Everybody's Cryin' Mercy

October 15th is Blog Action Day. Thousands of bloggers are writing about one subject: the environment.

Crikey! A deadline, and as usual I haven't a clue what I'm going to say; worse than that I fear I won't say anything useful. Or to say something as banal as, I strongly support the environment by doing things like taking my own bags to the grocery store with me.

It is true that I take my own bags to the grocery store, la di da. But I'm not a vegetarian, even though I know my meat munching has a much bigger impact than the grocery bags saved. The fact of the matter is in too much of my daily life the foot print I make is big and clumsy.

The title of the post comes from the title a song by the great Mose Allison. He sings: "Everyone's cryin' mercy/ when they don't know the meaning of the word." So I look it up in the American Heritage Dictionary:

Kind and compassionate treatment of an offender, enemy prisoner, or other person under one's power; clemency.

Part of what makes talking about the environment so hard is this business of power. When European explores first sailed across the ocean and "discovered" America, they talked about the land in terms of a young woman, a virgin. Some observers liken the language as intending rape. Certainly the idea of mastery over the land is not at all uncommon then as now. The difference is that now we're able to expend some much more work in a much shorter time. We can move mountains.

People are still skeptical about how much power they have over the elements; as much as we have, it seems puny. What's above and what's below are connected, we're sure, although not always sure how. In dire straits communities may hire a rainmaker, in desperate hope, while knowing that's a con. A person doesn't make the rain which comes from heaven above. Maybe the rattles and dancing can help bring the rain, or maybe it's the songs of the frogs who call the rain down? We're conflicted, cryin' mercy from above, and showing little in our own steps.

A bad enough situation
Is sure enough getting worse
Everybody's crying justice
Just as soon as there's business first

It's not so much we people deny our impact on the environment, it's just hard to imagine what to do about it.

Al Gore in a letter acknowledging his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in conjunction with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change wrote (though a comment at Theriomorph):

The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

It's hard enough to get my own consciousness up, and harder as the mornings grow cold to get out of bed in the mornings. How awake and attentive I am has some relationship to how awake and attentive we all are, but I'm not quite sure how.

Gore is donating all of the prize money to The Alliance for Climate Protection. It's a good Web site with lots of practical suggestions for steps we can all take. None of the steps seems particularly glamorous, but hey, it's a process. When I take one step, I can take another.

Speaking of stepping, I happen to be convinced that oil and gas supply problems are real. More of us will probably be doing a lot more walking and a lot less driving sooner than any of us imagine. A blog that I really like is Transition Culture: An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart, and Hands of Energy Descent. I particularly admire that blogger Rob Hopkins connects the head, heart and hands.

Hopkins is also actively involved with Transition Towns in his town of Totnes. The community initiative is to develop a energy descent plan with the understanding that if properly planned the town could use a lot less energy and resources. Here's the best part, they assume that their town using less can "be more resilient, more abundant and more pleasurable than the present." I was cynical when I first started following the Transition Culture blog. The blog is conversational, and practical. I get the sense they just might become all of those.

I want to explore this transition town idea in my own community. Stepping beyond the little property where I live could be a step in the right direction. Here's an archived copy of 10 First Steps for a Transition Town Initiative at Energy Bulletin Hopkins published earlier in this year at his blog. Already initiatives have sprung up in other towns in Great Britain and abroad.

I'm actively following an initiative in Northern Uganda to resettle about 150 child-headed families in a farm village. Perhaps the best place for an overview of the project is at the community group at Razoo, Opok Farms Village. It's such an interesting project to think about because the property, has good farm land which has laid fallow for twenty years, and forest. The whole community has been so discombobulated, but there's real hope to repair and build. I find the vision of the young people particularly hopeful.

But sitting here in America in my basement office typing away makes me feel a bit of a hypocrite. Dave Pollard is a really smart guy. Recently he linked to a post by Wendell Berry at the Briar Patch Network, Seventeen Rules for a Sustainable Community. Yikes! Sounds like a lot of work. But what I noticed is many of the rules that Berry puts out there are ideas that we've talked about for Opok Farms Village.

There are many issues quite distinct to Totnes, Gulu, and Freedom, Pennsylvania. But there are some ideas that make sense all around. Berry links to an essay contained in his book A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural Think Little. Al Gore sees a great opportunity for lifting global consciousness, I'm not so visionary as he is. Berry's Think Little reminds to attend to what we can, to be responsible where we can.

I've been cryin' mercy, all the while thing big, thinking global. I'd expect to be scolded, but Berry's message doesn't feel that way. We all can do something for the environment, with head, heart and hands. Being responsible means being able to respond. I pray I show mercy where I have power, and that might the powers above me have mercy on me.

