Earthday Everyday

Everyday, we rise, we breathe in air for our brain and muscle function, air that enables each and every tissue of our body to thrive, yet we tolerate people and corporations among us who flood the air with hazardous substances. I fully accept the fact that I am growing old, but I will not go down without putting every ounce of my being into the fight for our right to clean air. Breathing is something we all take for granted, just as the quality of the air is most of the time, but facts do not support our complacency. Many household products contain hazardous substances and some of the most pervasive are coming directly out of our packaging, or released when products are used according to the labeled instructions.

I must admit that I am growing old, because sometimes I mall walk, rather than face the elements, especially during the winter. This is where I became aware of some of the hazardous conditions which we let slide, for the sake of commercial interests. When the doors open to Hobby Lobby, an overtly Christian store which has effectively put several locally owned craft stores out of business, We avoid the area near the entrance because fugitive emissions are offensive and highly suspect. These same people give their employees Sundays off, which I respect, but come Monday morning, when they open the doors, the stench pours out into the mall for fifty feet or more, on these days, we turn around long before we get to their end of the building. Likewise, just down the concourse, is a nail salon. We try to go to the mall early, so we can avoid their noxious toxic emissions, but they occasionally open their doors early, wafting carcinogenic compounds into the whole wing of the mall. Situated across from the movie theater, I wonder how many folks know that there is even a source of toxic vapor just a hundred feet from their theater seat. When the doors to their space are opened, we stop over 100 feet before, swinging around center court rather than encounter the stench.

Each morning we slake our thirst and try to rehydrate with water. This too, allows our bodies to maintain homeostasis and function properly. This essential part of life has also come under threat from commercial interests and although harder to point fingers at, we all have our suspicions when we see it being impacted negatively. The recent craze to "frack", or hydraulically fracture underground shale, liberating natural gas that has been held there for aeons, involved pumping vast quantities of a toxic mix of chemicals and water to great depths. We are told that these depths are so deep in fact that they are not supposed to ever contaminate our aquifers. Remember that nuclear power was supposed to be generated so cheaply as to not need electric meters. It seems that most of the supposing that gets printed up in the media these days are Halcion dreams of the ultra-wealthy, micro-minority. Please pardon my stretching the English language to try to cover the obscene truth that we are all living with, but in trying times, we must all try to grasp the full picture as much as possible.

I was working on these issues before I was permitted to drive a car. In fact, I worked on these issues before we celebrated the Bi-centennial in 1976. Patriots were not the ones with "America, Love It Or Leave It!" stickers on their trucks, or the business men who thought that nuclear weapons were a "necessary evil", no. It was the under-funded troupes of mothers and children, physicists and nerdy science geeks who did the math, understood the hazards and were willing to share what they knew with every day people, just like themselves about the rat hole that the nuclear age represented. I'm sure that our FBI files expanded greatly with the work we did to stop the inevitable coming of the next generation of the nuclear age. Now, we are at a time in our history that allows depleted uranium rounds to be fired into the landscape without provocation. I have lived through the time when there was a mediation between what science told us was safe as far as nuclear contamination and exposure and what the nuclear industry wanted the limits to be...fortunately, some of those limits were in place for nearly half my life. Now, the exposure rate considered "safe" has been doubled, to stay within the range of our current exposure. This results in an ignorantly and arbitrarily arrived at number that runs counter to what we have learned about radiation from the scientific data. Now four times the exposure that was considered safe is the new standard.

Many people are still unaware of the fact that anhydrous ammonia, used on millions of acres of farmland each year is the toxic by-product of manufacturing explosives. The military industrial complex sucks money from our society through both destruction and the corporate food production systems. Harbingers of death on both the homefront and far afield as well. This highly concentrated form "nutrient" can cause blue baby syndrome and brain damage or death in infants who drink baby formula mixed with water contaminated with it. Levels of only ten parts per million are considered dangerous. We are in a new landscape. Corporations are currently considered people. They have had their right to "speech" (meaning, for them, money) guaranteed by the Supreme Court. They have cleared the way for their continued participation in politics, most especially funding political campaigns, in ways that we could not have imagined thirty years ago. I happen to live in a state which has been bought and paid for by the Koch brothers. Like a giant gourd, our state, the rich seeds that are our children, the state's water resources, the air and ultimately the land itself have been gutted, poisoned and denuded without thought of the future. The next quarter's profits have been such a distraction that virtually no thought has been given to the sort of land we are leaving behind for our children to inherit.

