Shameless Plea

I have been writing these posts for years and have put no expectations on them. I never expected that tens of thousands of people would read my writing or benefit from the ideas that I would attempt to express "here". The more I learn about blogging, the more I understand that some people are making a living, or at least part of one, from either subscriptions and/or advertising that generate capital. I have chosen to give of my self freely, but also ask occasionally for my readers to do the same.  This is one of those posts, asking for money. please give what you can to help defray the costs of spending hours in front of my computer, trying to wrestle with ideas and a reality which I have been forced to look at since childhood. we are on the verge of monumental change and I will continue to share the best information that I can find on solutions to pressing problems, healing the rift between humankind and nature and finding graceful ways to provide the next generations with a world that is habitable. My Paypal account number is tnsaladino42@hotmail.com If you do not like online transactions, you can send checks, money orders or bars of gold, silver, or any other valuable material to my physical address c/o ECO-Tours of W2isconsin inc. one four four five Porlier street, Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA 54301-3334

Bernie Sanders

It is rare these days in U.S. of American Presidential politics to get people running that have as much integrity and common sense as Bernie Sanders. In addition to being intellectually astute (which seems to have fallen out of favor), Bernie is both a diplomat and statesman. Some of us, who have been paying attention for decades have known about Bernie and his record of working for the people, rather than corporate benefactors, but the corporate owned media has been trying to marginalize him for decades. Their efforts to hide him from the public eye have been increasing exponentially since his meteoric rise in the imagination of the American people began just a few short months ago.

Bernie raised his first million donations faster than any other Presidential candidate in history. He is well on his way to getting his second million donors, dwarfing the popularity of all of his "rivals" combined. We are witnessing the wealthiest elites trying to keep him down, because they have vested interest in having his challengers in office rather than Bernie. The public has been slowly becoming aware that the uberwealthy have pretty much bought congress, been able to stop our current President from implementing any meaningful changes and been increasing tgheir wealth at the expense of the rest of us for at least a generation and the youth especially are extremely tired of feathering the nests of the few at the top with lives of servitude and poor wages.

The recent election in Canada which has given them a "liberal" Prime Minister, I believe, is a foreshadowing of what will be taking place here in the coming year. Please, share this and other information about Bernie Sanders. What we really need are teach-ins like those that were held for the first Earthday, getting the entire population up to speed about waht the current state of affairs truly are and the many ways we need to change to improve lives across the board for our people and others around the planet.

Vestigial Connections

Vestigial Connections remain from when we were Earth centered and aware of the heavens as partners in our journeys. Our culture has all but forsaken the vast majority of our time one this planet as human beings. With a single word, primitive, we brand tens of thousands of years as ineffectual, or at least irrelevant. The last hundred years or so, have seen majority culture walk away from all of that. The incandescent light and newer technologies render the vastness of the universe paltry compared to a single photon emitter within arms reach. We all worship the Sun and Moon in our own way. some just do it more directly and in-person (so to speak) with the elemental force. However, in a culture rife with falsehood, based on a giant lie and perpetrated upon us by a select few, who hold virtually all of the world's wealth, power and prestige, we often forget that we are creatures first and that our relationship to what it is to be truly human matters more than the trinkets we have amassed.

In "primitive" cultures, anthropologists have documented that about 20% of native folks lives are spent on fulfilling their housing, clothing and food needs. The rest of their time is spent in contemplation, interaction with others, dance, rites, rituals and storytelling. Even when they are actively attending to achieving their basic needs, they seemed to be appreciating one another, not at all dissolute or estranged from their community of respected friends/relatives. I try to live as primitively as possible among the mayhem of humankind. Although not there yet, I'm working on it.

The connections we feel are only severed since the advent of religion, which has been used as a tool of social control and oppression since it was invented. I suppose you could go back 22K to 24K years and ask the person who made the Venus of Willendorf and ask what religion they were...that concept may not have existed for another twenty-thousand years! Each of us, every single one, since the beginning of time, stood approximately half of each day bathed is Sun and about half wrapped in the arms of moonlight if there was any, but we hide inside concrete and steel, or under a shade of asphalt all of our lives and scurry in the face of wind or rain to the sunless hovels we inhabit, lighting them up at night to scare away any and all contact with the stars. When I spend time, outside, whatever the weather, I get charged up and it invigorates me on a cellular level. I firmly believe that this relationship is what has guided my pagan beliefs as well as informed my understanding of much of how the world actually works.