Social Networks

I've been online for less than ten years, but it's a big part of my life now. When I first got online I was impressed by how the id, ego, and superego were all well represented. That's still the case, I guess it just goes to show that the Internet is a human phenomenon and not machine.

I notice that I haven't posted here since August 11 of this year. I wonder if it matters? And to answer my own question it does to me, I think. Part of what's kept me from posting is I've been engaging recently in some social networks which are new to me.

Early in September Omidyar.net shuttered its doors. I had been an active participant there for just under a year, but found it a very empowering network. Over the three years or so Omidyar.net was open to the general public something like 20,000 people had signed up and by the time of its closing about 500 were active and regular users.

These numbers seem incredibly small in comparison to sites like MySpace and Facebook. I'm no social software intellectual, but it seems to me that the site is something worth some academic study--maybe my thinking so is good evidence of why I'm not an academic. But the site offered such a rich platform for collaboration, and while there was something of a learning curve involved, Omidyar.net was a highly collaborative space. It's the quality of the participation there that I found so significant.

Since it closed all the active users have gone on to populate other platforms. So it's rather interesting to me to see where some of my fellow collaborators have gone and also to see how they interact on different platforms.

It's gotten me to look around and join new sites as well. I'm not entirely a stranger to social networking sites, although I don't really use them too effectively. I had joined MySpace a while back, primarily because I thought it would be a place to get band information, and to keep track of social organizations important to me. But I've found it of limited usefulness. I was really interested to watch over their shoulders a couple of years ago when a niece and nephew came to visit. They were really into it.

Zbigniew Lukasiak made a observation about Facebook today:

I am a bit disapointed about Facebook - it notifies me about all kinds of events involving my friends - but somehow I can't find a way to monitor for new posts in groups I have joined. For me having meaningful conversations is the absolute number one feature of social web sites and I don't see much point in using Facebook when it does not make it easy for me.

The point about meaningful conversations is very much something I expect in social networks, but making a site responsive to that is easier said than done.

As soon as Facebook was open to the general public positive remarks about the place were common among the people I know online. As it turned out something that made it popular; i.e., discovering all sorts of people they know face to face, just wasn't the case for me. Most of my friends avoid the Internet, and certainly avoid social networking sites.

One slightly crass way of describing Omidyar.net is to say it was a social network for do-gooders. Don't laugh, there are several really rich platforms in this niche. One of those platforms I joined around the time Omidyar.net was closing is Razoo. I like Razoo. Something that Razoo does that I like very much is offer Web feeds for many of the pages. But but among the list of things about the site I'm not so happy about is that navigation is time consuming.

Back to Facebook, I didn't arrive there with a bunch of friends. So at the beginning there really wasn't much reason to check in on the site for. Previously I had signed up for Netvibes, but hadn't used it. Then I saw that I could install a Facebook module, or widget at Netvibes.

Netvibes allows users to make a sort of homepage where you can aggregate all sorts of content from the Web and add a bunch of cool widgets. So for example, I have a widget for Facebook, Gmail, my Flickr Feed, my delicious bookmarks, The New York Times and some other stuff on one page. It's great I can check in and at a glance see any new activity. Netvibes also allows tabs where you can draw in content on new pages which can be named an organized as you like. So that feature seemed a very good way of handling some of the content at Razoo, for example I've subscribed to all the blogs at Razoo I want to follow.

There are some small glitches, not so much with Netvibes, but the way feeds are updated at Razoo. Also at Razoo, the really important information I want is when discussion threads have been updated. Unfortunately, discussion threads are not syndicated, and Razoo doesn't alert members when discussion threads are updated. The only way I can follow the discussions is to actually go to the pages where they originated to see if there's been any activity.

A couple of days ago I was astounded to read at Scoblizer that Orkut is the Google service with the most page views a day.

I was curious so I signed up and started looking around Orkut. I also opened up Bebo which I had joined because I thought it might be a place to publish some stuff I wrote a while ago, and just to top off the list I finally joined hi5 which I'd avoided in the past because the recruitment seemed Spamy. Spending some time rummaging around these sites was fun, but I don't think I'll use them much. Orkut amazed me because there are a lot of Indian users and also a lot of Brazilian users and that struck me as such an interesting mashup. I don't really have the stats, but when I say "a lot" I really mean it, some of the fan sites there have over 300,000 members!

I'm a friendly guy, and like making friends, but I'm 51, soon to be 52. The discussions are what I value the most. With these three sites there are many boundaries to cross, and I think perhaps the boundary of age is the largest obstacle for making these social networks important to me.