Turning the tables on the ultra-wealthy is the sort of thing that probably will not happen overnight. An illness that develops over thirty or fifty years cannot be reversed overnight. No matter what a heart surgeon might tell you, the process of recovery is slow and requires commitment, steadfast resolution to change in significant ways and tenacity in the face of nearly constant messages that could tempt you back into unhealthy habits. What we must live for and consciously strive toward is the desired future state in which nothing is grown that is devoid of nutrient, nothing is put on fields that is not conducive to life. We must choose consumer goods and products based on the very real possibility that some of what appears on shelves has negative consequences that far outweigh the cost. We must each make thousands of discreet decisions about what to eat, what to wear, how to move about the surface of the planet and ultimately how we will relate to one another, not as human resources or consumers, but as human beings, aware of one another and ultimately, we need to decide if we are going to be part of a solution or remain complicit with continued problems. As you lie down to sleep, consider well, where your next breath is coming from, where the water that sustains you has come from and where it will go as well, then as you drift off to sleep make a resolution to reward those who consider the Earth sacred and who have made commitments to heal some of the horrific injuries that we have foisted upon the planet. For all of our sake, I hope we can make the change come sooner than later. We are entitled to a clean environment, it is what sane patriots have been saying for generations.

Love Letter To A Wise Woman

First, let me say, I forget her name. Perhaps this is not important because this practical, insightful and attentive creature has come to me in many personages over the years. I recognize this young girl as the third maiden to save me from my limited view of the world around me. The circumstance was that we were in grade school together, I had undertaken the process of dividing a piece of paper into three equal strips, or segments. My limited mathematical ability had me stretching to divide a fraction of an inch into ever more minute portions. The fractions became smaller than my ruler would allow. I could not make it come out without a remaining un-apportioned piece. She recognized my difficulty, came to my aid and helped me by showing me that if you took one end in each hand and bent the paper into a "Z" fold, the numbers would take care of themselves. I am still thankful for her help, over forty years later, I remember her kind and compassionate assistance to alleviate my struggle. The love I had for this young girl was as much for her intellect as her strong sense of self awareness and compassion. She knew, that she knew and that was all she needed to know, to be of service. Without judgement or guile, she gave of her own knowledge to help a fellow student.

She could have just as easily let me struggle.

The aspects that surely served her well as a child are, I'm sure, still informing her approach to life and that is what I love about her. Each time I meet important womyn in my life it adds to the capacity that I have for loving each of the rest of us. I would say the same for men, but seriously, their way of looking at things is far too often bent by their perspective of power and control. Many of the men I have known would have jumped in, made me feel inadequate, or just done it for me, leaving me to wonder how to do it myself. The get 'r done attitude and bull in a china shop approach would have made it unlikely that I would have had such an easy and long lasting positive lesson.

The first maiden that I had the opportunity to fall in love with was the child of a family friend. Sadly, she passed the veil before me and even though she inspired me to first love, her legacy was to encourage me to take life by the horns, wrest as much knowledge and beauty out of it as possible and to allow my own curiosity to flourish, something that I will never forget and will forever be indebted to her for. Our families moved away from one another when I was just a boy, but we met up again a time or two when my family would traverse the country. I always felt thrilled to get to see her again and when I reach Valhalla, I'm sure we will run barefoot together again and revel in our shared spirit. We are still one, though we are temporarily separated by the physical realm.

The second was from a household that had run a pet shop and candy store out of their home in Springfield, Illinois. This wise and charming girl taught me about critters and their care, that different is okay and that many times we can find silver linings in our most difficult lessons. Her bookish affection led me to find parts of myself that I had not known before. The afternoons we spent in the old store, feeding their creatures are part of what helped feed my own insight and interaction with animals to this day. Who would ever have thought that two generations later, the love these young girls shared, freely would still bear fruit?

Perhaps more common, or at least more numerous, are the mothers who guided the development of my illusions of love. Of course, the first mother I knew was my own. I do love Dar, but have also found that her limited vision proscribed my understanding of and ability to experience love greatly. Many of the things that hurt her soul were carried over to my experience. She was so open and transparent, I seriously had to grapple with and question adult themes from an extremely young age. Many of my youthful views have been discarded, but at my core, I'm still her son although I am now a grandfather as well.

Among the other mothers that have taught me great things, dozens stand out. Again, not so much the fathers. Where men are concerned, they seem to keep the most despicable social traits alive, like teaching a young boy to burp and fart. Mothers actually do the dirty work of teaching us to get along, clean up after ourselves and do the difficult work of being living examples of how to minister to the needs of others. While many of the men I happened to meet taught me how to drink hard and take chances, the women were more likely to hold their families dear, in spite of, or perhaps because of their perceived fragility. It just seemed to me growing up that they realized the true value of their families and the world which we all have to live in.