Understanding the dangers of severing the ties to our ancestors, their sensibilities, ethics, or relationship to the planet without good cause, or with utter disregard to what will be lost is a fool's errand of the most heinous kind. It is well known that when new technologies are developed, it can take several generations to understand he dangers and liabilities of the new technology. By the time we all accept it as "normal" the damage may be done virtually forever.Take the PCBs that flow past my home. They were used in the fifties and sixties in carbonless paper. Over 250,000 tons flushed into the environment, of which 160,000 tons flushed all the way out into the Bay of Green Bay. what is left in river sediments is costing hundreds of millions of dollars to "clean up" which is code for put somewhere else.

Persistent, long lived compounds that we knew were harmful would never have been allowed to take place in a primitive culture. They were too happy being together, enjoying the lives they were living than to ever consider poisoning the place they would play and catch their dinner. I am proud to exhibit "primitive" thinking skills. they kept our species alive for 200,000 years. As far as I know, the Venus of Willendorf represented a sacred and divine feminine that I recognize today, she is as modern as performance art. the creative crucible is sacred. The automobile as well, and the cover up about deadly effects of lead, these are crimes that primitive people would never even consider. Not only are we prisoners of the recurring costs of infrastructure improvements, for the "privilege" of having cars, we also have the taint in the air of toxic and carcinogenic compounds! Yay!

The sacred breath of Mother Earth is a real thing, not to be taken for granted.
Nor are the sacred fires of  Father Sun to be taken for granted. 100 years ago whale oil gave a tiny fraction of all the people on earth light to read by at night. 1000 years ago, it was olive oil. Now, much of the population can talk, or see anywhere in the world with a glowing box in their pocket. All this at lower and lower immediate cost, but long term there will most assuredly be repercussions.
I look around me at night and not only are people unaware of the stars that shine, many are looking into their screens so intently as to be night blind to the surroundings the streetlights were meant to reveal. Losing our connection to the elemental forces has taken centuries to become a fully recognized problem, at what cost will we remedy this technological mistake?

Grandma Moon will embrace you, but you have to let her in to your life. We are only a half dozen  generations from the days when you could see the vastness of space with the unaided eye in profound ways, the skies literally had the power to move you. The ancient pantheon of heavenly partners with whom  humanity developed are still there for us. Perhaps discovering just this,  is a way of coming home. to a more authentic and ancient "self" that we are each entitled to. I don't like most feelings of entitlement, but I do believe that we have the right top live far more primitively that we are trying to do today. The opposite has been tried unsuccessfully for all this time and it has not done anything but created an oligarchy. Reaching back to communal living and creating abundance from local resources may be the only way to reclaim our freedom.


 

Mass Delusion Is Not A Valid Excuse

What passes as normal these days is to believe in at least a few gods, for some they might be sex, money, science, law or art. Some may also include any of a number of deities based on folkloric traditions form either their particular geographic location or ones from some other part of the world that they have chosen to adopt. On the cosmic wheel of life, our individual development mirrors that of our culture as well as that of the species. In my estimation, youthful exuberance is about to yield to measured responses and a sense of greater responsibility. My studies have led me to discover this more mature world view is far more compelling than setting oneself on a path of opposition. I think that the most recent blip in "development" has been similar to the efflorescence of childhood and the second at adolescence. Just as the brain develops more and more neurons, increasing capacity, some of the earlier connections must be lost for growth to ultimately occur. So too, over the last few generations, so many new ideas, facts and technologies have presented themselves to us, that we have lost some connections to things that really matter. That is why I believe in so many native traditions.

We are growing into a self aware culture that admonishes itself for exhibiting non-politically correct verbiage. This can only serve to set many adrift on tangents of "losing their "rights" to bigotry and hate. Our world has expanded, for some, at the the expense of their civility. In The U. S. of A., it has been estimated that cigarettes cause about 400,000 deaths per year, third only to cancer and heart disease which are both also caused by smoking cigarettes. Still nearly 9% of children 15-18 years of age are taking up the habit.Cigarette smokers came under attack a decade ago and the ranks of new smokers plummeted. Ironically, it has been estimated that fly ash alone, a waste product from fossil fuel burning electric generating stations, causes as many deaths as adding 40,000 new smokers per year, and our legislators still have not mandated renewable sources of energy for their safety alone. Guns kill nearly as many, but we hear about gun violence all the time. We never hear any reporting of the fact that more people are dying on the highways and by-ways of our nation, in my state, and others, the news only wants to tell us that we can now drive faster than ever and that one day, autonomous cars will provide safety by driving themselves.