Back before the 2004 elections Black Planet used to have some lively discussion boards and I used to participate on a few. BP changed the discussion format around and so I found myself never going there. And in fact BP sent me notice that without activity my profile would be deleted. I assumed it had been because I never saw any notice in my email, but then rather suddenly activity reappeared there. Much of it was Spam, but not all of the Spam seemed without value. Some of it offered a window into issues and events important to African Americans.

Very occasionally I get friendship notes. I responded to one recently in what I thought was an honest way and gave my Yahoo email. So I got a Yahoo chat message. After a little chatting the woman really reamed me out for being at BP if I wasn't interested in dating. Maybe she's right, I just didn't think I was putting myself out there that way.

In my usual rambling way I've managed to use too many words to say two little. So just a couple more quick observations. First of all looking at pictures at Orkut, Bebo and hi5, I saw so many beautiful young people, so many pictures of best friends together, and pictures of favorite nieces and nephews, mothers and dads. At Orkut it was so interesting to see groups with Indians and Pakistanis, Syrians and Iranians. The joy of living, the loving families and friends, the birthday cakes, all of what makes us happy as people is on display.

Looking at all the pictures of real people all over the globe the last few days as I've explored a few social networks new to me, one thought rings clear: There are no smart bombs.

John F. Kennedy spoke:

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

Among the political bogs I read is Col. Patrick Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007. I admire Col. Lang and appreciate very much his realistic military appraisals and the lively and enlightened conversation at his blog. But if on balance I appreciate his blog, there's always a sticking point when he calls people like me imbeciles.

I know that modern warfare is conducted against populations not armies. So for example perhaps there are as many as five million Iraqis displaced by the American war on Iraq. Population estimates are over 26 million, so that's almost one in five Iraqis.

Col. Lang has been outspoken against a wider war in the Middle East. I hope smarter people than I are paying attention to what he says. But there is a gulf between Col. Lang and me. I understand that securing peace requires a well-ordered military. I value his service and the service of all those in serving and have served. I also believe those who work to make peace are engaged in a noble enterprise and are hardly imbeciles. Making peace is something all of us should be engaged in.

Second, October 15th is Blog Action Day. Bloggers around the world will write to draw attention to the environment. I plan to participate and hope you will too.

Closets

Photo: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Steve Prakope; some rights reserved

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Being "in the closet" is a standard metaphor for gay people living their lives so that their sexual orientation is hidden. The metaphor of closets is a more general one for that which we hide, but cannot deny.

Closets are dark places, and the darkness sometimes leads to strange behavior. In the middle of July the Florida chair of Republican senator John McCain's presidential campaign chair Florida State Representative Bob Allen was arrested in a public restroom for soliciting sex from a undercover policeman. Allen has defended himself in this way:

Allen, R-Merritt Island, told investigators he was just playing along when the undercover Titusville officer suggested oral sex and $20 because he was intimidated by the "stocky black guy," according to the statement.

Allen, who is white, also said that there "was nothing but other black guys around in the park" and that he thought he was about to be robbed. At the time, Allen was unaware the other men also were undercover officers.

Rep. Allen's explanation seems ridiculous! But via the essential black looks blog a video, bell hooks on rap, race & representation of black female bodies makes some sense of it for me. The last segment of the 9 minute video--at about the 7 minute mark--hooks talks about consuming commodified blackness. She begins with a powerful observation which I hope I've transcribed accurately:

I believe that American culture is obsessed with transgression. And to the degree that blackness remains a primary sign of transgression, one could talk about a American culture, mainstream culture, as being obsessed with blackness. But it is blackness primarily as a commodified form that can be then possessed, owned, controlled and shaped by the consumer; and not with an engagement with black culture that might require one to be a participant and therefore to be in some way transformed by what you are consuming, as opposed to being merely a buyer.

Rep. Allen is entitled to his day in court. The Village Voice links to a document showing that Florida's Christian Collation had given a 92.3 approval rating. Given the circumstances surrounding Allen's arrest, I'm dubious about his innocence.

The Diocese of Pittsburgh is extraordinarily politically conservative. The history of how it got to be that way is long. When we moved to Pittsburgh in my teens I was what they used to call a Jesus Freak, but even as a kid coming up from the American South with such religious fervor, the political conservatism of church pricked my heals. I haven't attended church except for family weddings and other obligatory occasions like that since my early college days, however the activities of the Episcopal Church still capture a bit of my attention.