The love I have for the mother of my children has been strained, although I am no less appreciative of her special gifts. The feisty woman who would not concede an inch to anyone who threatened her children, she taught me to be tenacious when you find what really matters. Although we were not made for each other, we did create beautiful, smart, creative and compassionate children. I knew it was time to settle down when the mothers I met were less exciting than their daughters. The wisdom of women has always been a vital force in my life and to that, as much as any single person,  I write this post.

The woman I have chosen to spend my life with has inspired me to learn even more lessons than I thought needed to be learned. The love that we share is unbound by ego, beyond physical or mental comfort or excitement, although both of those are there. We are two spirits involved in a great dance and we both lean on and help one another in a syncopated rhythm that mimics the ebb and flow of the days, the moons and the seasons. In our way, we are a microcosmic interpretation of universal thoughts and truth. Like two opposing fingers, we grasp things far beyond our immediate experience and evoke in one another a deeper understanding of our selves and one another.

I also want to speak of the crone. My own advancing age, allows me to straddle the line that will eventually fade leaving me in the stage of life that my friend Gary Haugen refers to as the Grandpama. Beyond gender, this repository of the divine feminine as well as the masculine resides in me. As a youth I said that I was in touch with my chick side, I developed mothering instincts when that became appropriate and expressed my nurturing nature using the many mothers I had known as models, but throughout my life, I have loved, and had a relationship with the crone as well. I was the child that many thought daft, who would hang out with the lady in the neighborhood that the other children thought was a witch. She may have been, but her lost loves and children's lives, squandered in war held wisdom beyond my youthful comprehension. Her tried and true methods for growing peas in the neighborhood full of rabbits as well as her desire to keep every penny she could out of the hands of the local utility company informed my understanding and beliefs as much as my own mother's limitations ever did. Her beautifully gnarled hands, alabaster with signs of her branching arteries and veins beneath, the crooked way she would straighten up, whenever she knew I was listening, or asking the right questions resembled pride, but bespoke something far deeper. The crone knows when she is loved, not for what is on the surface, but what resides in her heart and spirit.

The grandmothers are the conduit through which all important knowledge passes. Many tribes allowed their men to be "leaders" but the grandmothers always had final say as to who those leaders would be, as well as who they would serve. It is not worth arguing, anyone who has ever had time to spend with a crone can truly say that even in their silence, they can teach volumes. One of the grand mothers that I had early contact with used to say, "I just sit here and watch the ducks go by..." and "Who couldn't love a cat? Why I'd sooner kiss a cat than some people I know!" (I think that those people know who they are.) It turns out that even though we were all stunned, worried and a little bit confused about her grasp of reality, thinking that she was just spouting nonsense, as we cleaned out her apartment after her passing, didn't a duck and her ducklings pass by the window. Her endless hours spent feeling like she was completely ignored had been punctuated by the seasons and her unique view into the world. I sit now at times and just watch the ducks go by myself and for all that I get out of it, I am proud to have known her and appreciative for her sharing that tiny slice of her life with me as well.

Another crone, speaking of her awareness about her own growing blindness used to say. "I always loved to read,  but one day clouds came and blocked out the words." She sadly recounted the growing fog that eventually took her vision as if it were a natural process and she found ways to continue to learn about the world through the eyes of others when that became necessary. Nothing would prevent her from exploring the world or enjoying the infinite possibilities that present themselves to one who cultivates awareness.

The grace that comes through in each and every one of these personages has brought me messages from beyond the realm of mere physical existence. It has shaped my heart, my brain, my emotional and spiritual life. Loving each and every one of these parts of a singular force (the divine feminine) in our lives is not difficult and it is not limited by exclusivity or dominion. We live together, in relationship, for all time and that perhaps is what I love most. With a bit of luck, more boys will learn to get in touch with their chick sides, honoring and respecting the maidens that offer their wisdom to them. In the next age, we will have to have greater understanding of and respect for motherhood and uphold the sanctity of the role that many mothers play in our lives. When the age of Aquarius becomes fully established, the crones will be both loved and revered as well, for they are the keepers of the great wisdom that many seek. They have borne the water throughout time that can slake the thirst of a withered world. The men have had their chance at running things for centuries now, let us truly love our women and start listening to them for a change.  

