and make. He directed his words to poor people, but the rest of us should listen too.

The problem that I face along with my friends and our informal meetings is we're quite invested in living in ways we know are ultimately unsustainable. The conundrum is how to find a path towards a more sustainable way of life. We've figured out little parts of the puzzle, but are still far from making a comprehensive plan, or even a modest plan in the right direction. That's quite a different sort of situation that William was facing which led to his building a windmill, nevertheless he provides an inspiration that much can be done even when faced with very difficult situations.

May Peace Prevail on Earth!

September 21st is the International Day of Peace. It's also the first day of Autumn and the time of the breaking fast of the fast of Ramadan as well as the Jewish New Year and High Holy Days; Eid Mabrook, and L'shana tova to my friends.

I did a post on the subject of Peace Day at my Hats For Health blog. I suppose it will turn up in my sidebar eventually, but there's the link in case. I really hadn't planned to write a post of the subject here today, but I am a bit anxious to have my last post get buried. Really my naiveté astounds even me sometimes. Generally it's not a good idea to poke hornet's nests, and the subject of Internet scammers is one fine nest.

Today is also the first day of autumn. My dear Aunt Ruth is ailing, and my father calls his sister everyday. She often isn't very responsive, and his response is to ask even more questions. So sometimes he looks for a poem to read to her rather than to bombard her with questions. Tonight he was looking for September and I found it for him online. It fits the season here in the USA very well:

SEPTEMBER

The golden-rod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.

The gentian's bluest fringes
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun.

The sedges flaunt their harvest,
In every meadow nook;
And asters by the brook-side
Make asters in the brook,

From dewy lanes at morning
The grapes' sweet odors rise;
At noon the roads all flutter
With yellow butterflies.

By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer's best of weather,
And autumn's best of cheer.

But none of all this beauty
Which floods the earth and air
Is unto me the secret
Which makes September fair.

'T is a thing which I remember;
To name it thrills me yet:
One day of one September
I never can forget.

He was uncertain of the author of the poem. We thought perhaps it was Leigh Hunt, but actually the poem was written by Helen Hunt Jackson, and neither of us knew who she was.

The theme of my post over at the Hat blog is something along the lines of "Slacktivist Unite!" Silly, I suppose. What any of us can do seems such a small thing. Learning a bit about the life of Helen Hunt Jackson from the Wikipedia article was inspiring. Well into middle age, after suffering the death of her two sons and first husband she traveled West in search of a cure for TB. There she met and married a wealthy Railroad executive. After hearing a lecture by Chief Standing Bear she dedicated her life to redress of the injustice of the treatment of Native Americans.

I believe each of us makes a difference.

In my house growing up before meals we'd sing a song, a simple grace. The custom came about because my mother was active in Girl Scouts for many years. As a young boy I'd accompany her to a summer camp she led for a week in the summer. I can remember day times with my brother, but not much about the Girl Scouts. We must have been babysat at night somehow. But my sister well remembers singing Let There Be Peace on Earth, and Let It Begin with Me. I must have sung it too,but don't have clear memories of it, just remember the song. Searching the videos at YouTube ought to have a dire cute attack warning label. There are very many beautiful children's groups singing it. This version done by PS22 Chorus is so lovely.

Children indeed show us a wisdom beyond their years, but they're just kids. And if kids can get that peace begins in everyone of us, we can grok that as adults too.

Autumn is a beautiful time of year and a good time for taking stock, a time when all over the world people contemplate how they can make peace. Somewhere in all our hearts we know that's what we ought to do. Oh, but it's hard and it's complicated, I know. Still on this day and everyday, I bid you peace. Especially on this day, an International Day of Peace, may peace be with you.

Find the Other Ones

Right on this blog's masthead is:

To Promote Voluntary Service to African People

You might have noticed that I haven't said anything about that for a long time. I want to get back to that purpose today.

