wrythings

These are the closing words of George, a hunter from the South who has just spent 30 Days with a group of Animal Rights activists. It’s a beautiful story. It’s what reality tv should be.

I’m really struck by the notion of immersion in a cultural setting - in the subcultures of our own society. The 30 Days series is great from that perspective and is doing us a “positive media” service.

This week has been odd for me. We still have so much polarization in our politics. Members of my extended family have views on the current election that are in stark contrast to my own and we haven’t been able to forge a sustained political dialogue that would be a basis for deliberation. That’s my higher ideal - dialogue that leads to deliberation. We need that first safe civil space however … a precondition to emergent deliberation where we really are working together to understand an issue… not debating in a winner take all modality where the end justifies the means.

Animal Rights is not the issue that wakes me up each day, but the questions of the cruelty of our factory farming system and vivisection are a burden to my soul. I’m just as concerned about our inhumanity to each other, but one thing is certain: this is not part of a beautiful society, this is beneath our human dignity, it debases all who are involved.

My bigger issue is how to be a better human being. I’ve got a long way to go. I’m ok with that, as long as I make progress, and others are with me.

I just caught this episode on Hulu. I don’t know how long Hulu keeps episodes available for those of us who will embed their video in a blog, but if it’s not here by the time you read this, blame them.

Chicago proposes to become one of the Greenest cities in the world. Meanwhile, we’ve been in a holding pattern with respect to addressing the digital divide let along promoting digital excellence citywide. Chicago’s Digital Access Alliance placed environmentalism among the core platform. we need to be innovative with regard to green IT. It’s not just recycling and refurbishing. There’s some interesting thinking up in Canada. Here’s a set of links:

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/

http://free-fiber-to-the-home.blogspot.com/

I’m thinking ahead for a moment. Knowledge workers could more readily work from home with reliable high speed communications networks, allowing audio/video, shared desktops, multimedia conference calling… and any number of undeveloped applications. None of this is new. What would be new would be commitment to network capacity and workforce policies that encouraged this. Instead we’re looking at the networks as a consumption driven amenity, and even there the public doesn’t get much bandwidth bang (or reliability) for the buck.

Think also what we’d be doing for neighborhood economies if more people worked locally?

Sepp Hasslberger: The Gift Economy - Receiving stimulates giving

I’m pointing you to Sepp’s blog entry, but using that as a spring board to my own musings.

It’s better to give than to receive? We’ve heard that, and we can contemplate its meaning. We’ve also heard that there is nobility in receiving a gift well, with respect, humility, or better: generosity. We’re recipients of the gifts of nature, of life. How well have we received them? Receiving well involves stewardship - it involves valuing the act of generosity and the gift received.

We’ve been gifted a gift economy. Have we received it well? Two aspects of reception here … one is bound in attitude, relation and perception - the other in our stewardship as recipients.

When we hear about the gift economy, do we give it it’s proper due? When we receive from the greater gift economy, are we thankful enough to participate with generosity ourselves.

There are ways to receive with generosity, we should endeavor to live that way.

GiftHub addresses the hypocrisy of Social Investing … summing up the challenge of our moment in history with this comment: “I do not claim to have an answer, within the context of an unchanging system, diddling at the edges with atomized investor and consumer choices. If there are answers they would have to be in scale with the problems, such as environmental depletion and collapse.”

Justice is the scale that matters. I have the image of Ma’at: the heart, a feather. Do we have an answer that goes beyond diddling at the edges?

Robin Chase (ZipCar, GoLoCo) is great! In this 2007 TED talk Robin addresses Carbon Emissions and the Digital Divide.

(The video was only just released.)

We’re facing big problems, and we are less able to dismiss them from consciousness. We recognize the complexities of governance and so aren’t surprised as issues blend into each other and over national, jurisdictional, institutional and conceptual boundaries… It can be overwhelming.

We need new narratives of governance, cooperation, freedom and accountability in order to meet challenge to the species. The Great Turning offers a narrative that more accurately frames our situation and allows us to collectively align our response grounded in the heritage of human dignity.

David Korten has written extensively on this.   Here’s a related piece by Joanna Macy (pointed out on Weblogsky).