Pollution Probe

Back in the day, Pollution Probe, of Toronto supplied me with a map of sites around the Great Lakes that have suffered ecological disaster. The wealthy class has wreaked untold havoc upon the face of the planet. That is what they do. Pushing the costs off to the public sector is what they do best. As a child, doctors recognized what they called "Green Bay Throat", especially in children from the poorer areas of town (where the pollution was the worst) I was hospitalized or seen by doctors for the "illness" more than twenty times in the ten years I lived near the Fox River, which later became a Superfund site. However, the diagnosis remained eerily off the record. Perhaps that is why they make you strip before they examine you, so you can't hide a recording device in your pocket! In hundreds of cities and towns, perhaps everywhere, but to be true, I am most concerned about the Great Lakes Region, these same sorts of toxic pollution problems exist.

Frackingis the new threat, the one whose toxic legacy has been pushed beyond our ability to measure or comprehend. In the earliest days of the nuclear age, there were those among us who understood and taught others that the toxic legacy that would be created by an expanding nuclear industry would leave a legacy that will cost us "safe storage" for tens of thousands of years. what is the true cost of an electron today when the cost of it lasts hundreds of generations? We need to be asking ourselves what the value of a BTU today when the waters, the soils and the planet will remain contaminated forever. We have seen the results of allowing the ultra-wealthy to continue to receive their corporate welfare, getting a wink and a nod from regulators, doctors, paramedics and a pass from local law enforcement. Has there ever been a question that local governments and regulators routinely risk public health for profit? Collusion is planning to help in perpetrating a crime. If you believe that you do not live in an area that will forever be tainted by pollution, perhaps you have not been paying attention. CO2 pollution is worldwide, nuclear fallout is worldwide. Aldrin and Dieldren are trademarked carcinogens that have been found in the most remote lakes on the planet, wafted in by the circulating atmosphere. Carcinogens, mutagens and teratogens need to be treated as weapons that have been used against our people. Otherwise, this becomes the most heinous aspect of corporate welfare. We cannot be expected to pay the price for the profit of others. The Superfund sites that are especially harmful will cost near infinite amounts of money to clean up (if it is even possible). Think of the billions spent on cancer treatment and research. To be fair, the companies who spew their chemicals into our air, pump it into deep wells or taint the land with their waste, need to be held responsible for the errors of their ways.

If I threw a rock, and it went through someones window, I would be made to pay. If a company exposes me to carcinogens, mutagens or teratogens, they should pay for the damage they have done, end of story.

Honne & Tatemae

These words come from Japanese and roughly translate to real truth and appearance of things. When we look at a Jaguar or Cougar We have a dilemma because there are two competing truths even before we can confer meaning on these elemental and powerful forces. The astute reader has already used the capitalization of the terms to confer the meaning that we are indeed talking about trade names of products rather than the members of the cat family. Truth exists independent of our ability or willingness to look for it. Occasionally, even before we have language to describe it. On one level we can say that looking at Jaguar, Cougar, Ferrari or Formula one vehicles at one end of the spectrum or a Volkswagen, Opel or Iceta, truth is, they are all vehicles that use an internal combustion engine to move people about the earth. These vehicles could be argued to be different, but the real truth is that they all use fuel to move people. More or less elegantly, or at what efficiency rate would be largely dependent on point of view. The person who drives a car for the expressed purpose of going the fastest, or to experience G-force will have to be willing to sacrifice fuel economy and the person holding the belief that a penny saved is a penny earned will see a different route to beauty and perhaps even perceive the truth in an altered way, justifiably ignoring design flaws in their conceptualization of their perception of the real truth.

If you think that this is confusing, consider the Honne, we are all human beings. Even at that most base reality, immediately we run into trouble as Tatemae clouds our thought. Child molesters? Certainly not humane and the "being" part comes immediately conflicted as well because we may perceive these "subhumans as in a perpetual state of stalking and arousal at the very sight of children. This actually may be so, but it matters not. Our Tatemae requires us to deny heinous actors the same status as the rest of us. My own perception has led me to a variety of appearances that I created to mediate between what is actually surrounding me and what I let in to me consciousness. Frequently this mediation between Honne and Tatemae has become rote, takes place virtually unnoticed by our organism and if pointed out to us can seem like an assault.