I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but for whatever reasons when I write online I feel a need to preface my points by noting how imperfect and inadequate I am. I see other people doing this sort of thing too. I suppose it has to do with pecking orders and at least getting a place even if it's a low rank. What I have in mind for this post get into some controversial issues. I want to preface this post by saying I'm a nice guy. Even positively awful people probably believe that of themselves, so my saying it is nearly useless. Still, all my life I've tried to do little harm to others. While I've not always been successful, doing no harm is very important to me.

I like social networking sites, the social Web seems on balance a positive development. Long time readers will know that my interest in trying to be of service to Africans was influenced by a book by Robert Rodale called Save Three Lives: A Plan for Famine Prevention. The book was published in 1991 and right after the galley proofs were approved Robert Rodale was killed in a traffic accident in Russia. One of the basic premises of Rodale's plan is famine prevention must be a localized effort. He thought that in general people knew what needed doing locally and the way to prevent famines was to empower regular people to do what needs doing. Rodale invited us to think small to have as a mission to make a difference in three lives, instead of the mission to save Africa or to save the whole world. Many small efforts combined would make a big difference.

That's the theory. I read the book soon after I got online in 1999 or there abouts. A rather late adopter of computers, I was very impressed by the Internet. I noted that Rodale's book was written before the World Wide Web, and was inspired by how the Web could implement more effectively a dispersed approach toward famine prevention. Of course every technology is complicated and for every intended purpose there seems a shadow of unforeseen negative consequences. Perhaps the ratio isn't so equal, at least I hope for the positive side to outweigh the negative. Nevertheless there's always a downside, and worse it's not always easy to tell in the short run what's good and what's bad.

I made contact with Magumba Nathan in Iganga, Uganda around this time. I learned from him about his life and the challenges in his community. There'a big gulf between our experiences, so I tried to learn more about Uganda in many ways. I was also interested in the concept of using the Internet to connect people and muster needed resources. I stumbled upon Christina Jordan, an American in Uganda who was well along the way on this Internet path. A few years latter through Christina's work I got introduced to an online social network called Omidyar.net. The Omidyar Network still exists, but the social network does not. The tool set of the old ONet lives on at Ned along with some of the participants at the old site. Christina has left Uganda and is pursuing new endeavors now.

Earlier this month Christina Jordan wrote a great blog post Do We Matter Online: Empowering Marginalized People on the Internet. Christina makes some very good points, perhaps the most important is:

empowering people means helping them believe that they matter, and that what they have to offer has value.

What's different about her essay is she talks from the perspective of regular people living in the Third World encountering the Internet. And Jordan expresses how important nurturing trust is.

I was excited to read the post because trust is not so simple because it's something built over time. Part of the reason for my not blogging much about Africa recently has to do with this. I haven't lost interest, it's just much of what I'm doing is with friends and isn't really something public. Of course Nathan's efforts with his community organization the BSLA are something that should be publicly known. I've got the gist of them, but I'm afraid because I'm so far away I'll get the description a bit wrong. And I prefer that his community tells their stories. Be that as it may, when I read Jordan's post I thought of a trend I'd noticed online of young men especially from Ghana chatting up foreign men on Gay social networking sites.

I kept quiet about this line of thinking, but then by happenstance Ethan Zuckerman wrote a post Gay sex scams – and community responses – in Ghana. Every time I read a post by Zuckerman I end up on a journey of clicking links, one leading to another. Zuckerman came to write his post from reading an article at Global Voices. I cannot recommend highly enough subscribing to their email update--at the top of the page is a subscribe button. Anyhow the post there is Africa: Preventing blackmail and extortion against gays . Both Zuckerman's and the Global Voices pieces are worth reading. Both deal with the issue of fraud, in other words the perspective is more or less from the perspective of the foreigner not the Ghana money boys.

When I've talked to friends about being of service to Africans online, the issue of frauds always come up, so it's an important topic. But I thought of the subject after reading Christina Jordan's piece which emphasizes trust the other way around. Ghana money boys on the Internet is a subset of online cyber sex. There's much of that's clearly wrong about it, but I'm not so sure it's all wrong. In any case talking sex online is something that's done a lot and a common beginning of exchange between people from different places. For good reasons most people are freaked out about talking about this sort of Web behavior. In regards to the online fraud and Web sites to combat it Zuckerman remarks:

It strikes me that this story can be read either as an extremely depressing narrative about how human beings treat one another over the Internet, or as a testament to the power of virtual communities.