In 1997 Robert Duncan was consecrated Bishop of Pittsburgh. Bishop Duncan has been instrumental in initiating a schism within the Episcopal Church, one particular rationale stems from the consecration of an openly gay V. Gene Robinson was consecrated as Bishop of New Hampshire.

A part of Bishop Duncan's strategy to rent the Episcopal Church of America asunder is a tactical arrangement with Anglican Bishops in Uganda. The first arrangement with Uganda Bishops got off to a rocky start when a priest working in Pittsburgh but under the authority of a Bishop in Uganda raped a minor in his charge. That hasn't deterred Bishop Duncan's expanded tactical cooperation with the Ugandan Bishops for schism in the Episcopal Church.

Tying together Rep. Allen's arrest and Episcopal Church politics is a strain of authoritarian politics, where power, especially power over others, has a price. Stirring up hatred against gay people plays a prominent role. Commodified blackness bell hook's surely seem to fit Rep. Allen's soliciting sex from a Black undercover policeman and his subsequent defense. It's not really such a stretch from pandering to prejudices against gay people for political power to paying a black man for sex.

It's rather culturally acceptable to question the sincerity of politicians, but not so accepted to question religious sincerity. So Bishop Duncan can get away with saying essentially that his stance vis a vis gay people in the church is "hate the sinner not the sin." But as an outsider I don't see that the distinction is so clear in practice. And when questioned in this interview about the role that wealthy corporatist place in his efforts he responded:

I can certainly say as a board member of the AAC, there's never been any quid pro quo with money. [AAC is the American Anglican Council]

That sounds very much like something a politician would say. Even taking the bishop at his word, the nexus of political reactionaries and the funding of the cause of schism seems worth looking at with a cold-eye.

I really admire the writing of Ugandan blogger 27th comrade. Commenting on two pieces which appeared recently in Uganda's independent newspaper The Monitor, Why police are not arresting homos and and accompanying piece Gay testimonies: We are persecuted 27th comrade wrote:

Still ... I must tell you I have expressed, and still express, some level of distaste for male homosexuals. It borders on murderous hate. But I know that my hate for them is unjustified, and should be punished before homosexuality is punished. :o)

Judging from some of the comments 27th comrade is very brave to brooch the subject at all. Wise as he is, 27th comrade knows there's plenty to be angry about. He makes a moral argument against his hatred of gay men. How infuriating then might be a white Bishop garnering power, fueled with the funds of wealthy political reactionaries, feed by the prejudice and hatred of Ugandans against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people?

Politicians and priests buy power at the expense of the lives of gay people. The closet becomes valuable to them in a way not so different from the commodified blackness bell hooks speaks in American media representations of black people: "not with an engagement with black culture that might require one to be a participant and therefore to be in some way transformed by what you are consuming, as opposed to being merely a buyer."

Making peace isn't a passive activity, in fact it always seems a rather messy process. Gay people stay closeted because it is so dangerous for them to be out. But when it comes to the issue of same gender loving people so many of us feel loathing drawn from dark closets of our imaginations. I'm pleased to see the conversation. The expression of hatred and death threats however have a frightening viral quality.

Sokari at the indispensable black looks published a press release by Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) "Let Us Live In Peace." Gay people bravely stepping out of the closet in turn allow others to open our closets too. Opening the closets allows the possibility for making peace because it enables engagement. And engagement takes bravery all around.

Omidyar.net Closing

I began Bazungu Bucks almost two years ago. At first I thought that it would be a good way to explain to my friends why I wanted to raise a bit of money for my friend Nathan in Uganda. It soon became clear to me that hardly any of my friends read any blogs, much less Bazungu Bucks. I must have set up the blog in such a way that it could be found by Global Voices--quite by accident--and by way of Global Voices I discovered Blog Africa and a community of voices from and for Africa online. These discoveries have been extraordinarily rewarding for me.

One idea that has interested me for sometime is Time Dollars. Almost all complementary or alternative money schemes are quite local. There are so many good reasons why this is true. But I've wondered whether something like time dollars might be used to encourage and facilitate online activism, and in particular to encourage people to provide time in service to people in Africa. So that's the idea behind Bazungu Bucks and almost two years down the line it's fair to say I'm still wondering.

Online activism is a great big topic, especially for someone as naive as me. Over the years I have encountered Life in Africa online. Last autumn I realized LiA used Omidyar.net in their work and my curiosity was finally piqued enough to join up at Omidyar.net and look around.

Pierre Omidyar is founder and chairman of eBay the well-known and popular online auction site. He's done quite well financially and has dedicated some of his time and talents to philanthropy. The philanthropy of those who've made their fortunes in Tech is notable because many like Pierre Omidyar are still young. And they've made money with disruptive technologies so there's an expectation their philanthropic giving will be innovative and disrupt the status quo.

Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam set up the Omidyar Foundation and in conjuction with that the Omidyar Network. The Omidyar Network has established a $400 million dollar fund to be invested by 2010 according to that Wikipedia article. In the Spring of 2004 the Omidyar Network developed a set of online tools to facilitate their communication and work. In July of 2004 Omidyar Network opened these tools to anyone trying to make the world a better place. The result was Omidyar.net, so it's a social network, but with a unique mission and history.

I was late to the game, so there's so much history there I don't really understand. Of course all the posts are archived and there is enough allusion to the events that have transpired within the group of people swept up in the Omidyar net that the history seems present as in Faulkner's famous line in the play Requiem for a Nun:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

What I found at Omidyar.net was a great collection of brilliant, funny, compassionate, and accomplished people trying to make the world a better place. Hard work that.

On July 18th word came down from the owners of Omidyar.net that as of September 7th the interactive features of the site would be disabled and at the end of the year the archive would be taken down.

So the situation is a community, many of the members actively engaged in ongoing projects, have been given notice to pack up and leave. There's a bit of the flavor of a reality TV show to the scenario; like Survivor only on a Web site. And I'll admit that especially over the last few days I've been obsessively following the discussions. I do have a vested interest in the outcome, but also as a spectator it brings to the fore many questions I've been asking about the nature of networks and communities and the potential for online peer production.

I'm not sure really if there's a good way to get a view of the action as it unfolds at Omidyar.net. A person could join up at the last minute, but the learning curve is too steep I think to really get the flavor. I wanted in this post to tell about the closing because I'm learning something new in this transition and wanted the context to be available.

Home Sweet Home

Indigo Bunting
Originally uploaded by hart_curt

Yesterday I saw an Indigo Bunting. I see these brightly colored birds about once a year, a rare treat. There's another bird species I see with infrequent regularity and that's a Baltimore Oriel. Oriels are rather shy forest birds, rarely nesting near houses. But in more than one year in the autumn when the leaves have fallen I've discovered their distinctive hanging nests in a Buckeye tree by the barn. That's made me think that not seeing the birds has more to do with my lack of observation than genuine scarcity. Still, it's a rare day in the summer when I see an Indigo Bunting or a Baltimore Oriel.

I saw the Indigo Bunting where I always see them. On my road, just about a mile from my house is an old cemetery where the road makes a hairpin turn. From the top of the hill by the cemetery is a nice view of the surrounding countryside. I'm always struck by the beauty of the place. Just a mile further down the road is a suburban housing development. While the road is an old route, even on maps more than a hundred fifty years old, it's a minor road. More trafficked now as a short cut to the recent development and urban sprawl.

The other evening just at dusk I stepped outside and noticed a police car with lights blaring heading down the road and then a fire engine. I walked to the end of our driveway marveling at the dark canopy provided by the woods. Twenty years ago those trees were just saplings reclaiming a farm field. The woods were full with the sounds of birds settling in for the night. When I got to the end of the driveway I saw the fire trucks just at the bottom of the hill. There's a small bridge there and I suspected a car hadn't negotiated the curve in the road and had run off into the ditch. A red pickup truck sped forwards breaking just short of the fire truck. A woman who I didn't recognize got out and shouted: "That's my son in that car!"

I walked back to the house and told my father there had been an accident. We heard the sound of a helicopter over head and knew someone had been injured badly. We walked back out to the end of the driveway together; mostly out of curiosity, I suppose. A helicopter went overhead, and we wondered if it indeed had landed, and if so where?

The fire department is a volunteer department, our connection to it is limited to a yearly donation and going to the firehouse to vote. The firefighters are my neighbors and one day I may well depend on them, but I don't even know their names.

Volunteer fire departments are common in this region. Not so long ago the local economy was centered on a huge steel industry that's mostly gone now. Shift work was much more common than it is now. So fire companies are finding it hard to find enough volunteers. I've given passing thought to volunteering myself, but as mousy as it sounds, I really don't think that's where my talents lie. But watching them in action prompted me to think I really owe some of my skills and efforts in service to my community.

John Robb is a former Air Force officer, technologist, counter-terrorism expert and author of the book Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. Growing up military stuff was a subject of great interest to some of my friends. Like my utter lack of interest in sports, I never shared their interest. That is until the militarism of recent years. So I read Robb's blogs and from this one found a link to James Kunstler speaking at TED a couple of years ago. Kunstler makes the point that in the way we live and in the buildings we create place we don't care anything about.