The truth, or more specifically the real truth cannot be mediated, cannot be argued about, cannot be defended, cannot be supported by a single lie or justification. It stands alone. Having written about this before, please forgive my preoccupation with it, but perhaps another angle will help to flesh it out. Brandeis stated that "light has the power to sterilize." When we look deeply into the real truth of any matter, it brings light to the mysteries and vagaries of the transient Tatemae (the illusion of things) How many times have we heard from science, "Upon closer inspection..."? How many times do we need to hear from economists, or politicians, social scientists or historians, "Uh...what we meant was..."? The whole bloody thing is based on lies. Without keeping up appearances we would have to admit that there is far more profane than sacred and when we supplant one for the other, problems ensue.

Many of the most terrible actors are, in the realm of Tatemae, above reproach because they have linked their status to "the divine". The inhumane wife abuser, child abuser, exploiter of labor, all of these have specific documents that they can turn to that give them authority to do so. Whether a caliph, or pastor, guru or shaman endorses an action cannot change the fact of what it is. Oppression, exploitation, abuse and neglect are the same, no matter what you use to defend them. Inhumanity toward our fellow human beings is diametrically opposed to how we define the term humanity. The real truth is that we are all equal, all "children of the lord and lady", stardust, as some like to call us. We are the one and only chance to recreate Eden on the face of the planet. Whatever vile and heinous acts we choose to perpetrate on others, or the planet is our own business, but only if we confuse the fact that there is a difference between real truth and the appearance of things. When we start to believe, or believe in, the transient appearances the road to ruin has been paved.

Better we take a hard look into this now than continue to base our beliefs and actions on the sands of time, because the foundational principles that have helped prop up the lies of the past are shifting like the sands in an hourglass. Speaking of sand and I have written on this at some length in the past as well, Take the Arab World. I am sorry to use a potentially pejorative term here, but what many in the world see as just a region of shifting sand and alliances, dotted with oasis and mega cities too young to have any patina of poverty. Rural areas seem to the outside world to appear as decrepit stops along the spice road of a forgotten century.

This view is like calling the event that Vietnam knows as the War with America (which in fact, and in their schools, they teach that they won). After all, they speak Vietnamese, not American, the Vietnam war. The tatemae which has been cultivated in the U.S. has been that the tiny strip of land turned out to be "not worth our time and money any more. Hey, they make great trading partners and we can be much better off with them as friends than foe." Quite the about face for a culture whose watch word when I was a child was: "Bomb them back into the stone age!" Truth probably lies closer to, they love their children as much as we love ours, but many will never give that territory back to the people of Vietnam.

Back to the "Middle East", another misnomer...perhaps "cradle of civilization" for any anthropologists out there...Historians love to gloss over the fact that way back in WWI, the "war to end all wars", warlords who had no alliances could be bargained into the fight, to help us defeat the Kaiser, but that they would need an incentive to do so. The eventual victors promised self determination and autonomy, "statehood" as we called it. However, the self determination and autonomy was not granted freely, it came with a hidden price dealt after the agreements were made and the Kaiser had been defeated. The bargain had not been for self determination after all because those who drew the lines on the map knew in advance which factions and tribes were forever going to be at odds with one another and to guarantee that no state would, in-fact, overwhelm the others they created "States" of perpetual conflict that lacked any sense of meaning for people on the ground. A grave, and very real truth is that the arbitrary lines drawn to separate Syria from Jordan or Jordan from Iraq were subjected upon the people, much like natives from the desert southwest of the United states are now confronted with border jumping within their own homeland, perpetrated on them by virtue of a seemingly arbitrary mark across a map.

Imagine, for a moment, that someone had dominion over  "our land", the United States of America and said, "We will give you freedom and autonomy, but these are the parameters you must live by from now on..." Then they proceeded to carve up our boundaries so that California would extend eastward to the Mississippi River, subsuming Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, Utah, the bottom 1/4 of Wyoming, Kansas and the southern third of Nebraska, Missouri and Arkansas. Then lets say they carved out "Texas" and gave it the status of another country. Similarly, north of that, except the Great Lakes Region was considered another country and the entire South and East were made into a fourth country, Except Florida which would be an administrative unit of Cuba. You think we would have some angst over that? Do you think that one hundred years in the future, or five hundred years hence, they would forget the brutality of the carving up of our civilization? Heck, there are those in the South who still believe that the war between the states is not over.

Basing our world view on tatemae will always cripple our chances of making better choices, understanding the true nature of the world around us and it will certainly doom our children to have less stability, insight and power over their own lives. The vagaries of perception always create hollow illusions of truth. Believing in our lies, no matter how exquisitely crafted can only lead to estrangement and dislocation.