Oh yeah, what people do is often quite depressing, we're a bundle of contradictions. Obviously the harm done online isn't what is done in person. It's easy to go on a rant about sex tourism and that line might provide some sympathy with the fraudsters. From both Zuckerman's and the Global Voices pieces I clicked on lota of links, I'm not sure how I ended up at GayGhana.org, but I did. From a page on that site on tips for gay visitors to Ghana, I got a big chuckle reading:

Of course there are also legitimate Gay boys who sincerely look for a partner and who really do like white (older) men. Miracles happen.

For better or worse, hope springs eternal, and people are still looking for miracles. Over the years I've talked with male, female and trans people outside the USA online which start from the premise of looking for love. The Ghana boys have interested me in particular because there are so many involved.

Sometimes jumping out of the game results in a quick insult and end to it all. But sometimes the guys are quite happy to drop the gay pretense and cut to the chase about their efforts to get money. I'm sure there are some really awful guys involved in all of this, but most of these guys aren't awful. My concerns are usually the other way around, thinking about the terrible people they'll meet online. I have been impressed with the way the guys work in Internet cafes. Whatever you think about what they are doing, it's hard not to notice they're learning about computers and the Internet by doing it.

The wonderful William Kamkwamba has a new book out The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. I've been loving reading the reviews of the book because his story so inspires me. Following his blog he recently posted The Doers Club. He writes:

The Doers Club will work on inventions. The first is a steam engine that I want to make using a tin-foil solar oven. As they say, it's still on the drawing board.

Alright, I know I'm sometimes the fool. I also know I seem incapable of concision in my writing. In advance of Maker Faire Africa I'd tried to talk up the event and the notion of a maker culture to a bright young newly-wed in Ghana who wanted me to help him to do "one bad thing," meaning these Gay online scams. My presentation made no sense to him, and he's left me alone since. That's not the first time I've talked with young people in Africa about ways to use the Internet to create something good. These conversations don't always start out from a dating pose, not at all, but sometimes do.

Just recently I sent an email to a guy in the Gambia along these lines, I haven't heard back since. I procrastinated writing the email, thinking it a fool's errand. It probably was, but I wrote it anyway because something like William Kamkwamba's idea for a Doers Club really does excite me. There's a great deal of potential for Doers Clubs. They would have to have an on the ground component, but they also could have an online component. I think they might be a way for establishing more constructive engagement across boundaries.

The faker quality from both sides on online social networks around sex and dating has two sides to it. On one is the willingness to suspend disbelief, to believe miracles will happen. One the other side is the built-in skepticism by both parties. Perhaps the whole enterprise is irredeemable. "Find the other ones" was a retort Timothy Leary gave a reporter who asked what people are to do after they've "turned on, tunned in, and dropped out." One way or another people are using the Internet to find the others.

Writing all of this makes me think I should start a Doers Club on social networks I visit. Clearly, some social networks are more respectable than others. Going back to Christina Jordan's post and focus on marginalized people, I don't want to encourage people in the Third World to imagine that getting someone outside where they live to fall in love with them and send money or send a ticket to them to America, Germany or elsewhere. Still, lots of people are placing a bet something like that happening. Would a Doer's Club break the spell of possibility and therefore be avoided? Possibly, but there is also a store of goodwill, people want to love and be loved. We all know there are many kinds of loving.

I'm not sure I actually will start such a club. But I do believe that the "urge to merge" or Timothy Leary's "find the other ones" is profoundly human. There's much that's really bad going along with that, as well as the very best of what it means to be alive. Necessary attention to fraud shouldn't blind us to our goodness; in fact it's our goodness that needs extending.

~The photo is an image made of this Bazugu Bucks from Webpages As Graphs. Nothing really to do with this post, but an interesting graphic toy online.