 I know that people want to keep hold of the memories of 9-11, but to put it in perspective, we kill ourselves with automobiles, and that many again with guns than terrorists have ever killed. Americans, kill ourselves with cars and guns at a rate of over three thousand per day. can we at least have a little parity between our hostility and angst about things according to their relative importance? It is delusional to have such a gigantic "security" apparatus keeping us "safe" while flying, but such an appalling record on highway deaths and virtually no gun control. I think that this says far more about our nation running cover for, and providing direct subsidy to weapons manufacturers, dealers and ammo peddlers as well as the petrochemical cartels than it does about keeping Americans safe.

We can learn to live lives based on reality and fact, rather than hyperbole and misdirection.

The real revolution is still not being televised. To join it, just look around, find something that needs to be done and do it.

Beautiful Eloquence "Syria"

I'm so tired of the blunt arrogance, the judgmental innuendo and hyperbolic vitriol that passes as speech in our country. It is as if we are a mob culture, waiting to swoop in and dispatch any person, group or organization willing to raise their heads, voices or fists in defense of liberty. Linguistic shortcomings aside, the attitudes being expressed through our major media outlets verge on the ill-considered, insane, inane and/or outright ignorant. Even the people who have been paying close attention and who have formulated decent mental constructs that are valid and supportable have to confront the fact that we are awash in morally bankrupt expectations, false definitions and twisted rhetoric designed by our ruling class to neuter any serious opposition.

Today, The Donald said on a nationally distributed interview that the U.S.of A. should take "zero" Syrian refugees. Put another notch on his gun for that! Here is a more apt rendering of the truth. Since it was our foreign policy that allowed the current regime to stay in power as long as it has, we have inadvertently sanctioned their regime and allowed them to commit such heinous atrocities against their own people that civil war has erupted. It has been going on for years. The escalation has been brought about because of emboldened forces that co-opted dissatisfaction of oppressed people, who have been systematically stripped of their dignity, hopes, dreams and humanity. Oh, and did I mention, we sold them weapons too. If one person is oppressed, that is too many. we need the resolve to not let it be by our hand. Powerful elites who practice cultural genocide seem to have become our responsibility, if only because we validate them further by taking them seriously or "negotiating" with them offering to trade and support them, especially and most pathetically with weapons. Those fleeing for their lives are our responsibility. Fully, our responsibility. Remember the time tested and true maxim, silence is complicity.

It seems that we have become so comfortable living with fists clenched and jaw set in our rugged and stoic, adrenaline saturated game face, that we forget to let those assaults, which define our days, pass, even when we interact with our loved ones, friends, family and associates. Staying healthy, is a lot like giving birth. Nature's way is always more about process than reaching a steady state. As in the birth process, the mother and baby both experience clench-release cycles. Blood flow and lymph would virtually stop without this rhythmic dance. The events taking place in "Syria" are truly a cultural infection. Perhaps the best thing for America would be to welcome all comers and show them that our way of life, a life of democracy, liberty and freedom are worth having across the planet.

The trouble that we run into quite quickly is that we have to grapple with the fact the same forces that are oppressing the rest of our brethren with weaponry, dictatorial regimes, and religious police are barely able to keep a lid on outright rebellion. Likewise our oligarchs are barely able to keep the lid on by imprisoning half the black male population, gearing up police departments with military hardware and locking down the population if and when catastrophes occur or protests break out. In some ways, our levels of sophistication nearly obscure the oppression. Media pundits report that we are free, even as they tell us that Bernie Sanders is in second place, following Hillary Clinton in the polls. Why? Because Hillary Clinton is the tool of the oligarchs. She has "proven" herself a staunch ally of those who oppress for profit. Pay no attention to the facts. Bernie Sanders leads in the first two states that will hold primaries. Our nation is practicing cultural genocide in our own way, asking other countries not to do so seems to be bad form in the age of oligarchs.

We are seeing in a microcosmic way in Syria what troubles beset any population that tries to hold on to power, rather than relinquishing that to the people. To stay healthy and strong, and to give birth to a new civilization, peaceful and compassionate, we must overthrow the oligarchs. not with weapons, but by walking away. Remember, anyone who has ever been a parent knows, that the best way to raise a bully is to attend to their tantrums and ignore them when they act with civility and decorum.

"Never negotiate with terrorists." used to mean something because we all agreed that terrorists were like children throwing tantrums. Now, we seem to pick our flavors, let them do the same, as long as they buy their weapons and national debt from us.

