Twitternation

As a child, my grandmother was one of the few eddies within which you could feel stability and some degree of safety. Few things I knew, outside her countenance, and perhaps my other grandmother's to a lesser extent, were not in the flow, needed negotiating, deftness. when i learned to shoot rapids, it made perfect sense, in almost any part of the river, without helm, or moving through water, you are pulled randomly along, like a stick or discarded take out box. The turbulence of society was something I was attuned to back then. When i heard the term "blessing and curse", it was something a very young, as yet undefined, "I" had noted from childhood. to say that most adults seemed, to me, retarded is complicated by the fact that we have always been so.

I wish that it was easy to go back to the earlier prejudicial words of the past, but in a very true sense we can retard the growth of many organisms at will, so why not have the term retarded be allowed. In many ways, without being able to talk about it, how can anything change? Just branding someone with a "diagnosis", limits and changes our perception of capabilities and limits to performance that may not even exist. I was socially retarded because most of my friends were adults and now that many of them have died off, most of my really good, lifelong friends have died. None of these relationships might seem significant, but to me, my mentors are all I have connecting me to the great arc of human history. The things they taught me and the things I was able to explore because of them may be, one day, the most important things for our species to know. It is not for me to judge. Only time will tell. All data I have had available seems to indicate I'm on to several parts of the solution to many environmental hazards.

We can double the crop production, the output in BTUs the very calories our soils produce, but we have to switch from a petrochemical-based agriculture to more natural ways. Building soil is the most labor of love, eternally giving back to future generations. It is worthy of at least as much time as is spent on "religion". I still can't seem to distill it purely enough for people to understand the significance of doubling crop production. It is as if they just get a blank stare. Not commercial enough, to the average person, means insignificant. A pro-non-commercial good has not even been allowed to be defined. Many of us have been exposed to the fact that seventh generation thinking is a thing, that it means something critical to understanding permaculture and sustainability. Doubling production for generations, what an investment that is! Remember, the dust bowl blew away thousands of years worth of soil, which has never been replaced. The soil contains biomass, living microbes and invertebrates, each one a packet of moisture inside cell walls, each one a vibrant metabolic reservoir for energy, nutrients, they are what make a true, living soil.

When we have devolved into a digitally-induced haze, it is easy to forget...Billions of interconnected relationships bring soil health, these energetic and chemical factories create, not only more food, but better food. Plants grown in a community of relationships and interaction feed plants appropriately, unlike commercial chemical agriculture. The dystopia created when we forsake our basic needs for imagined ones. The only thing worse is mistaking wants for needs. We all see the bull. Even tee vee programs have become "news", but only on the right channel. The distraction factor has been raised by orders of magnitude with the fractured media landscape. This de-values content in many ways. Sheer abundance of content can dilute the message. I get news from twenty or more sources a week, but i would like to think I'm paying closer attention than the average person who only watches Faux, or CNN, etc. The tweet quality headlines seem to be as long as the media wants you to stay interested. If they can hit your indignant self-righteous hatred in the headline, right off the line, (pardon the racing lingo) they can deliver you as clickbait. Get used to it!

The true heroes, as I see it, around the world today are the ones speaking up and out against the erosion of our civil liberties. I believe that not addressing issues of global climate change is irresponsible and short sighted. We have to spell out the fact that we, as humans, possess at least the right to exist, unmolested. I speak of these things here, because I trust that the truth will one day be fully recognized and that these words would have helped make a difference, throughout the next seven generations and beyond!

The reason I brought the story from the place of  the eddy behind Grandma's steady rock, in the stream of life, is because we are now left to create those stable eddy currents for future generations. without places of refuge from flow, our youth experience undue stress and nothing is harder to heal than a sense of dislocation from that stable eddy, carved out by stable elders. we have the basic human right to pass along a better world to each and every generation, not blowing off evermore expensive weapons to destroy and kill, create rubble where society once flourished. Feeling justified in attacking people in their own nation, or supporting rebels against a popularly elected leader, the oligarchs don't have the authority to intervene in sovereign nations. more and more American patriots and heroes are standing up to say clearly, when any of us are harmed, we are all harmed! These are issues that resist both being expressed on social media, because they are too elaborate to spell out in a few glib and/or cynical lines. In too many platforms, social media keeps to the ultra short hard hitting messages, emotional gut kick images with a handful of carefully crafted words and people get off, literally on the flurry, like a dust devil made only of electrons, we get our dander up and blow off the steam without thinking...

We customize pigeon holes in new ways today. Sometimes we even learn to make our compartments into useful furniture.

This digital realm has an oscillation in and of itself. sometimes it can feel as if we are jumping or skipping up them two at a time, and at other times it may feel like you are tumbling down them! Our relationships in the digital realm have a quality of organism themselves. As in all organisms, there are differentiated systems and organs for a variety of purposes, invasions of pathogens and a resulting immune response of sorts. In my experience, many great things have come from this media outlet, the internet and social media on the whole have been so great. I describe it as if one were to take the revolutionary power of Gutenberg's Bible and multiplied it times the billions of people who can access a document  in this format. Worldwide, over 30K readers have been able to "read my book". This is revolutionary and I am not sure whether many young people even understand or respect this fact.

Tarnation, damnation, and consternation were but a few of the levels of frustration Grandma would have expressed. She faced all obstacles with resolve, but I'm sure twitternation would be right up there.  Something about the flutteryness of the word makes it feel like the proverbial, ungainly, June bug or bumble bee, who is not supposed to be able to fly, according to physics, but who does so anyway, out of sheer will. I have recently had a job that required me to become a member of the twitter sphere. I have posted there a few times at #TCSaladino. It intrigues me when I find people in that realm who have chosen to follow me, because I tend to limit my posts to music and not much more. That again points out the fracturing of media. not only are there more options available in more locations all the time, but very discreet threads can be woven together to create a media landscape to our personal desire.


Tweet your friends that #TCSaladino and Saladino 4 District 8 on facebook are the same guy!