Meeting Hatred With Decency

It is well known that the most powerful amongst us have a vehement hatred, directed toward us. They believe that we are sub-human and deserve to be their tools. They will never allow us dignity or respect. Slavery is not in the realm of history, no matter our color, we are enslaved by the very corporate welfare that we pay to be subservient to the whims of industry, banking and the powers that be, no matter what capitalistic endeavor they choose to shove down our throats. We have a patchwork of many nations that have elected officials who are in cahoots with our real leaers. We see the hate reflected in de-humanizing rhetoric directed at teachers, "the poor", druggies, our elders, children, "liberals", criminals and welfare cheats while many of the most powerful interests on the planet get fat on the profits they make off our dreams. We hear incessantly about how terrible it is for a teacher to stay in the middle class, while her students are in poverty, but we forget that without a role model who has become better off, no child would want to climb out of poverty. What would there be to look forward to?

The hate that the ultra-wealthy have for us is reflected in the farce that plays out over our elders having to work through retirement to make ends meet, even though their lives were lived in service to the current power structure. The same elite "class" that extracts even more wealth, keeping the elderly employed, enrich themselves further as they continue to play the justified part as the oppressors, the extractors of "human resources", the rapists of Mother Earth. The same top dogs who made up the system of beliefs that lead to austerity measures being foisted on those disabled by corporate excesses have come to call for every last red cent that they can get, be it in the form of our last remaining shreds of humanity, our children's future and even our legacy for the ages. If there are human beings here in five more centuries, they will look back at things and understand that we have all been slaves to a lying, cheating, greedy and hate riddled elite. Do not get me wrong. I do have a certain "justifiable hate" for these people as well, but I know in my DNA that this is a mere product of their oppression. There is no value in perusing or living within the blind shroud of this emotion. The system that has been perpetrated upon us by the haters is what we must work to change. Love truly means letting go of fear.

Can the constant assault of the oppressors be tolerated? As difficult as it may be to say, it must be. Toleration, however is a  far, far cry from complicity. When we are decent to the haters, it will not mock, it will not seek to rub their nose in the crap as we find it. Never, will it lead to getting back at or humiliating them.They do these things to themselves by their own depravity, their own lack of humanity. It is from these self-destructive habits of theirs that our decency can bring them back. Decency opens a door that can eventually lead to their healing. Standing as decent human beings, worthy of respect and equality is the only way to prove that the insults they throw at us have no standing. Quality works by example and invites reciprocation has been the clarion call of good folk since the beginning of time. Reducing our own tactics to the depraved level of the self-righteous oppressors only guarantees that when we climb to the top of the shit pile, on the bones of their offensive constructions, that we will enlist their other tools for the oppression of whoever we choose to hate after their demise. This is not the way to found a new or sustainable culture.

A friend claimed recently that the reason that peace has not won out in political or moral debate is because it is so easy to inflame human-beings and that bashing heads, killing and being brutal to those we detest, need so little impetus to get started. Continuation of conflict has been the way all great cultures have flourished. Today, if we were to take this approach to the logical conclusion, war will remain inevitable. The rich will remain safe while the rest of us duke it out, striking out with hatred against imaginary straw groups who the rulers determine with the turn of a phrase. Decent people are unwilling to hate on command. The self loathing that the ultra-wealthy heap upon us can lead to crippling effects, but as long as we allow hate to flourish, it can only perpetrate their flawed system. Better human communication and understanding that we are all better off working in harmony as opposed to discord is the only way out of the ancient belief that we are brutish.

 I work hard to point out the hateful, deceitful, extractive and decrepit aspects of the ruling class. I use strong language to reveal the truth behind their lies, but I do not want to engender hate for those who hate us. Instead I beg each and every person I meet to be calm, to look with a longer gaze into the future that we are creating through our thoughts and actions. Each and every relationship that we cultivate, each and every emotion we feed will grow and in time it will determine who we are. Perhaps, the most enduring way that we can immortalize a sense of hope and self-respect in future generations is to model for them the respect for decency that has created the changes we see taking place amongst us today, territory we have carved out through tolerance, respect for others and the decency to stand tall, knowing that truth will eventually set us free from the detrimental effects of hatred.