Turning It All Around

We are at a critical moment in time. Issues that have been seen from a certain perspective for centuries are being seen with new eyes. As people like me gain their voice and speak about issues from the perspective of those who are treated like slaves or almost worse, as a resource base for extraction, we are coming to see the ruling class as slaveholders and worse. The economic stranglehold that the 1% have us in is crushing whole communities and comitting the most heinous genocide imaginable.

We are fed highly processed calories, which are the result of heavily subsidized corporate "profit centers", our children are not taught how to think, but rather how to fit in as cogs in the military industrial complex and our health, well, that we are told is "taken care of" with drugs. Never-you-mind that the side effects can be "cured" by taking other drugs and that the liver damage from all your drugs can be offset by the priciest drug of all. The picking of our pockets by corporate welfare whores begins before birth when they schedule unnecessary procedures just because it is covered by insurance. The health of the mother and child do not matter one whit, as long as the fancy machine gets its billable hours.

The entire structural fantasy that the uberwealthy have relied on is being found to not only be rife with rot, but underpinned by a combination of Gelatin and what appears to be moldy Swiss cheese. Wheat is no longer the staff of life, but a tool of oppression. corn is not a sacred grain, it is a GMO nightmare in which virtually all corn on the planet is one genotype, very nearly clones of what worked in the past. as long as the profits fall into as few hands as possible, the wealthy figure, that is good, for them and that has always seemed to be enough rationalization to "prove" merit.

Today, we see and hear stories once easily covered up or just plain ignored. Corporate whistle blowers provide us with inside stories of neglect, corruption and deceit on a nearly daily basis. Rampant corruption, like the buying of the U.S. Congress tops the headlines in what is left of the free press and organizations once accepted as "bastions of industry" are being seen as hiding places for just a tiny sliver of the obscene wealth of a few hands full of oligarchs.

In the U.S.A. I have heard that less than four hundred people will spend more in their attempts to buy the next election for President as the entire rest of the nation! Nearly 1/3 Billion people will then be allowed to "vote" for candidates based on what less than 400 people had to say about them. We can no longer afford to be duped by the ruling class. If democracy is to survive on this earth, we have got to stand in the face of this onslaught, band together, share our stories and never forget the hope that inspired our great nation. We must stare the beast of oligarchy square in the face, boycott the agencies that usurp our wealth and personal power and divest of these corporate welfare frauds. finally, we need to sanction those corporate entities that have driven our communities into poverty, extracted the health and wealth or our cities, towns and villages and ransacked the planet for whatever they could extract.

In their day, Pearl and Pepper helped us to live closer to our foodshed.

Seeking Input

I am currently working on a support statement that introduces people to ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc.
It needs to be brief, but clear, invitingly rational and still convey our creativity and the important work that our tours get done. This message will be the header of our sign up sheet for those who want either more information, to join us on a tour or who just want to donate to the cause. This idea is modeled after the one that we circulated with Citizens for a Better Environment decades ago, but the idea is the same. It works as both an introduction to who we are and a starting point for asking people to join us in the revolution that is not being televised. ECO-Tours has never advertised, other than putting signs out on the days of our tours and classes, but the time has come to pursue spreading the message that we are all needed to make the necessary changes to stop climate change, protect our watersheds and to produce more food closer to where people live. These necessary changes bring with them challenges, but all of us here at ECO-Tours believe that each challenge is really an opportunity.

Those familiar with the Trickster myths of native cultures will understand that although crisis usually results from every action taken by Trickster, humanity is always better off or receives some important benefits from having to deal with his shenanigans. In our culture today, asserting that individuals matter, that they have the power to change the world around them and that their efforts are worth expending in activities that they feel are "worth" doing can be a challenge, but this statement needs to be an invitation to participate in our efforts to share the work involved in building stronger communities, a more stable environment and improving environmental quality for future generations. Conveying the fact that this work is important and worthy of support is probably the most crucial part of the message, but the wording also needs to make it clear that their signature represents agreement with our goals and mission, to leave a better world in the wake of our passing. This is a first draft, but I have been thinking about how to say what needs to be said for far too long. I'm not sure what to think about the following or if it even does the things we need it to.

"We the undersigned support ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. and their ongoing program of research, education and outreach. We support their ongoing efforts to create healthy soil, plant trees, improve water quality and to encourage diverse communities where none existed before. I wish to add my name to the list of state residents who understand the need to stabilize climate, provide habitat for wildlife, plant trees, restore healthy soils and protect water quality."

If you are interested in either helping to wordsmith this statement or join us on a tour, please contact us by e-mail at tnsaladino42@ hotmail.com, write us at 1445 Porlier street, Green Bay, WI 54301 or call at (nine twenty) double eight four-triple, four.