Yeah, I agree with Kunstler, but what can I do about it? James Howard Kunstler's style seems to be brutally honest, osmething that doesn't always endear him to others. More than the tone, it's the message that's so hard to embrace. Consider this from his recent piece in Orion Magazine:

AS THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CONTINUES sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those super-vivid ones people have just before awakening. It is a particularly American dream on a particularly American theme: how to keep all the cars running by some other means than gasoline. We’ll run them on ethanol! We’ll run them on biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil . . . !

Kunstler recently temporarily shut down his blog Clusterfuck Nation until he can find a way of controlling the obnoxious comments of trolls--good luck with that! Just the name of the blog gets at this issue of tone. I've been known to use the "f" word, but have a hard time writing it. So let's go with the euphemism clusterCheney. The clusterCheney of which he speaks is "a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil..." We're not listening because we don't want to hear it.

I was stunned last night to see former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond on PBS's Nightly Business Report saying, well, you know, there just might be a problem with energy supply. Raymond was adamant that he was not speaking as former Exxon CEO, but as head of the National Petroleum Council. That organization provided a report made public yesterday to energy secretary Samuel Bodman who asked the question: “What does the future hold for oil and natural gas supply?”

Lee Raymond's appearance is often compared to the Austin Powers character Fat Bastard or to Star Wars Jabba the Hut. And in his tenure as Exxon CEO was know for his vigorous denial about global climate change and his rosy predictions about the supplies of fossil fuels. So as this piece in treehugger suggests nobody was expecting Raymond and the National Petroleum Council to seriously answer Bodman's question. So seeing him on the TV saying we've got real trouble made me exclaim "Holy Cheney!" so to speak ;-)

Speaking of Cheney, the list of people in on the discussions of his 2001 Energy Task Force which he was able to keep secret were leaked to the press this week. At The Next Hurrah emptywheel asks: "Why Hide the Energy Task Force?" The remarakable thing is the oil company executives were telling him then that conservation was priority number one!

Which brings me back to the question what to do about it. Here's how the often harsh, but always clear Kunstler ends that Orion article--go ahead and read the whole thing:

It’s a daunting agenda, all right. And some of you are probably wondering how you are supposed to remain hopeful in the face of these enormous tasks. Here’s the plain truth, folks: Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents. How we will manage to uphold a decent society in the face of extraordinary change will depend on our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness, and I am confident that we can find these resources within our own hearts, and collectively in our communities.

Some of us can be firefighters, but all of us must ask what we can do for our communities. The Buckminster Fuller Institute is conducting The Buckminster Fuller Challenge. I hope some of you have good ideas along those lines. Like being a volunteer firefighter, I don't think I'm much good at design on that scale. But the quotation from Fuller they're using:

"If success or failure of the planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do ... How would I be? What would I do?"

asks the questions I've got to seek answers to. I do love my home. I agree with Kunstler that "our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness," are the best sources for hope.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

On Sunday I went with my dad to a concert performance by Jean-Luc Ponty at Hartwood Acres, a county park. The free concerts at Hartwood are joyful occasions with picnicking, children and dogs. Along with friends we had good food and the weather was cool. What a great band too. Ponty's remarks about most the most recent album, The Acatama Experience:

The Acatama Experience was conceived as a musical journey starting with a Paris street ambiance (Intro) followed by 13 songs, taking us through different lands, through a variety of impressions and emotions, through the past and present. This is also the first album that I produced in such 'on and off' manner, between January 2006 and February 2007. During that time period I also traveled and performed with my band on different continents, from South America to Europe, from Russia to Venezuela, from the U.S.A. to India, returning to this album project each time with fresh ears and new insight.

The band : percussionist Moustapha Cisse, drummer Theierry Arpino, bassist Guy Nsangue Akwa, and keyboardist William Lecomte blend their conservatory training with West African rhythms into brilliant music.

It turns out there's a Summer of Love connection with Jean-Luc Ponty in that he was first introduced to American musical audiences at the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival. The Monterey Pop Festival, as can be seen by the image of Tom Wilkes memorable poster snatched from the Wikipedia article, was in June around the time of the Summer Solstice. The Monterey Jazz Festival was held on the same fairgrounds in September around the time of the Autumnal Solstice.

Time flies and it is hard to keep everything straight in mind. Thinking about music for my own Summer of Love anniversary party I decided to make a mix tape. Yes a cassette tape. Most of the little music I own is on cassette, at least music that dates back to the sixties. Mixing musical genres is an art, and also my collection of sixties music is predominately Soul anyway. That's appropriate because while in 1967 I did listen to The Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow album, and The Mamas and Papas album, and Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme--all of them my brother's albums--mostly what I heard was Soul music on the car radio. It took me a while longer to discover the music of Monterey Pop and Monterey Jazz festivals.