I am not black, I am not a Jew. I am not a woman, nor Native by blood. Not Hispanic, nor Asian, not Christian, not you, but I respect the humanity that we all share. The majority has the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water and to touch one another in meaningful ways. No one deserves to be hated and no one is served by hating any other being. We are all reduced just a little bit by it. The honorable among us respect one another and the planet without condition, and we each feel the sting of hate when we see it, hear it or understand it. fortunately I have a voice to raise in defense of decency and I will not rest until I have spoken my own version of truth to power. When we all stand on the side of truth, the power structure that pits us one against another will run out of pawns. When we stand together, above the rhetoric of hate, this conveys a message to even the casual observers that we shall not be moved. The moral high ground exists in our ability to be our best in the face of the oppressors. Namaste'

I Nearly Died

Upon my return from my bicycle ride around the Great Lakes in 1987. I suffered from an acute bacterial infection that began as what I thought was just another bad case of strep throat. This would have passed into obscurity amongst an array of experiences that I have had if not for the fact that this week, in the news is the threat that prophylactic antibiotic use poses to our food supply. My own way, my knowing is based on first hand experience. When I first moved to Green Bay, I started getting what the doctors called strep throat. The more often I got it, the more conversational the doctors became about what it was. Apparently, many local pediatricians called it "Green Bay Throat", though they always refused to write that down on paper. I asked, believe me.

Consequently, I was prescribed antibiotics several to half a dozen times each year,which meant 30-60 days each year I would get antibiotics. Almost ten percent of the time, up to nearly twenty percent of the time. I loved getting away to Springfield, Illinois to spend summers with my dad, because that is the only time I never got sick. There was an awareness of the tragic chemical soup that was in the river that flowed past our house and I knew that the smell in the air was taking a toll on my health when I was young, but I did not understand how that chemical exposure could lead to bacterial infections in the first place. My near death experience was a combination of toxic metal poisoning and the bacterial infection that got so bad that it was hard to breathe, nearly impossible to swallow and so painful that I wanted to die. I could barely speak and was reduced to writing notes. Whatever bacteria it was just laughed at the several types of antibiotics they tried. I crawled tot he bathroom, ran insane fever and slowly watched my skin turn green, my eyes yellow and bruises go through me from coughs and chills so severe that I thought I would hurt myself permanently or die from the experience.

What saved me were techniques that I now use to heal others as well as myself. It will sound odd to those who have not heard of this kind of thing before, but a witchy woman used a pendulum to diagnose and treat me with what we had in the house. By that time I had learned a lot about staying healthy and understood vitamins, how the RDA (Recommended Daily Allowances) were arrived at and the major functions of each nutrient and mineral. I knew about using herbs for health and eating a diet suited to keeping the body healthy under normal conditions, but I knew little about therapeutic healing using herbs and vitamins. My experience with getting sick was going to the doctor. In retrospect, being under a doctor's care for twenty eight days and having them deliver me to death's door, nothing could be worse right? Even in my delirium and flagging condition, I took what this woman had to offer with several grains of salt. (pun intended) I always carried a good dictionary that included many chemical substances. The pendulum led my witchy friend to and eventually responded to our questioning with a "prescription" of five Tablespoons of Cream of Tartar, two immediately, two four hours later and one four hours after that. I had someone retrieve my dictionary and read all that I could find about Cream of Tartar. From what I read, it sounded as if it was like a wanton salt, looking for metals and material that might be too small for my immune system to recognize, this structural matrix had lots of bonding sites and the molecular structure was large, then as the adhesion of these tiny materials would inevitably take place, my own immune system could begin to eliminate what was weakening my whole body that allowed the infection to take me over in the first place.

I did what the pendulum said and by noon the next day, the pain lessened enough that I could drink water with less pain and by supper I had eaten my first solid food in nearly a month! How is this related to bacterial  threats in the food supply? Well, the resistance to antibiotics that nearly killed me was brought on by only having to adapt to antibiotics administered ten to twenty percent of the time. most livestock in the United States of America are dosed nearly constantly with antibiotics. The resistant strains of bacteria that thrive in our food supply can kill us. The system is broken and the monied interests tell us that without our food system, many people around the world would die. This is the last death rattle in a chorus of well-intentioned lies that were first perpetrated upon the Earth as the "Green Revolution". "Science" had "proven" that more food could be grown with monocultures dosed with expensive fertilizer, requiring expensive seed, chemical weed and pest control and always more mechanization. most third world countries are still staggering under the debt brought on by that series of well-meaning lies. The ugly truth is that these production measures, followed to their inevitable conclusion are what we are seeing today.