I chatted with a young musician, FredAlfred online recently and when it came to my age he asked: "Were you a hippie?" By this account, The Death of Hippie occurred in October of 1967. But you only have to read the document to understand the reality isn't quite as neat as the report suggests. The old joke follows: "If you remember the sixties, you weren't there." No, I was too young to be a hippie in 1967, but I still think it was the beginning of something. If celebrating the Summer of Love is worth it, then that "something" that was beginning has to be fleshed out a bit.

An obstacle to fleshing this out from my personal experience is one way of looking at it is that it's the beginning of one blunder after another. I not alone in seeing my own blunders and those of a wide swath of my generation, but it seems there's a minority of us who rather not repudiate the zeitgeist of the time.

Darn it! I never can seem to get to the point of anything. The reason I started with this whole Summer of Love thread was as a way of explaining a long lapse in posting to Bazungu Bucks. The reasons, as best I can tell, have to do with an upwelling of despair about present events. The reality of my local and personal circumstances are quite pleasant. Oh that so many more of us were so blessed! The rub is that the systems which serve my comfort and well-being contribute substantially to the misery of many people around the world. And these systems eat the world's resources in ways that cannot sustain even my local conditions. That's something my generation figured out long ago when we were young, but rather fully put that "inconvenient truth" out of our minds as we "grew-up."

Al Gore, an elder voice of our generation, keeps reminding us that we ignore inconvenient truths at our peril. He gets a lot of laughs, but keeps--it seems quite patiently--to remind us of the point. He penned an Op-Ed in Sunday's New York Times, Moving Beyond Kyoto.

Back in April, I was working hard in my garden. I had also been wondering how to begin local conversations about the the state of things and what we could do about it. Oh and I see by this post at Hats For Health I've been thinking about the Summer of Love for a while. In April, most probably April 29th, shovel in hand, the enormity of the challenge which global climate change hit me like a 2 X 4 to the head. The previous evening I'd read Alex Steffen's review of paleontologist Peter Ward's book, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future. Steffen quotes from the book:

In other words, despite what some conservative pundits have written, you might not want to vacation in an extreme greenhouse world, after all. Forget "breeding couples" camping out in the Arctic, we may not have flowering plants or any but the toughest insects left (the cockroaches from my first apartment will almost certainly make it).

And in my garden with multitudes of flowering plants around me, imagining a world without them filled me with grief.

Jim Kunstler minces few words about "the Castor-and-Pollux of Clusterfuck Nation, Global Warming and Peak Oil." The hue and cry "We want solutions! scares him. He makes the point:

let's stop talking about making better cars and start talking about occupying the landscape differently -- which we're going to have to do anyway.

What's really depressing to me is a famous observation ofUpton Sinclair :

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

While I think Kunstler is exactly right that we really must begin talking about "occupying the land differently," I find the talk about solutions reassuring, at least so far as it seems an improvement over shear and utter denial. It's not at all easy to cast a cold eye upon what our livelihoods depend.

No, my generation is no longer young. Yes, looking back over my years so many things that seemed like good ideas at the time, certainly weren't very good. Maybe in a long line of foolishness, the idea of commemorating the Summer of Love provides a glimmer of hope. Because once my generation earnestly wanted to expand our minds to imagine a better way of being. We were hardly imaginative enough. But we took a step in the right direction.

Gore's editorial highlights LiveEarth twenty four hours of music in concert across seven continents on 7.7.07. No doubt the effort seems a bit besides the point to Kunstler and others with it's call "to be part of the solution." But we've all got to start some place if we are indeed going to begin to occupy the land differently.

Central to the idea of Bazungu Bucks is the idea that people outside Africa can be of service to African people. I don't believe we can be of much service unless we alter first our thinking about how we live and ultimately begin changing how we live. We, people around the world, are bound together by this existential challenge of energy descent and global warming. Much of what we in the Global North think we know is profoundly wrong. And in so many ways undertaking the the challenges of the poorest in the world provides the essential keys to our own survival.

Summer of Love

John
Originally uploaded by pingting

June 19th is Freedom Day or more commonly called Juneteenth Two and a half years after The Emancipation Proclamation, General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston Texas with the news that the slaves were now free:

The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.

One hundred and forty-two years on, it's a day right to remember.

[I wrote most of this on June 19th, but a lightening strike took out my computer before I could finish it.]