Farmers in most of the world are not expected to do what is best for their fields or herds, the soils or their neighbors. They work for the bank, the seed company, the petro-chemical interests and the machinery dealers. If a farmer wants credit, they have to abide by the terms laid out by their lender and this means a slippery slope of insurance, treatments and standards that reduce every decision to a cost/benefit analysis. I know a lot about creatures, humans included and none of us benefit from being seen as dollars on the hoof or "an investment" as many liberals like to say. No one can be let off the hook for objectifying another creature. be it man, woman, child or beast, we are all creations of the infinite. for my purpose here, it is not important whether you call it God or Goddess, Allah or he who cannot be named. If we all agree to disagree about what to call it, we can begin to talk sense. I know that the infinite power in the universe did not give us intellect to squander on capitalism, or poisoning our soils. Creator did not want us to risk being overwhelmed by microscopic creatures that are only breeding because we have poisoned so much of the planet, including our own tissues.

I realized today that we try to understand each issue that we confront as if it is a pyramid. Often, we barely distinguish the tops, the apex or peaks of the pyramids around us, thinking that we are keeping things straight in our minds. But lost in the clouds far below are a myriad of foundation stones, tier after tier of occurrences, labors and understandings that needed to occur, perhaps thousands or tend of thousands of years ago on which were built the first levels of these ideas, experiences and thoughts that we use to navigate our way through the world. every technology that we have invented to date has brought with it increased costs and more expensive benefits. I am sure that, if not for something as mundane as Cream of Tartar, I would be dead. What I have learned about bacteria since nearly dying from an infection of antibiotic resistant bacteria is that the way we utilize antibiotics in the food system is a serious public health threat and in every way I know how, I will fight the corporations who continue to risk human health for profit.

April Fools Day 2013

I would like to remind all of my readers that the spirit of the day is actually far more important than we give credit. As cold and snow retreat from the Northern Hemisphere, thoughts turn to new growth, the coming changes that are brought by the light of summer and the snow shovels can get put back in the back of the garage. The seasons, which have been out of kilter for the past several years are still trying to stabilize and it is for us to attempt the same thing. The flush ruling class are feeling that their wealth and power are infinite, but those of us stuck between a rock and a hard place understand that no matter how hard they might squeeze us, you cannot extract more from a limited resource. Rather than try to catch others in a lie or prank today, instead unleash unbridled truth on them.

The pranksters (who run the show every day of the year) who have told us that they have our best interests in mind continue to rape the planet, despoil our crucial gifts from creator and the potential future quality of life that we will eventually pass along to our children and theirs. Those of us who still believe in love are just as radical as those who believed in love a century ago, two centuries ago and on back through the ages. The tide is most definitely turning and hardly a day goes by that a major flaw in the logic of our oppressors is not revealed. Understand that the slightest movement in the right direction will help, especially if we multiply it by a billion or more people across the face of Mother Earth.

Instead of a "practical" joke or silly prank, try really giving yourself to the art of caring for our fellow human beings. Whatever the situation, supporting and caring for others will make much more of an impression than making fun of them, holding them at arms length or having a laugh at their expense. This is truly the dawning of a new age and for us all to see that new age clearly, we need to change our behaviors enough to reflect our new awareness and compassion. The people who need to be made to look like fools are the ones who would gobble up scarce resources, make their immoral designs on natural ecosystems that support life and those who would exploit any resource or any population for the sake of greed, power or profit.

The wealthiest echelon of society have never served the rest of us, never. They have continued to prop up and force feed us lies that are designed to keep us complacent. This April Fools Day, let us bring the force of truth to their doorstep. No longer accept their guile, their deceit or their sense of entitlement. The time has come to put them on a budget, one that does not include tax havens like Cyprus, Switzerland or the Bahamas. We need to stop the corporate welfare state before we are not only broke, but living in the wasteland of their creation. The trends show plainly how desperate they have become. The situation we find ourselves in today is not sustainable. Rewarding those who do the most harm to society and the environment has got to stop. If we sit idly by and just grumble about the crumbs that fall from their well-appointed table, or just talk about what has been wrong in our culture for the last few centuries, nothing will change until we have reduced our planet to a lifeless cinder. find and reward those who are making positive steps toward sustainability and beware of those who greenwash the same old same old in the name of caring for the environment.

The time has come for us all to get our hands dirty. sitting on the side lines complaining has not made a single change occur. Plant some seeds, nurture them, share your abundance and take responsibility for bringing a few people with you into a future that is worth working for. don't relegate future generations to poverty and strife. Today is the first day of a new way of thinking about these issues. Share what you know to be true and work for positive changes that can help our entire planet transition into a more sustainable place, one with more equitable distribution of wealth, of power and one that will allow us all to have enough.