Forty years ago 1967 was the Summer of Love. Some of us remember; I was 12. My recollections are like the Buffalo Springfield song, written by Stephen Stills, For What It's Worth. Forty years on I'm still not at all clear what's happening.

A friend commemorated with a party at his house and showing of D. A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop. It's a great film, which seems surprisingly current.

My friend has two lovely daughters and one, who has just graduated college was there with a friend of hers. I cringed listening friends trying to explain the significance of Jimi Hendrix, and with the frequent question during the film: "Is it like Bonnaro? I'm not at all sure what young people today make of our nostalgia. We were awfully earnest then and so young and foolish. The talk after the show revealed that none us were are all that certain why exactly the summer of 1967 was so darn important, but most of us certain it was.

Thomas Frank, who as it happens is ten years younger than I, made an important point about the counterculture in his book The Conquest of Cool:

Every rock band with a substantial following was immediately honored with a host of imitators; the 1967 "summer of love" was as much a product of lascivious television specials and Life magazine stories as it was an expression of youthful disaffection; Hearst launched a psychedelic magazine in 1968; and even hostility to co-optation had a desperately "authentic" shadow, documented by a famous 1968 print ad for Columbia Records titled "But The Man Can't Bust Our Music." So oppressive was the climate of national voyeurism that, as early as the fall of 1967, the San Francisco Diggers had held a funeral for "Hippie, devoted son of mass media."

Certainly my memories of the summer of 1967 involve Life Magazine images. I also remember struggling to understand what was happening. I suppose the question in my mind was: Just how are kids supposed to act?

On the way to the grocery store today I passed two boys furiously riding their bikes. In that passing moment I was struck by how beautiful the boys were. I best qualify saying beautiful boys, lest I arouse prurient suspicions. Mark Danner, distinquished journalist, professor and author, delivered a remarkable commencement address to the graduates of The College of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkley, earlier this spring. In it he attempts to convey something of the reality in Iraq, first from am Iraqi relating the collection of a nephew's remains after a car bombing, and then from his own recollections of an American soldier he met in Iraq. He describes the soldier's face as beautiful. What I mean, and what I think Danner saw in that soldier, is...well, an "is-ness." A few days after his interview with the soldier, the man with the "beautiful sleepy face" died in an explosion near Fallujah. Seeing those boys as I passed by the awareness of how precious and irreplaceable their beings are registered. Perhaps seeing them also jogged my memories of being around twelve, like I supposed they are now, back in 1967.

The Summer of Love seems now more a celebration than protest. Stephen Stills points out that For What It's Worth was about police mistreatment of club goers in Hollywood's Sunset Strip. Something worth celebrating is how beautiful we are. That's the sort of celebration the Summer of Love was, but the painting it as narcissism misses the empathy and expressions of love. The point wasn't to appear beautiful, but to be beautiful.

In my own life the summer of 1970 was more significant than 1967. Personal circumstances, my age and location made it so, however there's a sturdy thread which connects my experience in 1970 backward to the Summer of Love. I was 15 in the summer of 1970. While my parents were attempting to resolve important family matters I was provided some measure of independence by being shunted off to various relatives in New Hampshire. I got a job at a county fair which lasted ten days or so making more money than I ever had.

It was the summer the Woodstock movie came out. I managed to buy The Beatles' Abbey Road and Crosby, Stills, Nach & Young's Dejavu and put them on the record player as often as I was able. I dreamed of forming a student union and planned an environmental movement at my school, and furiously wrote out my ideas in a spiral bound notebook. I was as awkward and shy then as I am now, and knew my being a leader was unlikely. Nevertheless, I earnestly believed that a with a change of mind young people could find a better way. I wanted to do my part.

At the time, bell-bottomed jeans seemed important to the cause. A pair of those and a Black Watch Pendleton shirt along with my two album purchases consumed my summer's earnings. I tried in vain to see Woodstock, but the movie was restricted. That fall I tried awfully hard to put some of my plans into action and I managed to see the movie.

In America we're anticipating the July 4th Independence Day celebrations. Freedom Day passed with the barest of mentions. With some of my friends we celebrated the summer solstice as is a long tradition. For reasons I can't quite draw out, I want to mark the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

My friend pingting encourages me to make sure it's a multi-generational affair. He makes a good point. My fondest hope is that Baby Boomers might drop their cynicism and that we might open our stony hearts to experience the feeling that we can make the world better once again. We aren't kids like we were in 1967. There were so many of us and the giddy excitement that together we could create something good made quite an impression. The celebration shouldn't be a celebration of a generation, but rather celebrating life and love.